New Journey into Parenting Channel on YouTube
Nurturing you into parenthood
Introducing my new youtube channel: Journey into Parenting. Every week I will be interviewing a different guest on the subject of preparing for parenthood. This is to complement the books and courses I offer both online and in person to help you prepare for your first baby. We will cover lifestyle design, relationships, making the right choices for your baby and preparing emotionally for a huge life transition, staying well during your pregnancy and beyond.
This week I interviewed Veronica Barbara who runs parent and baby pilates sessions and is thinking of starting parent and toddler sessions. Her sessions are a brilliant way of strengthening your body to recover from the birth and nourishing yourself at this time of intensive parenting. Veronica has chosen a venue where those taking part can stay and have coffee afterwards, strengthening social connections and finding support.
How you are affects your baby
We talk about how Veronica includes a relaxation exercise at the end and how this has a calming effect on the babies. They are constantly picking up cues from their environment and looking to us for feelings of safety and comfort. By slowing down our breathing we are giving them the message that all is well. This is something that you can incorporate into your parenting anytime. When my son was a baby I found that placing him on my chest and slowing down my breathing was an effective way of getting him to sleep.
Next week I will be going deeper into this topic when I interview hypnotherapist Orla Kirby about how our state affects our child and how we can use this knowledge to improve our child’s well being.
Parenting choices
Veronica finds parenting very enjoyable, treasuring the delights of each stage of development. Her approach is to use intuition and trial and error in learning how to parent well and feels that this works well for her.
The discussion moves on to “The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read” by Phillpa Perry, Grayson Perry’s wife. This is definitely next on my reading list as it encourages people to have a deeper look at their own upbringing. This helps them to make better choices rather than reacting against their parents or repeating the same ways of doing things.
In my book I use John Gottman’s four parenting styles: dismissive, disaproving, laissez-faire and emotion coaching as a framework. Through this we look more deeply at the approaches we experienced during our childhood and how they have affected us. This can help to make better choices about how we parent.
Try it out in person
Here is a link to Veronica’s classes.
My online course launches at the beginning of March, I also run monthly workshops in Bristol. You can book here.
