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Discovering your child’s inner voice

Helping your child discover and nurture their inner voice free from our expectations and cultural influence is one of our greatest challenges as a parent. Solitude, being the act of spending time alone, may be just the answer to helping our children attune to their inner voice.

In her book The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children Shefali Tsabary reveals the importance of scaling back our children’s schedules to provide them the time to listen to their inner voice.

“Children learn who they are and what they really enjoy if they are allowed to sit with themselves. Inundated with activity and subjected to lesson upon lesson, how can they hope to recognise their authentic voice amid the din of all this doing.”

She also discusses how encouraging moments of solitude can help our children develop their authentic self.

“Unless we allow our children to become comfortable with quiet aloneness, they become strangers to themselves, alienated from their essence. Moments of solitude and stillness aren’t empty moments, although they may feel like it initially. They are moments of fullness, in which we experience the presence of our being.”

Devices are the ultimate antidote to solitude

The addictive nature of devices proves an ongoing struggle for many of us parents as our kids choose to fill spare moments fixated on a phone, tablet, computer or television screen. Devices are the ultimate antidote to solitude providing endless distraction and entertainment. While devices have their place in helping our children learn and socialise – and let’s be honest here, give us parents a sane moment of silence – Tsabary warns against excessive use.

“If a screen is used to comfort restlessness or boredom, our children learn to be dependent on external aids to allay their anxiety. Television and computers often serve not only as a band aid whenever children feel bored or upset, but as a replacement for relationships. Used in this way, they rob our children of the opportunity to learn how to sit with their emotions and navigate their feelings themselves.”

As parents, we also need to lead by example when it comes to device usage. This means setting some boundaries around device usage and scheduling time away from our screens. The benefits of conscious device usage are two-fold; allowing us moments for personal reflection and to better engage with our children. A study reveals the more frequently that we parents use our phones, the more distracted and less connected we feel.

Activities to encourage moments of solitude

Tsabary offers a number of activities to allow your child’s inner voice to sing such as playing outside, painting, art, bushwalking, surfing, journaling, meditation, yoga or any other activity completed in silence. She suggests children spend an hour each week participating in one of these activities, although you may need to alter the duration for younger children.

“Our children deserve the privilege of knowing their inner landscape. They can only achieve this by being allowed to connect with their essence, which a parent can foster—for ultimately it’s the quality of our connection with our children that allows them to enjoy a sense of relatedness to themselves and their world.”

Reward your child with an hour of solitude this week and read Tsabary’s The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children for more insights into parenting with presence.