The following article is offered for free use in your ezine, print publication or on your web site, so long as
author resource box at end is included. Notification of publication would be appreciated.Title: The Challenges of Single Parenting Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. E-mail: mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com Copyright: © 2003 by Margaret Paul Web Address: http://www.innerbonding.com Word Count: 853 Category: Parenting
THE CHALLENGES OF SINGLE PARENTING By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
Having worked with parents for last 35 years and written books on parenting and relationships, I’ve discovered that one of greatest challenges for us as parents is to be loving role-models for our children, showing our children through our behavior how to take personal responsibility for their own feelings and needs. Our children need to learn from our role-modeling how to nurture themselves within and how to create a sense of safety in world. In families where both a mother and father are present, both parents can participate in nurturing child emotionally and taking care of child in world, and both parents can role-model what it looks like to do this for themselves.
Single parents have a far greater challenge - they have to be both mother and father to child. Mothering energy is that energy that nurtures while fathering energy is that energy that protects in world - that is, earning money, setting boundaries with others, speaking up for oneself. While our society often defines women as nurturers and men as protectors, both men and women are capable of both nurturing and protecting in world.
In order for a single parent to successfully be both mother and father, he or she must have learned how to be both mother and father to Child within. In other words, we have to have learned how to nurture our own Inner Child - how to take responsibility for our own fears, pain, anger, hurt, and disappointment, and how to take care of our Inner Child in world - earn money, set boundaries, and so on. There is no way to successfully teach our children these skills until we are doing them ourselves, which means that each of us needs to be in a process of learning how to do this.
We have developed a process that teaches us how to care for and nurture ourselves, while also loving others. This process, called Inner Bonding, teaches us how to become a loving Adult to our own Inner Child and to our actual children. Inner Bonding is a six-step psychospiritual process that can be learned and practiced daily, and that leads to development of a spiritually-connected loving inner Adult.
Inner Bonding defines Inner Child as our core self, who we are when we are born - our natural creativity, intuition, playfulness, imagination, talents, feelings, and ability to love. Our Child is our inner experience. Our Adult is everything we learn after we are born. It is our thoughts, beliefs, and ability to take action. We start learning how to be an Adult from moment we are born through watching our parents and other caregivers. The Adult we learn to be is a child-adult, part of us that learned many fears and false beliefs and learned addictive ways, such as using substances, TV, spending, anger, or compliance to avoid pain. A true loving Adult is that part of us that is spiritually connected to a Higher Source of truth and love and is able to bring that truth and love down into Child and share it with others. The adult many of us operate from most of time is really a wounded child masquerading as an adult. It is our unhealed wounded self that causes us problems with ourselves and our children. Inner Bonding is a process for healing wounded self and developing a spiritually-connected loving Adult.
