Abbie: Hello and welcome to the CosmoParenting Podcast brought to you by the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution. In this space, we invite you to see yourself as someone who is curious about and actively participating in creating your own meaning around parenting.
Today, we are beginning a new month and new theme, so this is our ‘Appreciate’ episode, where we introduce the theme and offer questions to reflect on that help us appreciate where we are and where we’ve been. Let’s begin.
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Abbie: This month we are considering adaptation. Two truths about adaptation to start off with are: (1) adaptation can be planned or spontaneous and (2) adaptation can be positive or negative.
I think it’s important for parents to understand adaptation because what is parenting if not just adapting to new situations over and over again forever? In the trailer for this podcast, I compared parenting to improvising, and this is the month where we are really going to focus on what that means and how to, not only improvise as a parent, but improvise well. So, adaptation can be planned or spontaneous. What I mean by this is that you can kind of pre-meditate or plan in advance to adapt- it sounds like an oxymoron but it works- you can know that a situation will require you to be flexible and improvise. For example, maybe you are planning on having a conversation with your kid that you haven’t ever had before, like maybe a family member has passed away and this is your first time talking about death with your child. You can know that this is a new situation for both of you and you can prepare yourself to be adaptable to whatever your child might say, do, or feel and also for whatever you might say, do, or feel that could come up unexpectedly.
Other moments though, you might not get to plan for adaptability, like if your child comes home from school and asks about death because they heard someone talking about it in class, you might not have been planning on having the conversation in that moment, but you can still improvise well in the moment if you have cultivated an approach to parenting that emphasizes adaptability.
It is also important to understand adaptation, not only as something we choose, but also something that happens unconsciously, which can be positive or negative. This is important to know for yourself and for your child. This is about how we are adapting to our environment. A child that lives in an aggressive, combative home where there is a lot of yelling and anger, might adapt to be quiet and learn not to cause trouble or to go unnoticed because it is safer than making a scene. On the other hand, a different child in a different home might adapt to be outspoken, loud, and opinionated because the environment they were raised in allowed them to be.
As we wrap up this episode, I want to offer some questions for you to reflect on for yourself. I am going to ask the questions here, but you can also find them written in the show notes of this episode, or on the Substack.
In what ways have you adapted to environments you have been in?
In your parenting, what situations are fairly easy for you to adapt to and what situations are the hardest?
Think of an example where you turned a challenging experience into a “positive” one by how you adapted to it. How did you do it? What did it feel like?
How can you “plan to adapt”? Or “expect the unexpected”? What would make you feel prepared to handle uncertain situations?
Okay, those are the questions I will leave you with today. I invite you to spend some time in reflection after this episode ends and throughout your week thinking about these questions. I’ll also point you toward the additional resources we have at www.cosmoactivities.com and encourage you to do some of your reflecting on the CosmoParenting Substack so you can be in dialogue with our community! Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the CosmoParenting Podcast. We are so grateful to be with you on this journey. See you next week to hear a parenting story.
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