What Is Conscious Parenting? How to Stay Calm and Connected When Raising Kids
The way we show up as parents isn’t just about our kids. It’s shaped by our own experiences, reactions, and patterns. Today I’m talking with Katherine Sellery, founder of the Conscious Parenting Revolution and a three-time TEDx speaker about what conscious parenting actually means and how it can help you stay calmer, more connected, and intentional with your children.
When we understand why we react the way we do, we can start to respond differently. And that can completely change the dynamic in our hearts and our homes. Conscious parenting starts with awareness. As Maya Angelou said, “When we know better, we do better.” So welcome, Katherine.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: I look forward to this conversation. Thank you so much. Me too. It’s just great to be here.
Suzy Shaw: So, tell us a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to create this Conscious Parenting Revolution and maybe how it impacted your parenting.
Katherine’s Parenting Wake-Up Call and the Search for a Better Way
Katherine Winter-Sellery: So, a mom of two kids and working as well and just felt like a deer in headlights. Did not really know what to do, how to deal with problems, what I knew was what didn’t feel good. And it didn’t feel good to use the “go to your room” or “you go think about that.” You know, that kind of thing. I just was like, “Wow, this doesn’t feel good to me.” So I needed to find something that was congruent with what I wanted to do.
And it was just the beginning of my journey, which was, you know, my son is now 31. So he was around, I’m going to say it, 2 years old when my husband and I started looking around. And he was a really easy kid and, you know, the truth be known, like super wanting to please was not the highly autonomous, I got her later, child. So even with the kids that are very easy and delightful, there’s always going to be conflict. There’s always going to be reasons to need to have conversations and or ways to handle behaviors that are just not acceptable.
So having said that, we embarked on a journey to find trainings in, at the time we lived in Hong Kong, were there for a long time, many decades. So most of our growing up with our kids happened overseas. And that’s its own little bubble of expat communities from around the world. But I found something right away that really helped. And that really provided the foundation for how to approach conflict resolution.
And it was a, you know, in my words, not the words of, you know, anyone else, but just sort of the no fault, no blame, no guilt, no shame approach, where it’s like, okay, stuff happens. And when stuff happens, how do we address it without going into one of those, you know, pretty ugly, four places of, you know, looking for fault and trying to figure out who to blame and, you know, who gets to get punished.
So, transforming that mindset is really what started me on a road of just peeling the onion around so many of the ways that I had experienced life growing up myself with my own family of origin and how problem behaviors were viewed or how behaviors that caused adults problems were viewed. And so all those behaviors that caused adults problems. And I was one of five, it was his, mine and ours family. So, you know, there were kids from different marriages, and we were all kind of figuring it out and finding our way and also finding that each of us had grown up with a different experience of our parents.
How Culture and Generational Parenting Patterns Shape Families
Suzy Shaw: So I’m curious, how did living in Hong Kong and overseas affect you, because then you see how culture impacts parenting as well. How did that change, you know, your understanding of it and what you wanted to do?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yeah, definitely. The overseas piece gave us a view of a lot of different perspectives. And, you know, kind of, I guess you could say, like after spending many years just trying to become a better parent myself, finally entering into training programs to become a parenting coach for other parents and then spending decades, literally, working with parent communities in Hong Kong who could be from anywhere because it’s such an eclectic place. So you’ve got obviously the Chinese predominant community, but then there was a, you know, a smattering of Koreans, Japanese, Americans, of course, Filipinos, of course. And, you know, French, obviously, the English, it was still a British territory, and all these different cultures. And there were nuances with each one of them, but fundamentally, I would say, parenting around the world came down to “do as you’re told.”
It really ultimately, what transcended all of these cultural influences was this idea that I’m the father or I’m the mother, you’re supposed to just do as you’re told, obedience and compliance. It’s kind of a common thread that tied all of those communities together with layers of nuance around freely-obligated. I mean, that’s so big in Asia, and, you know, reverence for the elderly, which I think has within it some real gems, some really beautiful things, and has some real toxic things as well.
So it just gave me a chance, actually, because people would say, “Oh, you won’t understand you’re an American.” And I’m like, “I get it. I grew up in a family which was all about do as you’re told. And, you know, you might think we’re really different, we’re not that different. We have the same baggage.”
Are Your Parenting Patterns Helping or Hurting Your Relationship?
Suzy Shaw: So, you know, I think that’s a generational thing too. I think we’re probably of a similar age. We have similar-age kids. And, you know, my parents were definitely of that generation as well. So, you know, how can we identify those inherited patterns and generational patterns that are no longer serving us as we parent our children?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yeah, great. So I think that, I guess the litmus test for everything is, is your relationship working?
Suzy Shaw: Your marriage.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Well, not just your marriage, but your kids. Okay. So, you know, are you close? Do you feel like you guys can sit down and open-heartedly connect with one another? Is it a family where it seems like the kids feel that there’s the ability to say whatever’s going on and not worry about getting in trouble for it? Do they hide their stories because they’re afraid of you? Do you know them? Do they reveal?
I mean, all of those things, I guess, are what we would ask ourselves in pretty much all of our relationships: Is the relationship really working? So the relationship with our kids is a very special relationship. It’s a unilateral contract. It’s not like with our spouses and with our friends and others in our lives, where it’s more of a reciprocal relationship, where we’re looking for a dynamic that feels very much like every party’s giving just as much. And with our kids, we’re obviously way deep into the giving side, and they’re way deep into the receiving side. And that’s by nature because… and that can change over time, and it becomes a little bit more of a bilateral relationship. But in the beginning years, of course, it’s all about us taking care of them.
And there is an intrinsic dependency that comes with the territory. What I guess begins to emerge, and I’ve seen over the years, is when there are resentment flows. And those resentment flows can come from either side of the dynamic. It can be the kids feeling resentful, like they’re never seen, heard and understood from their perspective, and they’re just supposed to do as they’re told and that nobody really even listens or leans in. And I’ve seen tons of parents who feel like their kids are just running roughshod and aren’t considerate of their needs. And so there’s resentment developing on the side of the adult in the relationship, too. So both happen. And that would be to me the evidence that things are not okay.
The Power of Listening: How Feeling Heard Changes Kids
Suzy Shaw: I remember when my kids were little, and I discovered the power of listening to them, really, of, you know, they’re trying to get your attention. You’re rushed, you’re overwhelmed, and to just stop, look at them and hear what they had to say, repeat it back to prove that you heard them. Then you could pretty much make whatever decision you wanted, but just taking that moment to listen and prove that you’ve heard made a huge difference in the relationship I have with my kids. Is that what you are seeing in this conscious parenting?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Absolutely. Yeah, I know that is the number one skill is to be able to stop sending your message over and over and over again. And when you encounter that resistance to your message, whatever the message is, to recognize that, you know, that that block are coming up against is because there’s a something over here in this little person or bigger person or whatever size human that you’re raising that is trying to figure out and usually trying to figure out how do I say yes to this important person in my life… my mom, my dad, my grandparents, my teachers, the people that we give the authority to. How do I say okay to what they’re asking of me right now when there’s this other thing in me that really wanted to do this thing? And how do I be heard without being made wrong? Because we often make any message other than the one we want wrong.
And that’s one of the things I think parents, when they also recognize, okay, how do I incorporate your message, my message? And then, you know, if I can, I mean, I want to be able to, I want to be able to demonstrate and be a model for consideration of other people’s preferences. And certainly, at least I want to take into consideration their feelings, needs, and frustrations. And not to be confused with permissiveness, not to be confused with caving in, not to be confused with any of that, but to be really true to the fact that the more that I can show you consideration, the more that you’ll show me consideration. And we’ll be able to, in that case, develop a relationship based on mutual consideration, not power, control, fear, dependency, any of the poison pills that are responsible for the resentment flow. And listening is the absolute key, the ability to stop just sending and pause long enough to be curious enough as to what’s going on for the other.
Hidden Childhood Triggers That Affect How We Parent
Suzy Shaw: The culture of curiosity. So what do you see as hidden patterns that parents might be repeating or might be rooted in their upbringing that they have to, you know, get over?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Well, I think that, you know, it’s not, I don’t know how hidden it is unless they have, unless parents haven’t really thought it through. But if you were made to feel like there was something wrong about you having your own needs, then what will likely trigger you is when you experience somebody else who’s trying to be assertive about meeting their needs. Because you grew up in a family culture where that was just not okay. You weren’t allowed to have needs. You were just allowed to say, okay.
Suzy Shaw: You’re part of the collective, like the Borg.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yeah, your job was just to say, okay. And whatever your needs were and whatever your feelings were really irrelevant.
So if you have a child who’s not willing to do that, and who’s more, you know, committed to having their feelings and needs being integrated into this conversation, that may really trigger you. So it tends to be all the things that we grew up with that were not allowed, that were forbidden. So if we were denied a voice, and we really grew up in the family where, you know, children are to be seen and not heard, and are to just like be in the background somewhere, but certainly not in the foreground and definitely not loud, then we probably got trained in maybe really very, you know, harsh ways that any, any coming forth of one’s own voice was considered, you know, disrespectful.
Suzy Shaw: Oh, yes.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: And I mean, even as we talk about this, I mean, to my mind, it’s like, well, why was that disrespectful? Because it came out of a young person’s mouth. So there seemed to be, I mean, I feel like a scientist who’s still like looking through this Petri dish trying to figure out, like, how could that have grown? How could that culture have taken such deep rooting? How is it possible that a younger person’s voice would be so marginalized? And that is, in fact, what I have built decades of training around: that children’s voices are marginalized. Their feelings and needs are marginalized. And maybe it’s because their feelings are exaggerated. And that could be part of it is that they’re exaggerated because they’re children, and they have not mastered the ability to be with their feelings in ways that are healthy. And so they come out really loud and big. But my experience is that a lot of parents never learned how to regulate their own emotions, or what they got really good at was just not feeling.
Parenting Different Personalities: Sensitive Kids vs. High-Energy Kids
Suzy Shaw: I wrote a book, Mothers of Boys Survival Guide, and I call the boys Earnest and Exuberance. And they had two different, very different energy levels. You know, I think it’s when you have more than one child, you realize they just come out the way they come out. It’s not a cookie-cutter kind of situation. And so the parenting of that child is independent in a lot of ways, one child over another child.
And you talk about the regulation of emotion. I had one child who would spin inward if he was criticized, that was Earnest, and he would get very reflective, very, very quiet, sad. And the other one would be bouncing off the ceiling like Looney Tunes. And I think how to parent that was one of my biggest challenges, which was to try to find equal, you know, parenting between them, but to still have that individuality. What suggestions do you have when you’re dealing with a child who is in one of these very high emotional, you know, states, so that you’re not doing the same thing? You know, you want to project calm and a better way to handle it, right?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: We call it the “disposition of a car alarm.” So if you have kids with the disposition of a car alarm, and I had one of those, it really is super hard on the adults in the room because they wear you down. And it’s hard to continue to provide the because they’re obviously when a child has the disposition of a car alarm, they’re dysregulated, and their nervous system is dysregulated. And you getting louder or harsher can actually amplify the dysregulation of their nervous system and exacerbate the situation. It makes it worse. It worse for everybody. It’s worse for them, worse for you, worse for the dynamic, worse for the family system.
So it really is about how I can support this child who has a dysregulated nervous system to heal their nervous system. And a lot of times that requires additional support like OT, for example, sensory, auditory provisions to support their nervous system in being able to calm down, regulate heavy blankets. I mean, there’s all that stuff.
Suzy Shaw: We did the weighted blankets, you know, for Earnest.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Did it help?
Suzy Shaw: Yes, it did help because he just couldn’t go to sleep at night and would really struggle with that. I think he would just think and think and think and think. The other one had burned himself out, and he was out down like a rock, right? But I did find that those little things, a fan in the room, a weighted blanket, helped with exactly what you’re talking about.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yeah. And then they also have the little things that you can have in your hand that also help to get the energy out. The fidgets.
Why Some Kids Can’t Sit Still — and Why That’s Not a Discipline Problem
And so, kids who have this kind of energy, the worst possible thing for them is to be in a classroom where the rule is you have to sit still because they literally can’t sit still. I can remember a father saying to us, “I had to go in and talk to the teacher because they kept punishing my son because he couldn’t sit still.” And he said, “I went in, and I said to her, I can’t sit still. He said, I’m an investment banker. I have a standing desk. And my father before me, he couldn’t sit still, and he was a lawyer, and he had a standing desk.” And I mean, he went literally through the patriarchy of the family system and how it was one male after another, after another, none of them could sit still. Let’s go back generations. He said, ” So your expectation that this child is going to sit still is never going to happen, but let’s stop making him feel bad for it.”
Suzy Shaw: Right. I remember a story where my brother and his wife were called in for my nephew. And my nephew was a very happy, nice kid who would touch everybody and tap and everything. And you’re not supposed to touch everybody. It’s like kindergarten, first grade. And my brother came in and was like, ” Hi, how you doing?” And hugging. And my sister-in-law said she could just see the whole of the teacher be like, ” Huh…”
Katherine Winter-Sellery: This is multigenerational. This mountain is too high for me to climb. Oh my God. That is so good. I love that story. Exactly.
So instead of trying to change a child who is a multigenerational standing desk person, right? How do we make it possible for him to be him and not bother you in the classroom? And so the conversation changes from there’s something about this child that we need to change to there’s something about the classroom we need to change. And so sure enough, you know, he’s now getting to be in the back of the room, and he can walk, he can move, he can fidget. He can have a ball that he rolls around on. And you know, the sit bones for parents who’ve never experienced what we’re talking about right now, this, any one of these interventions could be life changing.
Suzy Shaw: Yeah, yeah.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Absolutely life-changing and also normalizing for a kid in a classroom who’s being made to think they don’t belong there or that there’s something wrong with them. There’s nothing wrong with them.
You know, I think about that Dr. Seuss book, there’s the, what there’s the, this color belly. One of them has like this color belly. Another one has this color belly and you know, they’re just all different colored bellies, and each one is a little bit different and none of them are wrong. There may be a dominant culture where you’ve got more sitters than standers. I don’t know, but other than other than falling on the dominant culture percentage-wise, you’ve got more people who sit than stand, whatever, you know, we’ve got sitters, we’ve got standers. We can accommodate everybody. And I think that’s what it is in a family system is that we just, we look at the house that we have and we try to figure out how do we make this place safe for everybody? What’s necessary for us to do? Do I try to modify them, or do I figure out how to modify the environment, or do I figure out how to modify myself? What will create more psychological safety and the, you know, that yummy kind of environment where everybody feels like they belong there.
And if you’ve got dysregulated kids, there’s something going on in their nervous system. It’s not a discipline problem. It’s not that you haven’t been clear about expectations. You probably have. Maybe there’s, you know, I mean, if I think about the tweaks and what one can do if they’re experiencing some of these things, I would say that what we know from the research is that people who are involved in the decisions about their day-to-day activities are more engaged in them, and there’s less resistance to them.
So if we want our kids to have after-school activities, involve them in the conversation about what those after-school activities would look like. If they’re starting and it’s a brand new little person and they’ve never played tennis or gone to swimming lessons or, you know, this, that, or the other thing and we’re lining up all this stuff for them, then we need to be clear about it and we need to talk about what that could be like for them and we need to talk about what we’re expecting and get them to understand so that there’s more buy-in at the front end. That doesn’t mean you won’t have resistance over time. Of course you will. But then you can look at other factors. It starts to peel the onion.
So when we have disruptive behaviors, we start with the outer layer of the onion in terms of analysis, and we look at it as: Is it retaliation, rebellion, or resistance? So the retaliation, rebellion, and resistance, the three R’s, this is Thomas Gordon’s work. And Gordon was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times around his research that said, if you use power control and have a dominant culture in the family, you will activate retaliation, rebellion, and resistance. 75% of behavioral disruptions are one of those three.
I find when I listen to families who are coming to my trainings because they’re worried about a behavior, the first thing I do is I lean in, and I listen really carefully to see if this could be one of the three R’s. And I’ll tell you what, it almost always is one or two or three of the three R’s, which, believe it or not, makes it easier to get rid of that three R because all the parent has to do is adjust their parenting style and move away from power, control, rewards, punishments, threats, fear, to a guidance approach.
Moving from Punishment to Problem-Solving in Parenting
Suzy Shaw: So, can you give us some examples of that? So how does a parent make that shift?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yeah. All right. Let’s take an example. So we have a child who’s like, say, around six, and they’ve got all their toys spread out on the dining room table, and they’re boopity-boop and around, and they’re just having a grand old time. And mom comes in and says, “Hey, I need you to pick up all your toys and move everything out of kitchen so we can set the table for dinner.” And the child doesn’t even acknowledge that mom opened her mouth, just keeps moving along, doing the same thing. And you can feel mom’s temperature rising as she’s trying to get dinner on the table for the other kids, for her husband. I mean, this is kind of a traditional, my husband was always the cook, we could use him. But in any event, whether it’s a traditional role or not, so we’re just dealing with resistance.
So when that resistance starts, whether it’s this example of setting the table, whether it’s transitioning from dinner to bath time, whether it’s transitioning from getting up in the morning to leaving the house, by the way, a lot of problems happen during the transition time. And you can feel like your own temper rising because you’re tired too, or you’re in a rush too. I mean, that’s the other thing. Like parents, you know, moms, or people too, dads, or people too. Like we have to remember that we have to love ourselves too through all of this.
So when you experience the resistance, it’s kind of going back to where we started today. Do you stop repeating your message and start getting curious about what the resistance is? Or do you go into threats? “Okay, you know, I’m going to ask one more time. And if you haven’t started picking everything up, no dessert, no TV, no friends over this weekend.”
I mean, you just keep upping the ante of what kind of miserable experience can I give them that’s going to activate their behavioral change. So this is where I could go into a huge, long conversation with you and I about our theories of change. I love this conversation. What’s your theory of change about why people change their behavior? And essentially, parents are revealing and demonstrating what they believe to be their theory of change by what they choose to do when they meet resistance.
So a lot of people fall back on what I would think is almost unconscious choices about their theory of change until they want to get conscious about their theory of change. And that is they go back to power, control, threats. And sometimes it works one, two, three, you know, there are all kinds of ways that power, control, threats have been packaged until we finally find the one that hits something really important to the child that will be so important that they don’t want to have it removed from them. Whether it’s dessert or TV or friends over, whatever it is, you can be sure that that thing is meeting an underlying need. And that if you take it away and they can’t meet their needs, that is so terrifying to people not to be able to meet their needs, that they will, out of fear, change their behavior.
Well, I don’t want to use a fear-based paradigm. It has a lot of things embedded in it: retaliation, rebellion, and resistance. So it shows up in lots of different ways. So, how do I activate cooperation because of consideration? Because the family culture is based on this idea of being considerate of one another. Well, we do that with listening.
“Okay, so what’s going on for you? I can see that, you know, this is really whatever it’s going on here on this table is really important to you. Otherwise, I know you would have moved it.” “I’ve been working on it all day. I’ve been putting my village together all day. It’s perfect now. I’ve worked on it for hours. And now you want me to just put it, you know, put it in a box?” “Oh, I see.”
Now we’ve got like an idea of what’s going on with them. Now we’re forming connections around what I need and what’s going on that’s getting in the way of them being cooperative, which then opens up Pandora’s box of possibilities around how we can solve this problem together. And now we’re into the land of, “okay, all right, I can see your point.”
And for some people, that might not even be something they’re willing to do because they have the negative view of children and children’s point of view is irrelevant. Who cares what your point of view is? You’re supposed to do as you’re told. So then we begin to see what the baked-in ageism and prejudice is because there is a prejudice against children. There is a negative view of children. Their views shouldn’t matter. Their preferences are irrelevant. And so then we come up against this. Well, what do you believe? What do you believe? Do you believe that children actually are entitled to have feelings, needs, and preferences, or should they just do as they’re told?
And so then we open up that whole can of worms. And when we get back to this idea that they better behave, they have to be obedient and compliant, then I would open up the chapter in my book around the dangers of obedience and compliance. And if you train children to be obedient and compliant to power, they’re not going to be able to differentiate when that power is being used for them or against them. And it’s very dangerous to take children’s “NO” away from them is terrifying.
How Fear-Based Parenting Can Undermine Independence
Suzy Shaw: Well, and I imagine that comes through as they get older in a lack of independence, which, you know, for parents, this is one of the big, you know, goals that my husband and I had is that we had independent children that were going to go out and live their life. Right? So we don’t want to raise needy people.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: We definitely don’t want to raise needy people, and we don’t want to raise people who don’t have a sense of agency. And so, you know, what I would say is it can show up as, and I think it does for most parents who have cultivated this in the early years, the younger years, as it shows up as retaliation. It shows up as rebellion, because once you get to the point where the kids are like, “fine, all right, take my dessert away, whatever. Okay, great. I love my room. I’ll just go hang out there.” Like you can’t get to them if that was your objective, I have the power to get to you by restricting your access to preferred activities and delights, if you will.
So yes, I mean, it can show up in a couple of different formats. It can show up as the, okay, you know, and just a complete disconnect. There’s no warmth anymore. Or it can show up as fear. And for those kids, it’s much more like I’m afraid to take a step. I’m afraid to take a risk. I’m afraid to do anything because all those people out there have the power and control over me. And that sense of agency that we would want to have cultivated, and you cultivate it by engagement.
You cultivate it by having the aha that the resistance isn’t disrespectful, if you want to use the word, the child is being disrespectful because they’re not being obedient and compliant. No, that’s not what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to be respectful of themselves. And they can’t figure out how to do that and do what they’re told to do at the same time. So they’re struggling to figure it out. And if we keep the pure view of people are only ever trying to meet their needs, they’re trying to meet their needs. You’re trying to meet your needs. There’s no bad person in the story. There’s just a conflict right now of how you want to meet your needs and how they’re meeting their needs currently. And so the problem isn’t about meeting the need. The problem is that the way in which we’re going about meeting our needs is created a conflict.
And there’s an opportunity for problem-solving now and for collaboration. And there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be an outcome that’s suitably appropriate and makes both people feel seen, heard and understood.
A Parenting Mantra: “See Your Children Beautiful”
Suzy Shaw: Right. So this is such an important conversation, and we’re going to continue this in a second podcast. And the second podcast will be about co-parenting with different styles, which, you know, plays into all of this as well. So I encourage our listeners to stay tuned for the next podcast: Co-Parenting with Different Styles: How to Get on the Same Page and Stop Mixed Messages
And Katherine, as we wrap up this podcast, I ask all of our guests to share a mantra that a mom might be able to say to herself, a parent might be, you know, as they’re struggling with this, this resistant child, what, what would, did you say to yourself?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yeah, I would say that the mantra for this situation would be see your children beautiful. We just look at them and see past the resistance and see past whatever’s coming up and continue to see that beautiful little person inside who’s doing their best and who might be falling apart in ways that are, you know, getting in the way of harmony and ease, and there’s discomfort that comes with it. Just continue to see them beautiful.
Suzy Shaw: That is beautiful. Thank you. And where can listeners go for more information? What is your website?
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Yeah. So the website is consciousparentingrevolution.com. And they can also type in freeparentingbook.com, and it will take them to 7 Strategies to Keep Your Relationship With Your Kids From Hitting The Boiling Point. And they can download my Amazon bestseller. So we give that away free.
Suzy Shaw: Well, thank you.
Katherine Winter-Sellery: Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you.
Suzy Shaw: If this episode meant something to you, please follow and share the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide podcast on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Sharing helps other moms discover the show. Be kind to yourself, moms.