Positive Parenting: Tips for Limerick parents for practicing mindfulness

BEING a parent isn’t easy. It’s a balancing act trying to meet your children’s needs, managing a household, keeping the family’s finances in check, and also taking care of yourself! Most parents cope by going onto autopilot: acting without thinking, based on instinct.

This works really well when completing a task that needs skill, e.g. driving a car, cooking a dinner, or getting up at night to comfort a crying baby.
Children learn from their caregivers in a complex and beautiful way – not just from what they hear us say, but from what they see us do. For example, a child doesn’t think, “Oh, mom is stressed so she is just focussed on getting the dinner ready”.
They might be more likely to think, “mom tells me off when I try to show her my drawings”. While autopilot helps us to function, it also takes away our ability to notice things that we aren’t expecting.
Mindfulness means paying attention to right now, this moment, and everything that comes with it.
Mindful awareness of what’s happening right now can come in the middle of stressful days, like a moment of clarity in between jumping from one thing to another.
Paying attention to the present moment offers an opportunity to be free from autopilot, and make new decisions about how to respond to the world around us.

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If we stop to notice our breathing, our heartbeat, the thoughts racing around our heads - even if we don’t immediately become totally relaxed, the change from reacting to noticing gives us a choice about what we do next.
These skills are extra important for children as they grow up. As their brains develop, children are learning the best way to approach situations that are totally new to them. Often these situations need a maturity that they just don’t have yet parents can demonstrate how to have mindful moments. Children will learn to notice their own emotional responses, to pause for a moment and think, instead of letting “big feelings” run rampage. Mindfulness really means giving ourselves a chance to be surprised.
The famous ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus is thought to have said “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man.” A mindful moment reminds us that every moment is new, and unique.
So what can we do? Practice mindfulness with your children in a relaxed and focused way. You don’t learn to swim when you are drowning, so you really don’t learn mindfulness when everyone is upset! Try some guided meditation recordings together, maybe before bed. Find gaps in your day to have a mindful moment for yourself, to feel grounded by taking some deep breaths, noticing what is going on around you. Set aside time in your day or your week where you have no goal to complete right now - use this as a moment to share with your children, e.g. going for a walk, or sitting down for a cup of tea (with no background TV or radio).
Give your children and the world around you a chance to surprise you.

This article was contributed by the Limerick Primary Care Child and Family Psychology Service, a member of Parenting Limerick. Parenting Limerick is a network of parenting and family support organisations. For more information on this and other topics go to www.loveparenting.ie.