Parents have big hopes for their kids. We dream of them living a happy life and accomplishing big things. But I think you’d agree with me that the biggest goal of all is raising good human beings… and not getting stressed or reaching your breaking point while doing that. It sounds ambitious, and yet it can be done. Hunter Clarke-Fields lays it out step by step in her insightful and educational book, “How to Raise Good Humans”. Read my interview with Clarke-Fields below and make sure to stop by her site to learn more about mindful parenting.
Please tell us a little bit about the reasons why you wrote this book.
It was created out of the struggles in my own life. I was a mom feeling like I was failing at the most important job in my life. Parenting books had great advice that I couldn’t implement because I was so frustrated and stressed. I needed to reestablish my mindfulness practice to get grounded. However, my mindfulness practice didn’t help me find the right words to say — words that didn’t trigger resistance in my child. Ultimately, the two halves of this work came together because I realized that one without the other was incomplete. I needed both. The parents I was working with needed both. Mindfulness and skillful communication are the two wings that allow us to fly.
What were your early parenting years like?
Before my daughter was born, I had a lot of opinions on how to raise kids. I imagined that my child would eagerly do as I asked and not talk back to me. I would be loving, but firm, and we would get along. I had visions of us peacefully walking through art museums together. The reality of toddlerhood hit me hard. Not only did my child not listen to me, she actively resisted nearly every single thing I said. We butted heads daily. My naturally chill husband and I started to see her as a tiny ticking time bomb. It’s amazing to look back now, seeing in the photos just how cute she was, and remembering how incredibly difficult it was. We shared wonderful, life-altering joy and she pushed buttons in me that I didn’t even realize I had. At that time I didn’t know that I was re-enacting my own father’s temper, perpetuating a pattern passed down through the generations.
Do you think new parents are in information overload? How can they get over it?
Yes! There is so much information out there and so much of it conflicts. Parents are feeling scattered and stressed from too much information. Look for people you trust, look for information backed by research, and block out the rest. I encourage the Mindful Parenting members to put healthy boundaries on media for both themselves and their children. We never have clarity if we are always steeped in distraction. And if we never have clarity, we’ll never be able to be fully present for ourselves or our children.
What’s been your biggest parenting failure and success and how did each affect your life and behavior?
My greatest wins as a mom stem from a moment of failure. I sat in the upstairs hallway crying. Not gentle crying, but bawling and big, gushing tears — the kind of crying that makes my face look red and puffy. Like I’ve been in a prize fight. More importantly, I felt like I’d been beat up on the inside. One closed door away, I could hear my two year-old daughter crying too because I’d scared her with my anger. I curled up in a ball on the wood floor. The sound of her crying bored into my heart, precipitating another wave of gasping, snotty sobs. I buried my face in my hands. Who said parenting would feel like this? No one. It’s supposed to be filled with soft-focus moments, me gazing lovingly at my child, right? So what was wrong with me? The day I sat on the hallway floor, I had two choices. I could shame and blame myself, falling into a pit of despair… or I could accept what was happening and learn from it. So I took my anger and used it as a teacher. I looked at why I was getting triggered. I realized that to parent as well as I could, I needed to become calmer and less reactive, and I needed to respond to my daughter with more skillful language, not blameful words that exacerbated the situation.
In “Raising Good Humans”, you say that your children always cooperate without threats or punishment. What tools do you use?
I did not say my children “always” cooperate, but they mostly do. The Mindful Parenting Method is not about achieving 100% compliance because that’s not realistic! However, I do teach communication skills that have been tried and tested by research. For instance, when we refrain from blaming, shaming, and speaking from the “you” perspective — looking instead at how the behavior affects ourselves — our language naturally shifts to an “I” perspective. The “I-message” is a tried-and-true method of skillful communication, in which our statements generally start with “I” rather than “you.” I-messages are great because they help us meet our needs without putting the child on the defensive. They also help us take ownership of our own feelings rather than implying that they are caused by our child. You can use I-messages to express your own needs, expectations, problems, feelings, or concerns to your children in a respectful way without attacking them. Kids receive an I-message as a statement of fact about what the parent is feeling, so it causes less resistance. Your statement now invites empathy rather than resistance, helping our child to cooperate because they want to, not because they are forced to.
What do you say to parents that feel like they are losing the battle with their toddlers?
If you are irritable, frustrated, disillusioned, and feeling guilty — if you are yelling, stomping your feet, or crying — trust me, you are far from alone. When my daughter was little I was irritable, exhausted, ashamed of my anger, and feeling totally guilty. You can choose to wallow in that, or you can choose to use it as a catalyst to learn and change. I invite you to do the latter. It’s time to move out of the “battle” paradigm and start to understand each other relationally.
You’re asking busy moms to use a journal. Wouldn’t spending extra time they don’t have cause more stress?
Making change does not happen by just reading about these concepts, but realizing them in your own life. That means taking action — writing, practicing, and actually doing the exercises. Additionally, all the information collected in a journal will give insights into changes that can be made in routines, self-care, and environment, which will help you yell less, be more consistent, and feel calmer. If parents have five minutes for social media, they have a few minutes to journal.
I love that perspective! “Raising Good Humans” is in two parts. What are the differences between the two?
The first section is about the foundational work you do personally to calm your reactivity. The second half is devoted to skillful communication and cultivating peace in the home.
Why is the Mindful Parenting Manifesto so important to your book?
The Mindful Parenting Manifesto sums up the aims and the attitude in a few words. If it resonates with you, you know that you are in the right place.
I really like the quote you shared by Jon Kabat-Zinn – mindfulness “is the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally”. How can parents tap into that awareness when they are in the middle of a stressful situation?
Mindfulness meditation is the stealth tool that will make all the difference in calming down your reactivity. Mindfulness meditation is intentionally training our attention to be in the present moment, non-reactive, with a sense of non-judgmental curiosity. Mindfulness is a quality we are aiming for; mindfulness meditation is the tool for building that quality in ourselves. Parents can tap into that by first of all, creating a regular mindfulness meditation practice that builds their “muscle” of non-reactivity overall in their lives. Then when the difficult situations roll around, they’ve built a little “muscle-memory” to be able to pause and calm down their stress response.
Can you please share a real life example of using a mindful approach with your child?
My biggest challenges personally are always with my temper and calming that down. I’m now able to frequently bite my tongue and take some deep, slow breaths (truly cliche because it works!) to calm down my stress response and wait to speak.
Do you think our own upbringing is mirrored in how we raise our kids?
Absolutely. A few years into working on my own yelling problem, I sat down with my father during a visit. He talked to me about the circumstances that he grew up in. His parents beat him with a belt. My grandparents’ behavior, which would be called traumatizing abuse today, was then considered normal. My father, in his turn, spanked me. Now I was on a mission to change things. Not only was I not physically punishing my children, but I was also trying not to yell. We both saw the improvement down through the generations, but for me just “not yelling,” wasn’t enough. I wanted to create relationships based on cooperation and respect — and I did so. The old patterns of harshness, anger, and disconnection have been transformed in my family.
There are plenty of situations where parents’ first impulse is to yell and that behavior is repeated time and again. Is it possible to unlearn this?
Yes! Anger is an energy that needs to move through your body, so we can mindfully notice the feeling arise and let the energy of anger move through you. I like to call this “taking care of” your anger: we release the energy of anger and calm down our nervous system. Practicing a new response may be hard at first, but the payoff in increased connection with and cooperation from your child are more than worth it.
I like to tell my kids that when the words are out of your mouth, you can never get them back, so you have to be careful about what you say to someone. Are there words that parents use commonly that they need to work on eliminating?
There are barriers to communication that will inevitably be met with resistance and will stop the flow of communication between you and your child, leading to resentment in the child. Ordering and threatening are two common communication barriers and they make our children resistant to our requests. Instead of ordering, how would you ask a respected auntie to do this?
Moms tend to be overachievers and perfectionists. Do we have to give that up in your opinion?
It helps enormously! The problem with always striving to be more, to be right, to get everything just so is that we can’t EVER be accepting of what is. We can’t ever be accepting of our own imperfections. And when we can’t accept our own imperfections, we can’t authentically accept our children’s imperfections. They need to see a MODEL of a perfectly imperfect human. They need to see us make changes and begin anew. They need to see all that. And they need to know that they cannot have every single need met but they will bounce back and be okay.
What is next for you?
Right now I am focused on serving the Mindful Parenting membership community and the Mindful Parenting Teacher Training community. My mission is to bring this “good medicine” to as many as I can.
