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 exploring the theme of patterns. Two truths that we want to acknowledge about patterns going forward are that (1) patterns can be repeated or broken and that (2) patterns allow for prediction.
Pattern recognition is something that our brains are already doing all the time, so if we can begin to tap into that function and learn from it, we can add one more really useful tool to our parenting toolbox. When we are looking for patterns, we are asking our brains to zoom out, essentially, and consider a wider context. When you zoom out on your own parenting choices, you can see them in the context of multiple generations and better understand how your choices in parenting are a reaction to how you may have been parented yourself. For example, maybe it meant a lot to you that your parents did their best to come to every sporting event or performance you had, so as you try to replicate this with your own children, you are repeating a positive pattern. And if you zoom out a little further, maybe you can see how your parents’ decision to show up to everything was their way of breaking a pattern if they themselves had parents who weren’t present in that way.
We also engage in smaller patterns everyday. You go to wake up your teenage child, they groan and roll over, you come back 10 minutes later and they are still in bed, you ask them again to get up, they finally do so, but they miss the bus, so you have to drive them to school, you’re late to work, and everyone is mad at each other. In these cases, it is helpful to consider your own role in choosing to perpetuate or stop patterns. If there is a pattern that you are engaged in- it takes at least two turns to make a pattern, so if you act differently the pattern can’t happen in the same way anymore. Consider this- if your child’s school asks you to be involved in an event that you know you don’t have time for, and you say ‘no’ when you would usually say ‘yes,’ then the pattern of becoming overwhelmed, resentful, and too busy is broken. And of course this is a lot easier said than done, but for now, the idea is to start seeing your parenting through a lens of patterns.
In order to help us with this process, I want to offer some questions for you to reflect on for yourself. I’ll ask the questions here, but you can also find them written in the show notes of this episode, or on the Substack.
Consider how you were parented, what are the patterns you want to repeat? What are the patterns you want to break?
What are the patterns your family engages in every day?
Think of a pattern you are stuck in. How can you anticipate where the pattern will lead you? And how can you choose to act differently to change that outcome?
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 available for free at www.cosmoactivities.com and I’ll also encourage you to do at least 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 on this journey with you. And we will see you next week to hear a parenting story.
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