100 Family Media Literacy Activities, Ages Pre-School through Teen Years

Are You a “High Hopes” Parent?

Attending to Our Children’s Attention Span

Building the Foundation for Resiliency Skills

Live and Play in Your World: Stimulus Addiction and the Growing Brain

Looking for Meaning in All the Right Places

Parenting Today: The World Has Changed, Have We?

Parenting as a Living System

Reading the Screen

Screen Time and Obesity

Screen Violence: Impact on Self as Relational Being

Teaching Children Gratefulness

Parenting As A Living System (cont.)

In a mechanistic paradigm that assumes people’s behaviors vary little from a machine’s operations, measurement is important because it is concrete, giving the appearance of a cause and effect relationship. In a living systems paradigm, however, measurement is only one indicator of growth. In fact, since anything living either grows or dies, in humans growth is self-evident, albeit often obscured by numbers and statistic.

The CD player sitting on a shelf in my home office basically collects dust and when I notice the thin grey coating, I wipe it off. The plants in the room get dusty, too. But as I wipe them off, I notice if they are growing new shoots. I take off dried leaves. I check for too wet or too dry soil. I may change their position, moving them closer or away from sunlight, depending on what I notice. I may make a mental note to give them more or less water next time. I have to attend intentionally to the plants’ needs. Since the plants, as living things interact with their environment in a way the CD player does not, I approach the plants in my office very differently than I approach the CD player or any of the other machines, for that matter. Living things inherently change as a result of their interaction with their environments. Machines, on the other hand, might wear out from use or break from misuse, but they do not dynamically interact with their environments in the way living things must in order to thrive.

People—parents and children—are living and therefore need to be supported in ways that makes sense for living things to be supported. “Parenting as a living system” is a paradigm shift that moves us out of a mechanistic approach when providing moms and dads with information, support, and parenting strategies. It assumes parents as living beings are in a process of growth, interact with their children and everyone in their environment, much the way plants do. It assumes that when parents are supported in this way, they will also learn organically to treat themselves and their children as living things.

“Parenting as a living system” aligns parents’ with their true nature as living beings, deeply empowering them since the underlying principles imbedded in this approach most optimally nurture and expand life fulfillment. This concept is an integral part of the parent coaching model I developed. If you’d like more information, you can get started by reading the references listed below or give me a call to explore Parent Coach Certification® that emphasizes this approach. It usually takes a one-year training with 100 hours of a practicum for professionals in family support to learn living systems’ basic principles and apply them proficiently.

Where did the concept of “living systems” come from?

This is not an easy question to answer because the concept developed gradually over time and now means different things to different people depending on the discipline—biology, physics, organizational leadership—to name a few. But it’s probably safe to say that the origins of the concept stem from studying how living things work—or don’t.

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