Mindfulness

Mindfulness means paying attention, on purpose, in this moment, with gentleness. Only by experiencing and practicing mindfulness yourself can you truly understand its meaning. There's growing evidence that a dismissive attitude toward unpleasant feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations plays a significant role in mental health issues. Trying to escape these unpleasant experiences by running away from or fighting them in your behavior and thoughts usually achieves the opposite and costs you a great deal of energy.

Mindfulness consists of movement exercises (a series of postures in which bodily reactions, such as boundaries, are felt, allowing worrying thoughts to come to a complete standstill), sitting and walking meditations and explanations about, among other things, automatic thought and habit patterns and stress.

You learn to train your attention muscle, so that instead of focusing on everything that passes by, you focus your attention on one specific thing.

Mindful Parenting Training for parents

Mindful Parenting means parenting with attention. Attention to yourself and attention to your child. It's an ongoing process that we're never "finished" with. It's a process in which we remain mindful of our experiences (including those of parenting) as best we can, moment by moment, with minimal judgment.

Mindful Parenting assumes that you, as a parent, know how to raise your child, but that parenting stress blocks that knowledge. Mindful Parenting begins with self-awareness. Over time, we can identify the following key points:

• Recognizing and understanding your child's unique nature, temperament, and needs.
• Developing the ability to listen with full attention when interacting with your children.
• Treat yourself and your children with more compassion and acceptance, and less judgment.

Purpose of the training

The goal of the Mindful Parenting training is for you, as a parent, to experience less stress and more kindness by exercising your attention muscle, thereby making more conscious choices in parenting situations. This training helps you learn a crucial skill: not to react automatically to your child during a stressful parenting moment, but to create a gap between your physical sensations and thoughts and your response to your child.

What will you do in the training?

In the first part of the training, you'll become familiar with your bodily sensations, feelings, and thoughts. You'll learn to slow down your experiences (physical feelings, thoughts, emotions, and impulses to take action) by training your attention muscle and breathing. This "buys" you time and prevents you from reacting on autopilot! In the second part, you'll enhance your gentle and kind attitude toward yourself and your child by, among other things, increasing your self-compassion.

The training consists of:

• An intake of 1 hour before the training
• 8 weekly group sessions of 2 hours and a follow-up meeting 8 weeks later
• Small groups of 3-5 parents
• Guidance by myself
• Homework about 30 minutes a day (4 times 15 minutes a week already produces a change in the brain)

Costs

If you've been referred by a certified youth care provider (GP, youth doctor, parenting support worker, or general practitioner), the training and parental guidance will be covered by your municipality starting July 1, 2025. You don't need to do anything else, other than bring the referral to the intake. I'll take care of the rest!

The municipalities to which this applies are: Son en Breugel, Nuenen, Geldrop-Mierlo, Waalre, Helmond, Veldhoven, Asten, Deurne, Gemert-Bakel, Laarbeek, Someren.

What will the training deliver?

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) conducts extensive research into the effects of Mindful Parenting training. The UvA's research shows that after the training, parents are better able to cope with stressful events and difficult situations in the family and parenting process, are better able to deal with child problems, and experience a stronger parent-child relationship.

Mindful Parenting is a new application of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). It's also called a third-generation behavioral therapy in which, in addition to behavioral change (classical behavioral therapy) and incorporating thoughts and feelings (cognitive behavioral therapy), parents also examine their attitudes toward these thoughts and feelings (which manifest as bodily sensations in this training). Because it's precisely the resistance to or escape from these often negative thoughts and feelings that creates stress.

The target group for this training are parents who do not have any specific problems, but want to improve their parenting and the quality of life in their family.

Intake

A thorough intake prevents unnecessary dropouts. Before the training begins, there's an intake session where you'll discuss your motivation for taking this course, whether it's a good fit for you, and what you expect to achieve. We'll also discuss whether you're comfortable practicing at home (and how you'll organize this).