Parenting with Compassion
Written by Rob Kirk | 6 minute read
The Italian novelist and literary critic Italo Calvino once wrote, “Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable”.
The above quote, which comes from Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, used to mean a lot to me as a young English teacher, and I can remember just how thought-provoking and fascinating I thought his views on writing were when I was twenty-four-years-old, single, and teaching high school students about reading and writing. Perhaps illustrating the truth of the quote, I am now twenty-nine years old with five more years of drastically different life experiences and new information from the books and articles I have read under my belt, and I find the quote even more fascinating and thought-provoking, but for entirely different reasons.
I say “drastically different life experiences” mainly because the last five years have seen me become a husband and a father, which certainly was not on my radar when I was just turning twenty-four in May of 2015. Back then, I was teaching high school students how to conduct academic research as part of a cool course from College Board called “Advanced Placement Research”. I enjoyed the challenges of my job, and I loved learning about all of the topics that my students were studying. Then, Amanda Elizabeth Adams entered the picture!
I fell in love with Amanda very quickly at the end of 2015. She was a young English teacher herself and the mother of a then two-year-old little girl named Ember. Amanda and I would spend hours flirting with each other in the English planning room at the high school where we taught. I remember talking on the phone with my brother, Jason, one night telling him I was going to ask her out. Even though I was sure she liked me, I was still experiencing a lot of anxiety about whether or not she would say yes.
I didn’t really have any dating relationships in high school or college because of similar anxiety. I would always let the fear of what could go wrong cause me to miss out on the joy of what could go right. However, luckily for me, Amanda actually texted me one night basically saying it might be fun to hang out outside of work one night, and I immediately called her up and asked her out over the phone. She later told me that she was caught off guard when I called her. Either way, we started seeing each other every day, and within two months of the beginning of our dating relationship, she became pregnant with our son, who we certainly had not planned for.
After dating each other for eight months, Amanda and I got married in July of 2016. Our son, Leonardo Jude Kirk, was born in November of 2016, and in less than a year I had gone from being a single man with no children to a married man with two children. It was around this time in late 2016 that I began to research the question of happiness. I began my inquiry because I wanted to show my students that I could follow my own lesson plans, and I chose happiness because I wanted to be able to help my children find it. I remember telling all of my students that I was starting a research project on how to not screw up a child’s life for eighteen years.
You see, when I began parenting Ember, and when I learned that Leo was going to be born, I felt a great weight on my shoulders, and I still feel this weight daily. So in the initial days of my happiness research, I literally was just curious to find out how people even define happiness to themselves, and I read all about the Greek concepts of Hedonia and Eudaimonia. Eventually, I actually discovered that there was an entire field of psychology called positive psychology, which I began reading about and studying in earnest in 2017. Finally, in January of 2018, I began taking courses towards my Master of Science in Positive Psychology from Life University.
These last five years I have spent being a husband to my wife and a father to our now three children have been the best years of my life, and it isn’t even close. However, the last five years have also featured the most painful experiences I have ever encountered, as I have learned that trying to be a peaceful and conscious parent is the hardest thing I have ever done. As a parent of three young children under the age of seven, I certainly hear my fair share of “NO!” and “I DON’T WANT TO!” in my daily interactions with my kiddos, and I know first-hand how annoying it can be.
The truth is, in today’s fast-paced world, we parents often find ourselves losing patience. Many of us catch ourselves yelling at our children even though we are trying to become more mindful and peaceful in our communication with them. Why does this happen?
I chose to study this exact question as the focus of my master’s capstone project, and the answer, which I am still learning, seems to be that we have all learned and experienced violent and aggressive communication strategies throughout our lives, and when our needs are not met, we automatically lash out using these harmful strategies, as we desperately try to find ways to get our needs met with our children. However, during my research, I also came across many ideas and strategies for how well-intentioned and disciplined parents could make the shift towards using more peaceful forms of communication that are aimed at meeting both our own needs as parents AND our children’s needs.
Throughout this blog series, I will attempt to help parents understand how we can all become more conscious and peaceful parents. I will write about the importance of practicing daily forgiveness towards ourselves and our children, as well as offer coaching to parents on the specific techniques they can use to help them speak and act nonviolently towards their children and to help them practice forgiveness. Often, our own less-than-peaceful parenting strategies exist because they were used by our parents and other adults in our lives, and they got results -- but usually only in the short term. We cannot unlearn these parenting strategies or prevent our minds from creating thoughts suggesting that we use them against our own children. Rather, the overarching idea behind this blog series is that becoming a conscious and peaceful parent is a lifelong process that is worth pursuing and that requires us all to learn how to relate to our thoughts in a new way.
If Italo Calvino’s quote is correct, then my positive and negative experiences throughout the past five years have shaped me into the man I am today. But I am more interested in Calvino’s mention of the “things imagined” and the version of myself I see when I close my eyes and lay awake in my bed late at night. Relationships between parents and their children do not have to feature violent communication, and I imagine a world where all parents can consistently communicate with their children using nonviolent and compassionate communication to improve and deepen their relationships with them each day. I am writing this blog in my continuing effort to bring this imagined self and imagined world of mine into existence by equipping parents with tools that will help them speak more compassionately, forgive daily, and ACT like the conscious, peaceful parents they truly want to be.
Radio interview I did going over my Capstone paper on peaceful parenting: https://www.mikehagan.com/2019/mp3/102819_ROB_KIRK.mp3
