Love and Limits: A Parenting Workshop

Guidance for parenting.

While we might not have considered this in so many words, parenting is (of all the jobs we will sign up for) by far, the most difficult of them all. Parents often say “She did not come with a manual!” which expresses the profound overwhelm when they realize they did not have a clue when they were planning if the “Reveal” cake should be blue or pink. Our children can often be uncooperative, inconvenient and surprisingly different from the innocent angels we were sub-consciously expecting. 

What we realize over time is that parenting is a combination of very complex skills and naïveté , a very costly mistake. The truth is that what we know of parenting is what we have consciously and unconsciously learnt from our own parents. These lessons are deeply ingrained in us as expectation, actions, reactions and responses and play a significant role in how we position ourselves in this task.

It is the goal of this group to:

  • Address some of these assumptions and expectations

  • Explore why each child has different needs 

  • Understand the nature of emotions and the role emotions play in our parenting

  • Learn about the significant role “co-regulation” and “being with”plays in parenting 

  • Understand what effective discipline and boundaries look like

2022 Workshop Dates and Topics

Time : 9 AM- 11.30 AM ( Mountain Standard Time)

Format : This workshop will be on Zoom online. A link will be sent out the week prior.

Every workshop is 2.5 hours long and has two parts - a presentation on the topic and time for questions and discussion.

  • October 09 : Obedience and Influence : What is the pathway to an effective parent- child relationship?

    Essential to our capacity to navigate the expectations of everyday life, is a sense of security we cultivate in our developmental years. Parents provide the “secure base” from which the child launches into the world. This workshop will cover the key ingredients to the development of this security, the challenges along the way and how parents can help.

  • October 23 : How can we help our children with their big emotions? Part 1

    While emotions are a part of our everyday life, feeling them , naming them and learning to live with them is not a straightforward task. It is a fact that this language is missing in many families and we are left somewhat confused as adults. Emotional vocabulary, however, becomes very important when we are raising children. This workshop will provide the foundation for the next one.

  • November 06: How can we help our children with their big emotions? Part 2

    Picking up on the Part 1, this weekend will focus on the topic of how emotions operate in the parent- child relationship. The terms “self-soothe” and “self-regulate” are misplaced when we talk about young children and sometimes even adults. We shall spend some time understanding words like ‘attunement’ and ‘co-regulation’ in all their complexity and why they are so important.

  • November 20 : How to make Discipline work

    In this workshop, we further explore the makings of that most essential tool - Influence. Discipline is examined as teaching rather than punishment or that favourite word - ‘consequences’. What happens when consequences do not work?

  • December 04 : how can we help our children with their anxiety?

    Anxiety is not a pathology, just a feeling in our body telling us something is not right. However, sometimes this message becomes very loud and persistent, like an alarm bell that does not stop, causing secondary disruptions. This workshop will focus on examining where anxiety comes from, recognizing the many presentations of anxiety and learning how to manage it.

  • January 22, 2023 : All behaviour has meaning

    A deep exploration of how we understand our children’s behaviour employing curiosity rather than judgment. We tend to use words like ‘lazy, stubborn and manipulative’ to describe our children. The words we use become our children’s reality. Is my child just “lazy” or is there something else going on? What might be underneath my child’s behaviour?

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