An unsettling shift is happening in our culture today: there’s less and less intimate connection in modern families, as the bonds between partners, and between parents and children, weaken through distraction and busyness. Too many family members spend dinner hour (if it lasts that long) looking at their phones and tablets instead of connecting with each other. We convey our love on the fly, in sound bites and cursory text messages like “luv u.” That’s no substitute for looking into one another’s eyes, feeling each other’s touch, taking time for a real conversation, and saying “I love you” with meaning. It’s easy to imagine a future in which disconnected families are the norm, as habitual routines blind us to the connections, choices, and wonders that make family life so rich.
Through our therapeutic work with hundreds of children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families, we have seen how deep and heartbreaking the growing disconnection in families can be. We’ve watched family after family give up trying to reconnect because it feels too hard and painful to try to reverse the direction of something that has been eroding for too long.
Seeing the depth of these challenges has inspired us to develop some principles and guidelines that might be helpful in raising a mindful family. We have done this not only to work with disconnected families—and help others not end up that way—but also because we wanted to discover how to raise our own children with love, understanding, playfulness, humor, and trust, and maintain a strong relationship in the midst of it all.
All of us start out with such high aspirations, but we run into difficulties along the way. When the inevitable challenges arise, we have learned over and over again (sometimes the hard way) that looking first to what others need to do to change is not the most effective place to start.
That’s why our first principle is “raising the mindful self,” which doesn’t mean cultivating any special “self.” It simply means that each of us has to do our own work first. The next natural place to put our attention is on our relationship with our partner, which will not do well on autopilot. We need to nurture and tend to it regularly. If that’s happening, we’re well on our way to giving our children what they need, because they will take their lead from us. How they see us live is more powerful than anything we say to them about mindfulness.
Raising the Mindful Self
Years ago we were invited to a private talk by the famous pediatrician and author Berry Brazelton. There were lots of questions from parents and professionals, including us, who were searching for “how to” answers to everyday parenting quandaries. Toward the end of his talk Brazelton said, “You know, it may be that the enormous field of child development and parenting has actually done parents a disservice. It has sent them the message that they need to look to experts to find the answers, when oftentimes the answers lie within. They always have.”
Looking within is where we believe raising a mindful family starts—with each of us learning how to pause, listen deeply to ourselves, and trust our own wisdom. Finding spaces in our day to slow down, take a breath, and check in trains our minds to shift to a larger perspective in the midst of emotional reactions and see more clearly what we and others need in any given moment.
Raising a family is anything but simple. It offers multiple inputs coming at us from multiple directions, and if we get overwhelmed, our brain will operate on default. We will draw on our childhood emotional history to make quick judgments about how to react to our own children and our partner. In our best moments, we can find the breathing space to see the bigger picture and consider healthy ways to respond. But as life becomes increasingly stressful and hectic, it’s easy to fall into a routine of unhealthy, impulsive patterns that we may have inherited from our parents— despite the fact that we swore we would do it differently with our own family. Now we feel bad. Ashamed, we label ourselves “bad parent” or maybe “not good enough parent.” Learning how to pause more frequently through the day can help you notice these patterns and provide insight into how you can reconnect to yourself, your partner (if you have one), and your children.