GUEST BLOG POST: The Art of Blissful Parenting by Sharon Ballantine

Have you ever noticed how things flow in your life when you’re feeling good and how they don’t flow when you feel stressed or are engaging in any negative emotion? Feeling good is your key to being in the flow and for manifesting what you want. This means tapping into your Internal Guidance System. Unless your wellbeing is allowed, you don’t have access to your best and highest decision making capabilities. This is as true for our parenting as it is in any subject of our lives. This means we must make it a practice to nurture our wellbeing and tap into our internal selves while living life with the kids.

I didn’t learn to parent in one fell swoop. It was a process.  This process continues even though my three kids are grown and out in the world creating their own great lives. In the early years, not unlike many parents with young kids, the thought of guiding three innocent lives in the ways of the world terrified me. What was I to do? Would loving them be enough?

I decided the experts would know and off to the bookstore I went. I bought an armload of books on parenting that I was sure would help make my parenting easy and at least somewhat successful. But each time I reached for one of the books that was decorating my bookcase, my arm became paralyzed in mid air, and I was filled with trepidation. For reasons unknown to me, I couldn’t even take a book down and read it. After months of going through this useless exercise, I scooped all the parenting books into a bag and gave them away! Now what?

I realized quickly what I would do to parent in a way that served us all. By continually tapping into my own guidance I would effectively guide my children. Why? Because there is no productive guidance I could offer them when I was out of alignment. I had never practiced this with kids, but I had become very adept at allowing my wellbeing and listening to my internal self. During my childhood and also my teens, I had the freedom to find my own answers and learn to trust my internal guidance. I knew how it felt to create my own path, and I wanted to teach this to my children so they would be empowered in their self-confidence to create their best lives. All was going according to plan. The years flew by, and then I forgot everything.

My children were going into the teen years, and I became fearful. As I watched them make choices that I felt weren’t for their highest good, I tried to stop their choices. I was in fear, so I couldn’t hear my highest guidance, and I certainly didn’t trust their guidance. Allowing my fears to control my behavior was not conducive to supporting my children in making their own mistakes and learning from them. As I tried to control the uncontrollable with my three kids, it was no wonder our relationship was suffering and they were becoming confused on whose guidance to trust. My guidance was in control mode, and I wasn’t allowing them to use theirs.

We do a great disservice to our children by teaching them that their answers are found within others. This is an illusion, and when we convince our kids that we know better and that we have the life experience to chart their course, we feed this illusion. The truth is that each person’s answers, no matter what their age, are found within themselves. Still, most parents tend to have their own ideas about what they feel is reasonable for their children and what they want them to be exposed to.

I’m not suggesting that as parents we shouldn’t guide our children; what I’m suggesting is that we teach them to be aware of and use their Internal Guidance System. Keeping kids safe is one thing. Allowing them to discover their own path—often by trial and error, but increasingly by trusting their IGS—is quite another.

Teaching your kids to make their own choices, even if you don’t agree with those choices, helps them fine-tune their IGS.

For example: your son wants a hand-held video game that you feel is too violent and a waste of his time. How to handle the situation? Encourage him to be aware of his feelings while playing the game. Then, ask him a few questions: How does the violence make him feel? What is it about the game that inspires him and makes him feel good? Why does he want to play this particular game? How will playing this game help him learn something? Thinking about these questions will help your child tap into his IGS and become more aware of his feelings and motivations.

Certainly as parents we are required to set certain parameters for our kids, especially when it comes to their safety. With that said, it is always important to take your child’s feelings into consideration and to allow him to make decisions for himself, while also teaching him to be aware of the consequences of those decisions. Such awareness is an important part of listening to his IGS. What does it mean to teach your child to listen to and follow her IGS? It means teaching them to trust their first impulse toward an action that makes them feel “this is the right thing for me to do.” When your child is in alignment and feeling good, her impulses come from the Universe (Higher Self) and thus are for her highest good. Any impulse that is felt when not in alignment is not a message from the Universe, but rather from the reactive state. And any action based on such an impulse will not result in getting what she wants. It won’t be her best choice.

Children will instinctively choose actions and behaviors that serve their highest good, but they will also react to their environment, which will not serve their highest good.

For example: your daughter doesn’t want to participate in a group activity at school, but prefers to create what she pleases on the sidelines. Her teacher’s first reaction is to insist that all the kids do the outlined activity, and you agree. One course of action would be to force your daughter to participate against her wishes. The other is to allow her to be independent because that is what is pleasing her at the moment; she is following her IGS toward her highest good.

I had a defining moment in my parenting when my son Dustin was 14 and our relationship was in turmoil. During this moment, I remembered what I had previously been living and teaching my children. This defining moment allowed me to come full circle in my parenting, and I gave my kids, particularly my son, back the control in their lives. I remembered what it felt like to trust myself. In our family we refer to it as the day mom gave Dustin back his life on a silver platter. This was the day I told him I would be there to support him, but I would no longer be checking his grades online. It was his choice regarding his grades. I told him I would trust him to trust his own guidance regarding the food he ate, how clean he kept his room, if he did his homework and all the other aspects of his daily choices. They would be up to him. I was not abandoning him; I was still there to support.

Everything changed for the better after that. Dustin’s grades didn’t improve overnight, but he began to listen and hear his own guidance regarding his choices. Dustin began to realize he cared if he didn’t do well in school etc. because he didn’t have me telling him how to feel. Over time, I witnessed my kids feeling and living with their own choices. They were learning to discover and nurture the power in making these choices and creating what they wanted. When they created things they didn’t want, they had the tools to tap into a part of themselves and find the answers that would take them to where they wanted to go.

Sharon Ballantine is a life coach, parenting coach, and founder of The Ballantine Parenting Institute, her online course for parents. Ballantine has also headlined her own parenting column for BeliefNet.com and hosted her own Internet TV Show, The Sharon Ballantine Show. Sharon Ballantine resides in Seattle, Wash.  Her first book, “The Art of Blissful Parenting,” offers parents a more easeful way to raise their children: teaching their kids how to tap into their own guidance so they don’t spend their lives relying on the guidance of others.

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Tags: having kids, mindful parenting, motherhood, raising a family, the art of blissful parenting