The course has been designed to help parents develop stronger bonds with their children and take better care of themselves. It is based on the eight-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction programme (MBSR) and has been developed in the Netherlands by Susan Bogels and Kathleen Restifo within child mental health services.
The aims of the course are to teach the essential skills of mindfulness to support our own health and well-being in a way that can strengthen our inner resources as parents. With mindfulness training, we can learn to slow down and attend to our children and ourselves with greater awareness and compassion, so that we better manage our responses and fully appreciate more of the precious moments with our families. Our mindfulness practice can also support us in working with difficult parenting experiences.
As parents, the best way to share mindfulness with our children is to exemplify it in our relationships with them. This, in turn, will teach them to how to better manage stress and emotions and improve their overall sense of self-mastery and well-being.
About the course
The mindful parenting course consists of eight, three-hour sessions and is suitable for parents of children of all ages. Each session will be a mixture of mindfulness meditation, group exercises and discussion, movement exercises and psychoeducation exploring the following themes:
Mindful vs auto-parenting.
Understanding and nurturing ourselves as parents.
Understanding stress and how we can work with this in a way which better serves us and our families.
The rollercoaster of parenting – how to work with difficult parenting experiences.
Mindful communication.
How to become of aware of automatic parenting and intergenerational patterns, and how we can bring our own values into our parenting.
How to bring mindfulness into our everyday lives.
Note: No previous mindfulness experience required
Cost: £350 per participant (There is a maximum of ten participants per course)
I am delivering this course in partnership with The Apple Tree Centre.
Please contact info@appletreecentre.co.uk to book your place on the one hour introductory session and/or the 8 week course
