Robin Grille is an Australian
psychologist, parent educator and author of internationally acclaimed Parenting for a Peaceful World. The US
edition of his second book, Heart to
Heart Parenting, is due for release in Spring 2010 (LifeTime Media). You
can find out more about Robin’s work here:
www.our-emotional-health.com
Oh how fortunate we are that Robin was willing to do an interview for us! This wise wise man has much to offer the world. Here are a few words just for you in this exclusive interview for NPC.
1.
Tell us about where you are right now and
what’s happening around you (little view into your world).
It’s Wednesday
afternoon, and outside my window a Sydney
springtime is trying to burst through the clouds. I have finished working with
my clients for the day, and I am waiting for my wife and daughter to come by –
we are all feeling lazy and are going out to the local Sushi Train. Fabulous! I
feel blessed to live in a country where so many of the world’s cultures live
alongside each other – here it is easy to pay allegiance to no flag; and
instead to relate to the whole human family.
2.
What’s on your mind these days?
I have been feeling despair at times when
I see on the one hand the relentless destruction of our shrinking planet and
its atmosphere, and on the other hand how painfully slow our societies are to
change from ‘business as usual’. There are times I am deeply worried for my own
child and all the world’s children, I wonder what kind of world we are leaving
for them.
3.
What are you seeing in the world that gives you hope?
I do take great comfort from the abundant
evidence I see that, in many places, attitudes towards children are changing
for the better. I see great hope in the international birthing reform movement:
so many parents are opting for natural birth, water birth and home birth.
Around the world there is a gradual and steady return to natural breastfeeding,
a rapid improvement considering it had all but disappeared through the 1960s and
70s. I am also buoyed when I see that each year more and more nations legislate
to prohibit the corporal punishment of children, and I see signs that modern
education philosophy is beginning to reject coercion in favor of more
democratic and playful approaches to learning.
The fast-growing awareness about the
critical importance of healthy emotional development in early childhood
(attachment) promises to be a powerful engine for social transformation. If
these changes continue to unfold and accelerate, this bodes incredibly well for
future societies. In nations that have progressed in child-rearing reform,
(such as the Nordic nations, for instance) there has been a corresponding
progress in democracy, social justice and sustainable development – this is precisely
what the whole world so urgently needs. I just hope that these evolutionary
changes happen fast enough to prevent irreversible damage to our planet. We
have very little time, so I feel we all must become active in the global
child-rearing reform movement.
4.
Tell us about what set you on this path.
My own experience of psychotherapy, both
as a client and later as a therapist, helped me to understand how utterly
important our passage through childhood is. Parents, teachers and all who
support them literally have the future of humanity in their hands. I have also
learned that much of what passes for ‘normal’ parenting still falls short of
meeting babies’ and children’s emotional needs. No wonder we don’t have a
peaceful world yet. But the newest discoveries about the how early life
relationships shape the child’s brain have placed at our disposal the key to
creating the most peaceful, vibrant, loving and sustainable societies. What’s
not to love about this?! I think this information is so exciting and so urgently
needed, that I cannot stop writing about it and talking about it to parents and
professionals all over.
5.
Where do you imagine yourself in 10 years?
In 10 years I want to be
carrying on with my writing and my workshops and seminars for parents, teachers
and health professionals. I love this work and I love to see the difference it
brings to all our lives. So far, I have only taken my workshops overseas twice,
once to New Zealand and once
to USA (California) – and I enjoyed that immensely.
My second book, Heart to Heart Parenting, is due for release in USA in the
spring of 2010 – so I hope that means I will be touring there.
I also hope that in 10
years’ time there are tens of thousands more people than there are today
supporting and educating parents, carers and teachers to promote healthy
emotional development for all the world’s children. I believe this is the most
powerful, effective and far-reaching form of social activism, and I believe
this is how we can create a peaceful and sustainable global society.
6.
What are the most powerful things parents
can do?
Listening, listening and
more listening. More than anything, babies and children want their emotions
heard and validated. Most of us have some difficulty with this, our children’s
emotions press our buttons, and we tend to talk our children away from their
feelings.
The next powerful thing
is, from the time our children are toddlers and increasingly as they grow up,
to express our own feelings to them with authenticity. In some measure, this
requires us to be emotionally vulnerable and open. Most of us fear this. But an
emotionally ‘real’ two-way communication is the very essence of a close and
loving relationship in which empathy and respect can grow.
When children feel very
heard, and when they see our feelings, their behavior becomes considerate,
loving and respectful, as night follows day.
7.
Will
you summarize tenets of Heart to Heart Parenting?
The most helpful thing any parent can do
is to get in touch with how they felt when they were babies and children. In my
book Heart to Heart Parenting, I show you ways that you can do that. Our own
childhood experiences are the strongest drivers of our parenting behaviors, for
better or for worse, so it is hugely important for us to connect with the
‘inner child’.
So although my book gives parents a map of
their child’s stage-by-stage emotional needs and how to meet them, I focus a
lot on the parent’s needs. I help parents to understand how their children act
as triggers to their own feelings (and sometimes their unresolved wounds) from
childhood. Parenting can therefore be an exciting personal-growth journey for
the parent, it has the potential to be the most healing and heart opening
experience.
I place a lot of emphasis on co-operative
parenting, and I make many suggestions to parents on how to attract and create
supportive groups of like-minded parents (or extended family, or tribe!). This
is one of the most important and yet most understated secrets to a joyous parenting
journey.
The human nervous system has been designed
to produce for us many, many peak experiences of bliss – if we only make
possible the simple conditions that generate this. The parenting journey from
conception, through birth, early bonding and the child’s ‘flight to freedom’,
is charged full of opportunities for unspeakable joy, for parents and their
children. This is the outcome that awaits us as we give more time, attention
and support to emotional connectedness.
- What else
do you want us to know/are you interested in
sharing?
A lot of parents suffer anxiety, guilt or
shame as more information about children’s emotional needs becomes publicly
available (by the way, babies were telling us all along, but in our culture we
learned to ignore our instincts. Until now that is, when scientists are finally
agreeing with the human heart-signal). It can be daunting to be confronted with
the list of babies’ ‘wants’ that has been made clear by international research
into attachment – especially in nations like USA
and Australia
where parental leave provisions are appallingly low. Great relief from these
agonies is possible as soon as you realize that all parents are as ‘good’ as
the support we are given. It is absolutely the case that the best parents can disappoint
their children when they feel isolated and under stress. On the other hand, you
can take a fairly neglectful parent, and improve their parenting capacity
enormously by providing them with all the emotional and practical support they
need. Often, some kind of personal healing of deep emotional wounds is
necessary as well.
Any of us can and do become better parents
when we feel held and loved in a close-knit and supportive community. Human
beings were designed to parent in groups, not in pairs!
So, whenever you are unhappy with your
parenting behavior, the first question to ask is: are you getting the support
you need right now? Often it can also be important to look inside and see if
there is something in you that is wounded and wants healing. With this kind of
approach, the strain goes out of parenting, and both parent and child win.
