Raising Us
The way we raise children eventually becomes the way we live together.
Raising Us explores how the way we raise children shapes who they become, who we become alongside them, and ultimately, the kind of world we create together.
"I thought raising children was mostly about what we would teach them. I didn't realize how much they would teach us about ourselves."
Why Raising Us
Raising Us grew out of two very different parts of my life: raising three children and, years later, becoming a psychotherapist.
When I chose to take my children out of school and eventually unschool them, I began questioning many of the assumptions I had carried about how children learn, develop, and become themselves. Years later, sitting with adults in therapy, I began seeing childhood from the other direction, in the patterns, relationships, fears, expectations, and beliefs about ourselves that we carry forward.
Raising Us brings those two perspectives together.
It is my ongoing exploration of what helps children become more fully themselves, what raising them asks us to examine in ourselves, and why what happens in childhood matters far beyond childhood.
At the Heart of Raising Us
Four Ideas Worth Returning To
The philosophy at the heart of Raising Us took shape over many years, beginning with raising my own children and deepening through my later work as a psychotherapist and my study of human development.
Again and again, I found myself returning to the same four principles: Make Room. Hold Space. Be Curious. Carry It Forward.
They are not steps or rules for raising children, but touchstones we can return to as we consider what our children need from us, what raising them asks of us, and what all of us eventually carry into the world.
Make Room
Children are not projects.
Making room begins by questioning some of the schoolish thinking many of us have inherited—the idea that learning must be measurable to count, that adults should determine the path, or that children should develop according to a prescribed timetable.
It asks us to loosen our grip on the child we imagined long enough to see the particular child in front of us—and to make more room for their interests, curiosity, differences, and individual pace of development.
Hold Space
Children need help learning what to do with everything they feel.
Long before they can regulate difficult emotions on their own, children rely on us for co-regulation. Our presence, responsiveness, and ability to stay with them through frustration, fear, anger, disappointment, and uncertainty help create the emotional safety they need to gradually understand and regulate what happens inside them.
Holding space also asks us to pay attention to what gets stirred up inside us, so that our own fears and unfinished stories do not quietly become theirs.
Be Curious
Childhood is not simply preparation for adulthood. It is life happening now.
Children are naturally curious. They notice, question, explore, create, and wonder. Curiosity invites them to engage with the world, follow what interests them, and discover who they are along the way.
But curiosity isn't only for children. It can become a way of moving through life: staying awake to what is happening, noticing what draws us, questioning what we have come to assume, and remaining open to who we are still becoming.
Carry It Forward
What develops in childhood doesn't stay there.
The ways children learn to experience themselves and other people eventually travel beyond the family. So do the things we learn as we raise them. How we listen, repair, respond to difference, make room for another person's voice, and remain connected through disagreement becomes part of how we participate in relationships, workplaces, neighborhoods, communities, and the larger world.
What we inherit does not have to be what we pass on. Raising children gives us an opportunity to become more conscious of what we want to carry forward—and what we want to leave behind.
"The world we create between us becomes the world we create around us."
— Deanne
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Speaking
Speaking & Workshops
Bring the ideas behind Raising Us to your organization or community. Talks and workshops explore childhood, emotional development, relationships, and how the ways we raise children ripple outward into the world we share.
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Parenting Coaching
Parenting can bring up questions not only about our children, but about ourselves. Individual parenting coaching offers a place to think through challenges, understand what may be happening beneath them, and find a way forward that fits your child, your relationship, and your family.
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Raising Us is still growing. Join me for new writing, ideas from the book, upcoming talks, and reflections on childhood, relationships, and the adults we become.
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