Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, Research-based Parenting Ideas To Help Kids Thrive

In her book Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, Toko-pa Turner talks about the disconnection we feel from others, as well as from our own selves, because of the experiences we’ve had in our childhood.  While Toko-pa’s childhood was traumatic by any definition, even those of us who didn’t experience severe trauma were told - either verbally or non-verbally:    You’re not enough.   You’re not good enough.      Or even: You’re too much.   And we shut off that part of us, whatever it was.  Our sense of joy, our creativity, our need for autonomy.  We set aside those needs so we could be accepted by our family, whose love we craved more than anything in the world.   But that doesn’t mean we need to always live our lives in this way.  We can accept the pain and suffering we’ve experienced, and incorporate that into new, more whole ways of being in the world.     A big part of this is finding a new relationship with our needs - seeing them, understanding them, being willing to a