Aware Parenting Stories with Joss Goulden

In this episode I have the pleasure of having a conversation with Chris Muller. Chris is a Psychologist, Counsellor and Coach in Transactional Analysis. She is a level 2 Aware Parenting instructor, the regional coordinator for Aware Parenting in Holland and the founder of the Aware Parenting Academy in the Netherlands. She helps parents and professionals connect to their own inner child, without fear, judgement or guilt and from a place of trust, safety and love to heal their trauma. In this episode we discuss how she discovered Aware Parenting and incorporated it into healing her own childhood trauma. Chris shares how important it is for us to do our own healing work in order to be able to support our children with Aware Parenting. We talk about how our children teach us to be more compassionate with ourselves and how this approach supports us to care for our inner child when it comes up in our parenting. She describes how to use Aware Parenting to heal her child’s trauma and the challenges to do so in a system that doesn’t understand, recognise or support Aware Parenting. For more information about Chris, please visit her websites www.chrismuller.nl and www.awareparenting.nl or follow her on social media at Chris Muller.

In this episode, I am so happy to be having a beautiful conversation with Vivian Viester. Vivian is an Aware Parenting Instructor from The Netherlands, who is currently living in Switzerland. She has an 11 year old son and loves supporting families to practise Aware Parenting with more compassion and offers 1 to 1 sessions, online programs and listening circles. In the episode we talk about how Vivian found Aware Parenting. She shares what compassion means to her and how she has learnt to be more compassionate with herself as a mother. She talks about learning to get everyone’s needs met in the family and acknowledges how hard it is to parent this way when we often don’t have the support we need. We discuss how to bring more compassion to ourselves and our children. For more information about Vivian, please follow her on Instagram and Facebook at Vivian Viester, Aware Parenting

In this episode I have the absolute pleasure of having another conversation with the wonderful Danni Willow. Danni came on to the podcast for episode 5 if you want to hear her wisdom there. She is an Aware Parenting instructor with 2 children aged 6 and 4. She is the founder of The Way of The Woman and offers 1 to 1 sessions and women’s circles. Today in the episode Danni and I share some of the things that we love most about Aware Parenting, how we have navigated some of the challenges that we all face and how we have been able to get support to do our work so we are able to support our children in this beautiful way. We offer some examples of using Aware Parenting in our families and how it has helped us so much in both parenting and in our own lives. We share our new Exploring Aware Parenting Community that is opening soon to support families to dive deep into the theory of Aware Parenting, whilst getting on-going deep compassionate support from Danni and myself and from all the other members of this beautiful community. If you want to know more about Danni, her website is www.thewayofthewoman.com.au and she is on social media at The Way of the Woman. To learn more about our Exploring Aware Parenting Community, the link for more information is here https://awareparenting.com.au/community

In this episode, I have the pleasure of talking to Helena Mooney. Helena is an Aware Parenting Instructor and Hand in Hand Instructor who has been supporting families for over 10 years. She loves helping mums to create deeply connected families where both parents and children thrive and have fun together. She is the host of the Parenting with Play podcast and works with parents 1:1 as well as through her 2 online programs: Aware Parenting Babies and Annoying to AMAZING! Helena has 2 children of her own aged 14 & 8 and lives in Sydney. In this episode Helena shares her story of how she found Aware Parenting and how learning how to listen to feelings and play with her children was so life changing. We dive deep into Attachment Play. Helena shares her considerable knowledge about the different forms of Attachment Play and why it is such a helpful aspect of Aware Parenting. We talk about how it works to support our children, and she gives many examples of how she has used play in her family and with the families that she supports. If you want to know about how to use Attachment Play with your family, then this is the episode to listen to! To find out more about Helena, follow her on social media at Parenting with Play on Facebook and Instagram and her website is www.parentingwithplay.com.au

In this episode, I have the pleasure of talking to Tracey Anderson Askew. Tracey is a Childbirth and Parenting educator and mother to 4 boys. She is the director of Transform Parenting, a support community that provides programs to prepare for birth and early parenthood. She has 20 years experience working with parents and has supported over 3000 families through their births. Today we talk about how to heal from our births by sharing our stories and finding the wisdom and learnings from our birth experiences. We talk about how birth is a catalyst for our growth and that we can support our babies to heal from their birth experiences too. Tracey shares about the wisdom of our bodies and how she counters the cultural conditioning around birth that often disempowers women. We discuss how she supports women to know that they are powerful and enough, both for birth and for early motherhood. She describes how she helps families to move from fear to trust, to demystify pain and how to support the nervous system for birth with the language of empowerment. We discuss the importance of trusting our bodies and trusting life and the importance of trust in parenting too. Please note this episode is not specifically about Aware Parenting. To find out more about Tracey, please visit www.transformparenting.com.au or follow Tracey on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok at Transform Parenting. Her Transform Parenting Summit, featuring presentations by several Aware Parenting Instructors including myself, will be available on 23rd September 2022.

In this episode, I talk to Carolina Valencia Coleman. Carolina is a Colombian Australian, mother to 2 children, aged 11 and 8. She is a certified Aware Parenting Instructor and currently leads a Cultural Responsiveness Training Consultancy that specializes in safeguarding the cultural and racial dignity of children. Carolina is passionate about birth, caring for children and supporting parents through Listening Partnerships. In this episode Carolina shares her journey into Aware Parenting and how it saved her from the weight of exhaustion and worry that she originally experienced as a mother. We talk about the importance of Listening Partnerships – a term borrowed from Hand in Hand parenting – also known in Aware Parenting as Empathy Buddies. We discuss the need for us to be receiving compassion in order to be able to offer it to our children, and how this teaches our children compassion too. She describes how to undo our conditioning so we can listen with empathy and space in our listening partnerships and how to share, and how learning to do this makes it possible to support our children with loving, unconditional listening too. The Facebook group for finding a Listening Partnership that Carolina runs, can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2562318203992646/ The guide for Listening Partnerships can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GIec0EsSciZ0xeMuX8YbzkHnQlHz32lF/view?fbclid=IwAR2uV65FlgKkjCLyUvmbx-V9p83gcmORME-XE9GBMS4ilBiuo8E_eWjTiNE

In this episode, I talk to Maru Rojas. Maru is an Aware Parenting instructor from Mexico who lives in London. She has a keen interest in potty learning and elimination communication to help children be aware and learn about their bodies. She loves looking at Aware Parenting as a holistic philosophy for raising children and re-parenting ourselves. Maru describes how she has supported her children by listening to their feelings with her partner and with her mother and she acknowledges how hard it can be to do this and how much support we need in order to practise Aware Parenting. She describes how she has incorporated attachment play into her family and how effective it is to support babies and children to heal. She talks about her particular interest in elimination communication and how parents can support their children with aware parenting to be aware of their bodies. We talk about self compassion in motherhood and re-parenting our younger parts as part of our own healing with Aware Parenting. To find out more about Maru, please visit www.parenttogether.co.uk or follow her on Instagram at _maru.rojas_ or email her maru.awareparenting@gmail.com

Episode 9: In today’s episode I have the pleasure of talking to Kate Baltrotsky. Kate has been an Aware Parenting Instructor since 2014 and is the mother to 3 children. She is completing her Ph.D. at Southern Cross university evaluating the Aware Parenting approach, focusing on playful discipline. She has recently had the first part of her research published in the Journal of Child and Family Behaviour Therapy titled “Parents’ Experiences of a Brief Online Parenting Program with Playful Discipline”. In the episode, Kate outlines this first research study on the effectiveness of the Aware Parenting approach and why she felt called to undertake research. She describes the contents of the training that was offered to parents as part of this study and her key findings. She explains how her research has found that short parent training programs on Playful Discipline are effective to support parents to be the parent they want to be, to understand that behaviour is a sign of unmet needs or unreleased feelings and to give parents effective strategies to respond to challenging behaviour in the form of special time, power-reversal games and loving limits. Kate describes the next stages of her Ph.D. and the need for additional evidence in the scientific literature to increase the mainstream acceptance of the Aware Parenting approach. She also talks about what she has learnt from parenting this way herself, including letting go of “perfect” in parenting and the importance of finding ways to meet our needs as mothers. To find out more about Kate, follow her on Instagram at Katesurfs or email her kate.baltrotsky@scu.edu.au Her research article can be found here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07317107.2022.2084596 The free Facebook group we mention is accessible here https://www.facebook.com/groups/484995275036830

Today on the podcast I talk to Shelley Clarke. Shelley supports parents to understand their child's behaviour and develop rich long lasting relationships. She is a Physiotherapist, CranioSacral Therapist, Aware Parenting Instructor and Parent Mentor. She is passionate about the nervous system, human body and helping families thrive. She is the host of the Mind Body Parenting Podcast and is the mother to three beautiful children. She is on a mission to shift the paradigm that we parent from. Shelley describes how hard parenting felt before finding Aware Parenting and how learning the strategies of AwP, brought back the joy, connection and laughter to her parenting. We talk about how this approach has allowed us to unpack our layers of conditioning to remember and reclaim our connection to our needs and feelings and how this then impacts on our relationships with our children, our partners, our friends and family. We discuss the power of attachment play in our families and how play works to shift their feelings, to make life easier and to encourage cooperation. To learn more about Shelley, her website is www.shelleyclarke.com, and she is on Instagram at _shelleyclarke_ and Facebook at Shelley Clarke Mind Body Parenting.

Today’s podcast is in 2 parts. In the first part, I was so fortunate to interview Alfie Kohn. Mr Kohn is a writer and speaker who specializes in human behaviour, education and parenting. He is the author of 14 books and hundreds of articles and lectures at education conferences and universities, as well as to parent groups and corporations. Mr Kohn talks today about moving away from an approach to parenting which is based on having power over our children, to one based on working with our children. He explains how research has challenged many of the assumptions about mainstream approaches to raising our children. He explains that punishments and rewards are really both manipulation and control of our children and only work temporarily and at great cost to our relationship with our children. He describes how intrinsic motivation is damaged by rewards, praise and punishments. We discuss how to offer our children unconditional love in a way that our children receive as unconditional and how to parent without these coercive “sticks”. He also briefly discusses the failings of education systems that are based on testing, homework, and grades, all of which destroy creativity, meaningful learning and the desire to learn. Please note this part of the episode is not specifically about Aware Parenting. In part 2 of this episode, I outline the Aware Parenting perspective on not using punishments or rewards. I describe how to shift our thinking away from the behaviour modification perspective of trying to control and coerce our children and move instead to an Aware Parenting perspective of power with our children. I explain how to treat our children in a way that allows them to feel unconditionally loved, and how to ‘discipline’ our children with a compassionate and connected approach that looks underneath our children’s behaviour so we can identity what is getting in the way of them being their natural, loving, cooperative selves. I provide many strategies that parents can use instead of punishments or rewards to make parenting more enjoyable, to deepen our relationship with our children and support ourselves to be the parent we want to be. To find out more about Alfie Kohn, please visit www.alfiekohn.org I highly recommend Alfie Kohn’s books “Punished by Rewards” and “Unconditional Parenting”, as well as “Cooperative and Connected” by Aletha Solter and her article “20 Alternatives to Punishment” available on her website www.awareparenting.com