As each parenting moment unfolds, so does the opportunity to broaden and deepen the parenting relationship. Parenting is fully an iterative process rich with opportunity as well as challenge. Recognizing how the unconscious influences each moment as well as understanding the psychological structures that inform the parent-child relationship, supports choice as to how the parent shows up in the child’s world and how the child is revealed in the world of the parent.

The purpose of this course is to offer a depth psychological perspective on parenting, which provides a way to understand and approach the parent-child relationship with an eye for both conscious and unconscious dynamics within it. How much do we act to shape the child to fit into the image, values, and world that we have inherited and created for them? How much do we adjust this world so that it is receptive to the unfolding nature of the child? This is a dialectic process that requires attending to what is at work in the soul of the parent and requires being present to what this communicates to the soul of the child.

Parenting is an opportunity to start fresh each day. We must be willing to live with our questions and hold our answers gently. Parenting is not a problem to be fixed, nor are children. There is not a formula that when mastered will be effective in every situation. Parenting requires a willingness to learn, to become more conscious of what we are unconsciously enacting, communicating, and modeling to our children, understanding what images or ideals govern our attitudes, words, and actions, and whether these further the wellbeing of both parent and child and their relationship. We will investigate and invite the possibility of a depth psychologically informed transformative opportunity to broaden and deepen a holistic and healthy relationship between parent and child.

Weekly module titles and descriptions

Module 1: Born with a Blueprint

From a depth psychological perspective, every child comes into the world not as a blank slate, but with a soul uniquely preconfigured for the life they are called to live. Parenting from this perspective doesn’t aim at forming a child, but listening for, attending, and responding to the emergence of who the child is—not what a parent hopes or expects them to be. Accordingly, this session will cover what it means to become conscious of our parental expectations, bracket our projections, and understand the cultural narratives about what children should be, in order to be present with the soul coming into expression in our children.

Learning Objectives

• Discuss both the cultural and personal narratives that you ascribe to or enact as a parent for what they assume or express about the nature of children and what children should be.
• Analyze the difference between projection and presence in parenting.

Module 2: A Different Form of Communication

9. G. Jung said, “Children are educated by what the grownup is and not by what he says” (CW 9.I, para. 293). This session will use this statement as a focus of conversation about how and what parents communicate with their children in view of what children actually learn from their parents. Parenting demands a great deal of doing, but parenting from a depth psychological perspective demands an even more demanding kind of being. Are we as parents living in congruence with our own psychological blueprint, have we disowned parts of ourselves, have we left our wounds and dreams in the shadows, are we burdening our children with our own unlived lives? What are our children learning from us—not from what we tell them, but from how we relate to ourselves and our lives as a whole? What does our way of being communicate to our children?

Learning Objectives

• Assess one’s views of communication and what kinds of communication one considers most important in parenting.
• Examine what you communicate in words to your children in comparison to what you communicate with your life—with your way of being as a person.

Module 3: The Ethics of Parenting

Inevitably, parenting brings our values into manifestation when we are responding to attitudes, words, and behaviors of our children that conflict with the values we hope to instill in them. These conflicts bring to the forefront questions of authority, structure, correction, discipline, punishment, and consequences. Behind all of these is a kind of parental ethic about what is right and wrong, good and bad, beneficial and harmful. This session doesn’t aim to answer these questions or provide a universal or absolute form of parental ethics, but to bring these questions out into the open, so that we can become more conscious of the ethics we enact, where we learned it from, what it communicates to our children, whether or not it actually instill the values we want our children to embody—or whether or not the way we express it in our own attitudes, words, and behaviors towards our children is in congruence or conflict with what we are seeking to instill in them. What is the image, the ideal, carried in our ethics, is it what we think it is, is it possible to achieve, do we live up to it ourselves?

Learning Objectives

• Assess one’s parental ethics, where it originates in family history or collective culture, and what image or ideal it carries.
• Assess whether or not the way one enacts authority, structure, correction, discipline, punishment, or consequences are in congruence or conflict with the values one hopes to instill in your children.

Module 4: Wholeness Versus Perfection

9. G. Jung wrote, “there is a considerable difference between perfection and completeness . . . The individual may strive after perfection but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness” (CW 9.II, para. 123). As the culminating session of this course, this statement by Jung will provide a lens and reflection point for all the previous topics discussed. Perfectionism in parenting—in the expectations we have for ourselves and for our children—requires the rejection or exclusion of some part of ourselves and of our children. In contrast, what Jung describes as completeness or wholeness is the soul in its fullest expression and health that requires the inclusion of our own and our children’s imperfections, limitations, humanity. We will use this last session to explore together the difference between wholeness and perfection in parenting and how wholeness might provide parents a model for how to love and care that reciprocally moves us and our children toward wholeness rather than perfection. This model positions parenting not as something we do to our children, but something we learn with them, reciprocally, relationally—becoming more whole individually and together.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze the degree to which parenting is governed by perfection or wholeness.
• Assess what is lost and gained in both perfectionism and wholeness in parenting.

This Course is Ideal For:

• Parents and caregivers seeking to deepen their understanding of the parent-child relationship through a depth psychological lens
• Mental health clinicians (LMFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs, psychologists) who work with families, children, or parenting issues in their practice
• Counselors and therapists interested in integrating Jungian and depth psychology principles into their work with clients around parenting dynamics
• Educators and school professionals who want to understand children’s psychological development and communication beyond behavioral approaches
• Prospective parents who wish to explore a depth psychological approach to parenting before embarking on their parenting journey