Parenting is nothing short of daunting, testing, wonderful and fulfilling. Many of us have probably discussed our own parent’s blunders and have vowed not to make the same mistakes when we raise our own children, but according to Lael Stone, it is important to separate our childhood insecurities from our own children’s experiences.
Lael Stone is an educator, speaker and author of Raising Resilient and Compassionate Children. She has dedicated her career to helping parents to better understand their children and helping adults to unpack their own trauma in a healthy way.
Lael Stone: Navigating Puberty, Sex, Drugs & Alcohol with Kids & Teens:
Lael takes understanding your children to an entirely new level and is publicly very progressive in her approach. After first specialising in birth education, Lael progressed into ‘pleasure based sex education’.
“It wasn’t just about don’t get pregnant, you know, be mindful of, you know, STIs, all that kind of stuff. It was about how do we know what feels good in our bodies? How do we tune in to what our yes’s and no’s are? How do we respectfully say no? How do we say yes? How do we navigate all that really tricky stuff of adolescence and sex and figuring out who we are and what pleasure is?” Lael said.
“I mean, no one ever spoke to me about pleasure when I was a teenager. So I did that for many years, which was amazing and I felt so privileged to be able to work with a whole lot of teenagers, just to have those conversations that I felt a lot of adults weren’t having with them.”
While Lael is all about helping guide children through big questions, she believes parents need to first address their own trauma.
“Every day we have the opportunity to tune in to someone and to get calm within ourselves and just listen and be present and so, I think that when a lot of kids develop a story that says, hey, it’s not okay to feel, and that’s just because of the family of origin they’ve grown up in. I mean, that applies to most of us as adults.”
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