THE REGENERATIVE PARENT

The Regenerative Parent Community

Foundational Role in Building a Society That Works

What is your philosophy of Parenting?

  • What does it require to carry that out in functioning capabilities (e.g., infrastructure, nested supporting members, methods, and practices)?
  • What is necessary in personal state of being (self-managing, ‘family’ relationships)?
  • What changes are needed in deep motivation (motives that serve to guide self and community choices)?
  • Why does parenting matter and to whom?
  • We will explore all this and more.

 

Excerpt from The Regenerative Life, Chapter Four: The Regenerative Parent

Societies concentrate the resources needed to create systems for developing and amplifying human potential. They serve the essential purpose of linking individuals together in ways that enable them to become more than they could be on their own. Through social participation and interaction, our lives gain meaning, and our actions gain significance. Ultimately, societies are the means we use for discovering how to consciously contribute to the evolution of life on Earth.

 

“Childrearing lays the ground for all other social processes. Parents help children grow their capacity to join with others in order to pursue common purposes. They do this by assisting them to learn, understand, and value the social agreements that allow cooperation among people with widely diverging interests and goals. This can happen within the structure of a family, among a cohort of playmates, or in other social contexts. The point is to help children become contributing members of something that is bigger than they are and serves a larger purpose. The quality of these contributions depends in part on how well children come to know and manage themselves. Really great parenting is not only about helping children become socialized. It is also about helping children tap into and express in the fullest possible way their own potential.

 

“Taken together, these two dimensions of parenting provide an engine for social evolution. Ideally, each generation passes down the collective wisdom of all prior generations about what it takes to get along and work together, and what the consequences are for failing to do so. At the same time, each generation is encouraged to discover and express its own genius, adding new experience and insight to the collective wisdom. Naturally, this process isn’t direct and linear. Societies come together and they fall apart, they improve, and they regress, but the overall arc of history, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, bends toward justice.

 

What is the purpose of the Regenerative Parenting Community?

 It is time to reimagine how parenting works and serves a social role. To regenerate our thinking about parenting. This endeavor is intended to build a Regenerative Parenting Community. It will make use of a community of parenting members (birth parents, adoptive parents, extended family, co-parenting alliances) to change how we parent and how other institutions affect the parenting of children. Not only our own, but all children. A Mongoose approach to parenting where there is less attachment, narrowly, to our children doing well and increased stewardship for all children in a circle, being parented for physical, social, psychological, intellectual and spiritual vitality, viability and evolution. Childrearing often happens in community in non-Western cultures and did in Western cultures until very recent generations. How can we rebuild an understanding of how that can work?

The community is called Regenerative Parenting. But it is not about birthing and raising a single child or a set of children. The Parenting Community is about parenting as a Regenerative practice which grows all the adults in understanding their role in evolving society by evolving childrearing.

 

In many cultures, parenting is seen as a community endeavor

with extended families and other member of the tribe and social networks playing a core role. Today, families are splintered if not by space and time, by ideology. Parenting with a regenerative philosophy requires working in a community committed to learning and growing together, having others with whom we can share, develop ourselves, as well as test and reflect.

 

Process of The Regenerative Parenting Community

This community, meeting online and in local groups, will develop thinking and practices regarding the meaning of parenting for a regenerative society, engaging with a regenerative approach, alone and with others. We will work together, in a regenerative live online workshop format, to evolve individual, family and collective capacity to understand, and be resources to one another in developing regenerative persons, families and social systems.

Community Member

In a short period of time, this practice really has transformed one of the most difficult periods my daughter and I have experienced together. I’ve since gained a perspective that helps me see differently so that I can respond in ways that really do feel whole and authentic.

– Rachel Kastner, Member of The Regenerative Parent Project

 

Framework for the community

We see parenting as a journey with no defined path, that is greatly enabled through community in which to explore our role as parents in a structured way and evolve ourselves and our parenting. Through this community we gain instruments and practices that let us move our choices and outcomes.

 

 

We Work With:

Living Systems Frameworks to understand different world-views and paradigms of parenting.You can use the framework to examine your own beliefs and how you feel about your discoveries. Including:

    • Having multiple parenting members who are able to explore their shared and conflicting world views, how they got there and what they want to do about that going forward.
    • Examining how you were raised and the challenges in shifting toward where you want to go to from where you are now.
    • Learning how to dialogue when conflicting worldview or paradigms are at play between parenting partners, within extended families and within ourselves.

Using personal assessment instruments, understanding emerges and new principles arise.


Community Member

This community has shifted my patterns. I am beginning to understand the essence of the parenting role which allowed me to let go of unnecessary constraints to be present with this learning experience, which in turn provided the space for my daughter to determine her own process of response to a situation and to better support each other.

– Anastasia Smith, Member of The Regenerative Parent Project

 

 

 

A regenerative set of principles drawn from Living Systems understanding, exploring their relationship to parenting. Living System understanding – found in indigenous communities, ecosystem principles, and common threads of ancient spiritual traditions from around the world – shifts parenting. Exploring these principles in our parenting we develop understanding.

 

We work to build capacity:

  • to evaluate how we are doing and where our obstacles typically show up.
  • to be increasingly self-directed, self-managing, self-correcting without external input from others.
  • to engage others as thinking partners and developmental resources.
  • To develop dialogue when conflicting worldview or paradigms are at play between parenting partners, within extended families and within ourselves.

 

Community Member

I really thought that being a dad was going to be easy for me. But I found myself in a situation that I wasn’t prepared for. This work has really helped me move past that. It gave me an anchor.

– David, parent of a transgender child; Member of The Regenerative Parent Project

 

What it is NOT

  • It is not therapy or a parenting course with a proscribed set of behaviors to adopt, although, you may develop your own path and set of behaviors using some of what you learn.
  • It is not a religiously revealed path for how to raise children to meet a specific Teacher’s words, although you may connect it into and test it with your faith and find it resonates and is useful.
  • It is not a facilitated or mediation effort to help parents who are in conflict, although it may give you practices to reconcile and reimagine your lives.

 

What it IS!

  • An education and reflection community with different members becoming resources to one another in self- development.
  • A way of approaching parenting in which personal growth becomes a more intentional aspect of parenting.
  • A structured series designed to enable you to understand your own approach to parenting and apply a regenerative approach. You have the final say on what seems right and what you will pursue.
  • A way to build local communities to foster regenerative practices in parenting.

  • Community Member
  • “This goes so far beyond fragmentary parenting models that focus on behavior. It helps me to engage with my whole child, my whole self, my whole partner, and potentially the whole world differently. I now see how parents are uniquely positioned to shape the consciousness and beliefs of the next generation.”
  • – Lily Hollister, Member of The Regenerative Parent Project

 

Membership Structure for ongoing Regenerative Parenting Community

Choose a membership option for active membership in the ongoing Regenerative Parenting Community

  1. Two Parent Membership: Two individuals in the same household attend. There may be sessions where only one parent attends and then brings exercises back to the other member. $497 annually for two members parenting the same child(ren)
  2. Family Pod Membership: A family pod exists where there are 3 (or more) members for the same household who are learning and co-parenting together. $ 597/three annually ($100 for each additional member). Aunt/uncle, caregiver, grandparent from the same family
  3. Community Pod Membership: A community pod exists when multiple households with children, parents, extended family, and friends in an agreed group join to support one another and all the children in experiencing Regenerative Parenting. The joining family pod invited others near them socially, geographically, or emotionally. We may be able to facilitate such pods. Here, children and adults experience the creation of working societies and families that are governed by Regenerative Premises, Principles and Concepts. Pod is formed around a child(ren) from a household. Ask for more information about these larger community groups.

Eventually, we hope to have 5-20 community pods working in local/social pods but sharing and feeling part of a larger community with a shared intention to be in a Regenerative parenting Community. At some point, we may support local meetings in separate communities by local/social groupings. But we start with established pods that are brought in by the joining members.

 

What Is Included

  •  4 Regenerative Parenting events of 3 hours each.  One session every two months in an eight-month window.
  • The Global Seed-Communities Summit in AUGUST, annually, via zoom or in person.  More information here

 

Attendance Concept

Co-parents may attend all events or alternate attendance as needed. Between sessions, the parent able to attend can lead the engagement to work as a pair or couple on assignments. We will include information about how to be a resource when you take home the learning, therefore improving the parenting partnership. Breakouts will sometimes be mixed across families.

Dates For This Ongoing Community

All 9am – 12 pm Pacific Time

(Four Sessions plus Summit included in annual membership)

2022

  • Jan 15, 2022
  • Apr 9, 2022
  • Global Seed Communities Summit: Aug 12, 2022.  More information here
  • Sept 10, 2022
  • Nov 12, 2022

2023

  • TBD

 

VIDEO OF FREE INTRODUCTORY SESSION HELD OCTOBER 23

How to Join

SIGN UP FOR ONGOING REGENERATIVE PARENTING COMMUNITY

Coming soon – Contact us for more information

About Carol

Carol is a Regenerative Life educator on the philosophy, practices and paradigm of Regeneration. She is a mother, grandmother and alternative mother by choice. She was the Producer, curriculum developer, TV anchor of Healthy Family Dynamics on community stations in WA. Her family includes, children by birth and marriage, parenting teens who became homeless, openly-adopted grandchild, open family connections of adopted child, gay families, and blended families. She is also Senior Fellow of Social Innovation with Babson College Lewis Center.