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 wrapping up our last three themes of the year with our final ‘Relate’ episode, where we will dive a little deeper into the relationship between the three previous themes, which were Order & Chaos, Perspectives, and Change.
Let’s begin.
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Abbie: Today, I am joined by Sergej van Middendorp, a CMM Institute Steward and a parent to two adult children. Sergej, thank you for joining me.
Sergej: Yeah, thanks for the invitation.
Abbie: I’m really glad to have you here for this very last episode of the podcast, the 52nd episode, wrapping up our wonderful year together.
As you know, today we’re going to do our best to bring together the three themes that we have just covered over the past three months, and that is Order & Chaos, Perspectives, and Change.
Particularly, I’m really excited to have you here for this conversation because you’ve been such an incredible teacher to me around metaphors in general- first of all, I think that’s a wonderful strength of yours. I know you’re particularly partial to metaphors of jazz that help us understand improvisation. And my hope is that that’s been a through line throughout this whole year that parenting is improvising in a way. You can build up a really rich tool belt of resources. And you will never know what’s coming and we will never know what’s coming. So we couldn’t possibly, you know, have told you in any of these episodes. So it’s about feeling confident improvising, feeling like you can improvise well into any situation as a parent.
I’m particularly interested to hear what you have to say about the improvisation involved in all of this today. But let’s start very broad. And I will ask you, Sergej, what do you see the relationship being between these last three themes- Order and Chaos, Perspectives, and Change?
Sergej: Yeah, that’s a great question in its own right, especially in the context of parenting. One way to answer the question is to say the relationship between these things is complexity. That’s at least one way to also theoretically look at it.
We won’t go into that too far, but for example, Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework offers these domains where order and- what he calls disorder- and chaos in his language is part of disorder. But complexity is also part of disorder in his language.
And these are two qualities, he would say, of disorder. Change, if we bring change into the equation, is metaphorically, especially parenting, like a constant, like a background.
Because children grow, situations happen, situations in which humans interact and co-create something. And Snowden, to quote him again, would say that’s “inherently complex” or “naturally complex.”
However, the perspective of someone who has seen a lot of changes over the course of bringing up a kid, for example, like we have two adult children, you start to see patterns, you start to see order in the complexity. And the way an experienced perspective effective might then act is to start to try and respond automatically or non-consciously as in a best practice, right?
If this, then that.
However, that’s a major pitfall because if it’s true that human interaction is inherently complex, we are better served by understanding order in the context of complexity as a ‘minimal structure’ as just improvisers might say. Yes, there is order even in a complexity however that order is integrated in to us acting into that moment of parenting or acting into that episode of parenting or this longer period of a child’s development like adolescence for example. Yeah, that’s my first take
Abbie: I really appreciate that perspective. And as you’re speaking, and I’m thinking about the other language that came to me is that I think all three of these things, particularly the chaos part of order and chaos, perspectives that are different from your own, change that is maybe unexpected or unwanted can feel like threats.
And so I think that maybe something to focus on for all three of these themes together is that it’s less about what is happening and more about how you are equipped to respond to it.
Because there’s such a, I think, scarcity mindset is something that a lot of people- and people who are parenting are kind of backed into a corner with it- they feel that they’re- obviously you’re parenting- your role is one of protection in many ways. Your role is one of creating a sense of safety or of certainty. You might be tempted to try to do that as a parent. And I’m just thinking about how we react and how we’re often not at our best or not able to be very curious or not able to be very relational when we’re feeling threatened.
And so what I would invite people to think about with these three themes is to say, what if I didn’t see a different perspective… What if I didn’t see change that was happening in my life… What if I didn’t see chaos when I was wishing there was order… as a threat, but as something to be embraced?
Like we talked about at that last order and chaos episode with Don, what if you actually embrace this? Not because you’re happy it’s happening, but because you recognize that maybe you can’t undo it and this is a part of life.
And so then it becomes about how are you acting into it?
Sergej: Yeah, that’s a great way of continuing the conversation. It evokes in me this idea of the way you frame safety. I would add to that that, for example, safety can be seen as an embodied phenomenon in the sense of Polyvagal Theory, for example, has this concept of safety.
And if our nervous system, which is continuously sensing in the environment, mostly non-consciously, if the situation is safe and responds to perceived threats.
New situations can also be seen as perceived threats. However, if a child grows up and you want to offer possibility for learning while maintaining safety for the child, first of all, I think it’s important that the situation affords you as a parent to feel safe in your body.
And if that is not the case, whatever you try to convey in terms of space for learning will feel non-consciously as unsafe for the child.
Abbie: Yeah.
Sergej: So it takes practice, I guess, to start really feeling safe, letting your children experiment, learn, maybe even fall or hurt themselves in a certain way, which is still safe, if you can see it in a larger context of growing. But practice, I think, then becomes a keyword. Can you really feel safe? Can you co-regulate each other as parents to actually convey safety in your being, including your communication, when you afford your child to learn and try things themselves?
Does that make sense?
Abbie: It absolutely does. And I appreciate you bringing us back to this theme that’s, I think for me at least, cropped up in a number of episodes, which is parenting is about the person who’s parenting as much as it is about the child.
And that modeling, I think, is something that’s come up again and again, that it’s even as we go through these practices or strategies with Stephanie month to month that maybe she, when she first shared them, were intended to, oh, this is something you can offer your child to do because that’s how she uses them in the classroom with the students, the children she works with.
And so many of them, I’ve found myself walking away from those conversations being like, oh, that’s a great practice for me. I’m going to remember that. Or that would be great for the parent to do as they invite the child to do it as well and to expand their perspectives and their toolbox in that way that it’s a tool for both and it’s related.
And so you can’t, like you’re saying, you can’t successfully offer your child a sense of safety if you’re not also working on your own sense of physical, emotional, mental safety, that enables you to interact.
And again, go back to the idea of like improvising well, because we’ve talked about the language of regulation and dysregulation with Stephanie previously.
And so we talked about what’s possible when you’re in each of those states. And, yeah, there’s so much here. And I, you know, I’m feeling myself kind of at a loss as we’re in the very last episode of this year.
And there’s always more to say. And so it always, I think, is going to feel a little incomplete. And I’m going to try to make my peace with leaving it at that and trusting that, you know, this is a podcast that’s always going to be out there. People can always return to it.
And also, hopefully, it just sparks more and more conversations. And now that you have this language that we’ve been offering throughout the year, now that you have some tools, some different things to try on some different ways to, you know, imagine what your parenting world can look like, go forth with confidence, you know, and just try and improvise and, you know, jam together.
And so I think that’s, that’s what I’m walking away with and hoping to leave people with. Before I wrap us up, Sergej, is there any last words you would like to leave people with as they walk away from this year of a podcast?
Sergej: Well, I know how rich the conversation is over the year with given these conversation partners and all they bring to their parenting and to our community.
And there’s so much to explore there that it is a complex learning experience in its own right. And I’d say take some of these ideas and practice and reflect.
And that action-reflection cycle itself, trying these ‘minimal structures’ and revisiting those episodes and then seeing how it works out or how it plays out is the fun of parenting, I would say. I’ve certainly seen so myself in our relationship, in our family.
Abbie: Yeah, I love that. Thanks for leaving us with that, Sergej. Thank you so much for joining me today. And to everyone listening, thank you for joining us too, today and this entire year. Don’t forget to check out www.cosmoactivities.com for our other free resources in the series, including CosmoKidz, CosmoTweenz, CosmoTeenz, and this CosmoParenting podcast will live on that site forever as well. So something you can always return to.
And the conversation doesn’t stop just because the episodes will stop coming out weekly. You can always comment on these episodes and return to them if you want to be in conversation with this community and we are always learning together.
So thank you again. We’re so grateful to have been on this journey with you. And that is it for us and CosmoParenting.
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