Powered by Max Banner Ads 

Profound Children’s Books

Doing our best to practice conscious parenting means being vigilant about what information and influences our children come in contact with. The kind of books we read them, and in time they read for themselves,  is an important part of this. The mainstream marketing children’s Disney stories and their ilk, lack for me a deeper appreciation of life and humanity that I hope to instill in my child. It was a great pleasure then when we first  discovered the books of  Jon J Muth.

His books are always my favorites to read.  There are two parts to a children’s book that are really crucial, the first is the illustration and the other is  obviously the story. As an illustrator Jon J Muth is very talented, his pictures have a warmth and intimacy  that I have found in few other book. The stories themselves carry profound human and spiritual teachings in a simple and unpretentious way.

 I think the child in me loves the idea of a giant panda zen master friend like Stillwater living in my neighbourhood and being a mentor/friend. Of course my little boy doesn’t get the joke in Zen Ties,  when Stillwater greets his young nephew Ku from a train, "hi Ku". Ku of course speaks in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 - a haiku.

Another favorite is The Three Questions,  a young boy Nikolai in his pursuit of the questions "When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?". It was in this book that I first met the character ‘Old Turtle’, a mythic representation of the deepest wisdom.

Probably my favorite of all  is ‘Old Turtle and the Broken Truth’, authored by Douglas Wood.   Amazingly this children’s book goes to the very heart of the cause of all human conflict, and it’s resolution. This will be considered a classic by the time my son is buying books for his children.

I know that at the conscious level my 3 1/2-year-old boy probably doesn’t understand the depth and wisdom of these books. Until around age 8 children’s subconscious minds are wide open. So I know that on some level the repetition of reading these stories over the years, they are truths and values will be  absorbed.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Scroll Down to leave a Comment

Technorati Tags: Book reviews, Conscious Parenting

Letting Children Be Who They Are

This morning, after struggling with increasingly ill health for some time, our dog Samantha passed away. My son Sebastian who’s 3 and a half, has been aware that Sam has not been well and more recently we began talking to him about the fact that sooner or later she would die and no longer be with us.

Recently he had being doing things to take the illness away, which mostly consisted of crawling under her, coming out the other side and throwing away the illness once he got to the other side. Sam has been there his whole life, they had their own personal relationship and she was an integral part of our family.

I’m not sure quite what ‘dying’ or ‘dead’ mean to him and I wanted us to be prepared for questions that I imagined coming, about where she’s gone and why. I also imagined, some form of grief for him and hoped my wife and I in our own grief would handle it well. I was concerned that we have something consistent and clear to give him as answers, this being his first experience of death in a personal way.

So far there have been no questions and no overt or even subtle signs of grief. He has actually been very matter of fact about it. When we told him Sam had died this morning, he said ‘yes you told me she would’, and this morning before he went to school we had told him that she probably would die. This morning as my wife and I were in the first waves of grief, he brought us cups of milk to help us feel better

I had a memory during the day of myself as a young child coming home from school to find the rabbit hutch empty and told Penny had died. I was very upset, but my parents hadn’t spoken to me about her being ill or dying so it was a bolt out of the blue for which i had no preparation.

In other big changes in Sebastians life, we have begun talking to him about them months in advance, and when we have by the time the change comes it has passed easily and smoothly.

Today was another lesson for me to let him be who he is, the rewards are obvious already.

Technorati Tags: Communication Skills, Conscious Parenting