2013: Section 5

Download 2013: Section 5

For those of you following along with this year’s theme, section 5 focuses on the “parenting” category from the twelve categories of shame list created by Dr. Brené Brown. Her research on shame-resilience and vulnerability demonstrates for us all, how and why to live a wholehearted life.

When I first noticed the category for this month, I thought “oh…this is easy…I opted out of having children so there’s little to report on this topic.” Then a slew of issues came flooding through:

• how I feel about my mom and dad’s parenting skills
• how I feel about my dad’s parents and how they treated my dad and his siblings
• how the ancestral parenting of the women on my mom’s side of the family still affects me to this day
• how I feel about how other people parent their children
• how I parent myself
• how I parent our two greyhounds (sky & seti)
• how I feel about passing on the opportunity to be a parent (although I did babysit for 12 years…that right there cured me of wanting to have and raise children)

For this month’s section, let’s explore all the different aspects of parenting…the good, the bad and the ugly. What worked? What needs tweaking? What failed miserably? And how can we rectify it?