Raising Resilient Children

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{This week, I asked my JoyRide members if they had any questions or thoughts they would like me to share in my daily posts. My musings this week are based on what they presented & the inspiration they provided.}

“Can you talk about raising kids & helping them to develop a healthy way to deal with emotions from day one?”

In my opinion, raising healthy kids has everything to do with taking care of your own nervous system & emotional health. I really believe that’s the biggest service that you can provide for your children.

This is the trajectory that I consider:

Each child is gifted with their mother’s nervous system. The experience of a natural birth provides a reset of sorts as the pressure & squeezing of the birth canal provides enough stimulus to give the system a reboot.

From there, as my child grows & develops, they are mimicking, copying my motor patterns; the way I hold my body, the way I walk, my gestures, my responses. If I understand that every motor pattern has its own emotional imprint, I can see that as a child bases its physical patterns on mine, they also “inherit” my emotional patterns.

Our children then not only base their own systems on ours, as the process of unconscious development unfolds, but they react to ours also. So as we both move through our lives together, the more, as a mother, I can understand myself; the more I can move myself into a mode of parasympathetic dominance, the greater influence I will be. The more stabilising, the better model, the healthier presence.

So if something is presenting that I find upsetting or challenging, the liberation exists in being able to identify myself as the change agent. & within that, I have to unravel any survival patterning that lives within the people-pleasing realm, or sets up a victim/rescuer dynamic so that I don’t play the part of seeking to “fix” someone or something else; I empower myself, & in that process, I empower others.

Onwards.

❤️ Jane

{NB: I recognize that childbirth & raising are loaded issues. I have mentioned natural birth here from the standpoint of the physiological effect it has on the nervous system; my opinion is that any birth that results in the safe delivery of the baby & the health of mum is the best one. There are also some specific factors that sit differently in this discussion, so please take this as a general overview. & what’s more, the plasticity of our brain & the way our nervous system is wired means that nothing is fixed; everything & everyone is changeable at each & every point).

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