The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children Paperback – November 1, 2010

Dr. Shefali offers a new paradigm of parenting in The Conscious Parent. If you are ready to step aside from power struggles and the antiquated days of a hierarchical parent-child relationship, this book is for you. If you are ready to experience your children as special agents on your spiritual journey, this book is your gospel.Becoming a conscious parent is all about the becoming. It is the transformation from our unconscious habits and patterns, inherited by our families of origin and embedded from our cultural norms. Becoming is an act of awareness, an intention, and a conscious choice to mindful living and raising our children.The greatest concept of the book is that through transforming ourselves, we empower our children. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the real focus of conscious parenting is on the parents, not the children. When parents are able to accept their emotions and live authentically, it is natural for the children to do the same. Conscious parenting is raising ourselves so we are better able to help raise our children.The intention of conscious parenting is to accept full responsibility for ourselves and eliminate the need to control the outcome of our children. It is a conscious choice to replace shame and blame with understanding. Through understanding, we free ourselves and our children to live authentically.Through a combination of personal experiences, client stories, and clinical research, Dr. Shefali shares the human component and natural tendencies of parenting. The book is easy to read and relate to. The Consciousness Compass is a series of questions to guide us along the path of consciousness. This excerpt is a summary of the book and the shift in consciousness.*It is we who teach our children how to be greedy by giving them diamonds instead of sticks and stones*It is we who teach our children how to fear adventure by rewarding their successes and reprimanding their failures*It is we who teach our children how to lie to us by getting angry with them when they tell us the truth*It is we who teach our children how to be mean and violent to others by disregarding their emotions and denying them unconditional acceptance*It is we who teach our children to lose their motivation and zeal by pressuring them to excel and "be something"*It is we who teach our children to dishonor us by pushing them to be who they are not*It is we who teach our children to be bullies by dominating their spirit and silencing their voice*It is we who teach our children to be confused and overwhelmed by giving them all things external, but few tools to look internally*It is we who teach our children to be inattentive and distracted by inundating their lives with busy activities, leaving no space for stillness*It is we who teach our children to live their life looking outward by spending our time and energy on our own looks and acquisitions*It is we who teach our children to disrespect us by not stopping them the first time they are disrespectful and every time after*It is we who teach our children to be defiant by not knowing how to lay down the rules and mean business when we do*It is we who teach our children to know shame by shaming their spirits and judging them constantly*It is we who teach our children to become anxious by denying the celebration of our own present as we constantly focus on tomorrow*It is we who teach our children not to like themselves by constantly categorizing their emotions as those we approve of and those we don't*It is we who teach our children not to trust the world by betraying them every time we don't see who they are in their essence*It is we who teach our children how to love or not love by the extent to which we love or don't love ourselves.We are on this journey together, as parents and in relation to our children. Mindful living and conscious parenting is a means to transform ourselves and empower our children. This book is a great parenting tool to raise our awareness above that which keeps us from loving unconditionally and living whole-heartedly.

This book has opened my eyes to the different light children and parents can shed on each other! Everything in this book was intriguing. I can’t wait to read more by this author

Get ready for some self-examination with this book. You'll be thinking about why YOU were chosen to parent THIS specific human. I love this book. You will grow your ideas about parenting to include your spiritual beliefs and how that impacts how you parent. It's a great gift for expectant parents. I've gifted it to 2 couples so far and they LOVED it.

I purchased this book as a gift for my sister who is a new mom. I knew she would gain some great insight on how to parent obviously by the title of the book more consciously :-) help her understand her little ones and approach parenting a bit differently then our parents and our culture has. once I received the book I read small pieces of the book here and there trying not to crease the pages or the cover. so lets say I read it gently. :-) as I read the pages I could not put the book down and almost did not give her the gift as promised! I resorted to wrapping her book up and purchasing the book again, this time however, for myself! and although my children are not small toddlers, it still has helped me gain a better perspective and when my children act out a certain way, instead of acting quickly, I take a moment to think of what would be the best solution/action/response. instead of reacting I have learned to respond. It has made us all (my children and I) approach it all in a way that works amazingly for us all. I recommend this book for anyone who is trying to start a family, a family of small children and even teenagers. This book will change the way you look at your life, your family and environment. hands down one of the best parenting books I have ever read!

Overall, a worthwhile read. There are several great concepts that shift and lift parental perspective.Would recommend more to new parents or parents of toddlers/pre-schoolers than parents of teens.Critical observations:1.) the book is wordy with moments of off-putting smugness, and2.) offers parents of struggling teens an oversimplified (borderline offensively simplified) message*.•The author cites her experiences of helping parents of struggling teens, but her examples are the extremes of dysfunction and do not apply to all families who are struggling their child's teen years.The author's broad brushstrokes regarding the teen years with primary focus of blame on parents for teen deviance and teen struggles can feel minimizing and patronizing.[full disclosure, here's where I get wordy:]Times have changed. When my husband and I were teenagers and something embarrassing happened to us, our parents would wisely reassure us that the entire humiliation would be forgotten in a week. That is no longer the reality for our teens. Handheld devices now record, replay, alter, and share, and share, and share exponentially with no guarantee that the content (of our teen's humiliation/bad decision) will ever be completely erased. On top of that, peers are emboldened to mob mentality while they sit comfortably veiled in their anonymity. Substances are at unprecedented levels of potency (some lethal upon first exposure, others laced with extremely addictive secondary substances). . . The ripple effect of over-prescribing for sports' injuries and necessary medical procedures; school shooters; an overwhelmed public school system. Even if "our kid" is not quote unquote struggling, they likely have classmates / peers / individuals in their social circle who are. The list goes on.The author does not fully explore the extent of such external factors.From our experience, it is misleading to say a child raised in a loving, supporting, conscious home will be immune to these outside influences. We see it in family therapy and family support groups: not all families have obvious traumas and dysfunction; there are also families who care and love deeply, who are and have been active participants in their children's lives, who have other children who are thriving and healthy, but have a child who is troubled despite their quote unquote healthy home life and consistent/conscious parenting....This is awful of me, but I found myself hoping the author might one day expand her family to more than one child, ultimately experience first hand a child among her brood profoundly struggling during their his/her years, and THEN write another book.All this said, I did find the book's nuggets important enough that I have recommended the book to others and bought two more as gifts.