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PLA is an evolving, cross-cultural program that provides parents with the science behind child brain development along with insights and tools for reflecting upon cultural norms as a conscious move toward building the emotionally intelligent families and compassionate communities.
About Us
Take the Parent Liberation Project Online Program
Take the Parent Liberation Project Online Program
Take the Parent Liberation Project Online Program
You can take the online Parent Liberation Project course NOW by clicking here. Your training counts toward facilitator certification in future programs. Find upcoming speaking engagements and in-person events as well.
Our Mission, Our Vision
Take the Parent Liberation Project Online Program
Take the Parent Liberation Project Online Program
The Parent Liberation Project and Alliance is based on Teresa Graham Brett's seminal book, Parenting for Social Change. Learn more about Teresa and her path to creating this valuable book and program.
The Parent Liberation Alliance
Take the Parent Liberation Project Online Program
The Parent Liberation Alliance
The Parent Liberation Alliance has partnered with international parent nonprofits and NGO's to bring the Parent Liberation Project and facilitator training to their communities. Find out more about this global outreach and how your international organization can participate.
Purchase Your Parent Liberation Project Program
If you would like a sliding scale to purchase the program, or a gift economy price, please use this link.
parenthood and liberation
By Teresa Graham Brett, JD
We grow up believing that family relationships and parent-child relationships are merely personal experiences. Parenthood and childhood are much more than a deeply personal experience. These experiences are deeply rooted in culture and context that reinforces control, power over, and domination in our culture.
When we are able to put the experience of parenthood and childhood in the broader context of socialization or enculturation we can begin to bring to consciousness the unconscious world-view that harms our relationships with each other and ultimately creates disconnection, separation, fear, and mistrust.
This program will help focus on understanding how we come to have a particular frame-of-reference, or world-view, about parents and children What we often refer to as the collective story of parenting in our cultures. We will examine all the experiences and messages we received that form the foundation for our actions as parents and our experience of parenthood.
In order to create and live a new vision of parenthood and childhood, we have to be willing to use processes that critically reflect on what we believe to unique individual experiences in the broader context of our cultures.
We will also increase awareness in your own process. Using moments when you are triggered, you will have the opportunity to bring awareness and consciousness to your parenting process. You’ll learn more about how triggers offer opportunities for growth and learning as a human being.
We will focus on issues of control and how as a parent you can begin to reduce your need to control. We’ll understand how control of children a social constructed mandate, one that is not necessarily rooted in science, neuroscience, and research. You’ll look at your own experiences in childhood where you had no control over your life to create deeper understanding of the impact of that loss of control as an adult.
We also will explore increasing your time in the here and now as a means to interrupt the cycle of control and rewrite the story of parenthood. By examining how fears of the future and ghosts from the past impact you, you’ll gain greater insight into the importance of presence in your parenting. Presence and mindfulness are effective tools for liberating you from fear that is rooted in cultural views and experiences.
Our purpose in exploring what influences us as parents is to increase our understanding of how we have been socialized to view childhood and our role as parents. The process of creating relationships with children based on trust, respect, and empowerment begins with critical examination of what we were taught as children and ultimately what assumptions, beliefs, and values we internalized as a result.
When we are moving beyond paradigms of parenting that focus on control and behavioral outcomes, to liberation-centered parenting that focuses on trust and respect, we must understand the ways our thinking and behavior have been influenced by our culture and social institutions.
Even if we already rejected much of what our mainstream culture has offered us, and have chosen alternative parenting paradigms, we still need to look at the underlying assumptions and beliefs of those paradigms. If they are fundamentally rooted in control and behavioral outcomes, they are harmful to creating connected, empowering relationships with children.
About the Parent Liberation Program
What You Get In The Online Course:
Welcome! I’m so glad you’re here.
If you’ve found your way to this page, and you have, you most likely are a parent who has a lot of questions.
Questions about parenthood and parenting, sure. But more than that, right?
You, like me, are probably a parent who has bigger questions – and hunches that there is more to the Old Story of traditional parenting than you’ve been told.
And you’d be right. There is.
What we know about traditional, domination and control-based parenting is that it does not produce empowered and loving, or happy, human beings.
That hunch that you have – that there is more to experience in parenting and to provide for your children – is right. There is more.
We are living in an exciting time when a New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family is not only emerging within us (remember that hunch?) but all around us as families worldwide are waking up and claiming authorship/authority of their lives inside a New Story of compassion, self-regulation (aka, mindfulness) and empowerment.
How did I recognize as a social justice advocate the connections between peaceful parenting and a peaceful world? You can read my whole story in my book, Parenting for Social Change to find out!
What happened after I wrote my story, I began to research how we as individuals need and use a story of “who we are” to help us define “how” we are in the world and with each other.
What if we decided we wanted to change our story, I thought? What if we decided that the Old Story of control and separation wasn’t going to work for us – and that nagging hunch was never going to go away until we took some time to explore the possibility of “something else”…
And here we are! Congratulations for following your intuition.
After writing my first book on how parenting is intrinsically connected to social change, I realized that parents want tools that we could use in our daily lives, tools that would allow us to recognized the storyline we carry in ourselves, placed there by our parents, culture and social messages.
At the same time, I found it was important that we also understand the root causes of some of the challenges that kept coming up for us – these persistent and deeply embedded beliefs that we are rarely conscious of while folding laundry and changing diapers.
In exploring my own vast and surprising story, I created the Parent Liberation Project. Here are some signs that you are operating from an Old Story, your own or a cultural story, that doesn’t serve you or that hunch telling you something else is possible.
Do you feel:
- You are frustrated and want to create change in your relationships with children, but the change doesn’t seem to be happening or happening fast enough.- You want to understand why the same things keep coming up for you as a parent.
- You feel stuck in the same patterns in your relationships with children. For example, you can’t understand why you keep getting angry, even when you so want to be a peaceful, respectful parent.
- You know there is a better way, but aren’t sure how to shift gears.
The good news?
You’re not alone. There is a reason why the same stuff comes up for you. You can create change and get unstuck. There are tools for you to create a better way. It is possible to have an equal, respectful, connected, honest, deeply loving relationship with your children… the New Story is real and it is here to stay. Take some time to read more from researchers, activists, parents and professional on this site if you don’t believe me.
The Parent Liberation Project is designed for you as we move as individuals, families and communities toward a more peaceful and just world. Join me in our specially designed and empowering program:
What is in the Parent Liberation program?
There are five parts of the program:
1. Introduce the foundation of how we got to where we are now
2. Create YOUR new vision of childhood
3. Dive into the deeper knowing of ourselves and our experiences
4. Recalibrate towards empathy, acceptance, and connection
5. Increase spaciousness and love in the here and now
1. Introduce the foundation of how we got to where we are now
You’ll unearth how we learn
For example, the learning spiral and transformative learning and the socialization process
You learn about a framework for understanding the unconscious beliefs and values that cause conflict in our relationships with children
All of our experiences as children and then into adulthood result in the creation of unconscious beliefs and attitudes. These ultimately influence our actions as parents
We then set the stage for re-envisioning the adult-child relationship.
2. Create YOUR new vision of childhood
You’ll assess the state of your current relationships with children – in general and in specific ways
We bring to consciousness the underlying beliefs and attitudes that create disconnection and conflict in your relationships with children. We look at the fears and beliefs that are triggered when you are in conflict
Then you review what is working and what isn’t working in those beliefs. From there, you create and experiment with new beliefs and values.
3. Dive into the deeper knowing of ourselves and our experiences
This part is all about triggers. Increasing awareness of our patterns of triggers and beginning to explore why and how we’re triggered so that we can disable the triggers.
You explore the impact of the cultural messages and our childhood experiences.
We unearth the hidden ways that fear is embedded in the ways we get triggered.
And we bring those out into the open and minimize their power over us.
4. Recalibrate towards empathy, acceptance, and connection
Control is at the root of the message we learn about parents and parenting in our culture.
We explore control: the research, the impact of control in childhood (including your own), the cycle of control, and how we create externally motivated human beings through the use of control. (that means you and me and the children in our lives)
We also learn more about the impact of disempowerment in childhood and how we can be allies in empowering ourselves, each other, and our children.
5. Increase spaciousness and love in the here and now
We face our ghosts from the past and fears of the future.
Through the use of simple mindfulness tools we practice spending more time in the here and now.
We look at the research on mindfulness and how being present to the moment puts on a trajectory towards success and connection.
How it all plays out!
15 informative e-mails sent over 30 days with support, ideas, homework, and tools.
All emails are designed to help you understand why you get triggered, why you get stuck, how you can get unstuck and keep learning from the experiences you have in your life.
69 page PDF download of all the e-mails in one workbook for consistent use.
We call this is the Guide to Liberation Parenting, and is yours to use forever and always.
5 motivating recorded talks that are each approximately 20-30 minutes long.
These inspiring talks are available for download or streaming – so you get to choose what works best for you!
Powerpoint presentations that go along with the 5 audios.
These 62 pages provide visual connection and explanation to the deep knowledge I bring up the audio recordings. And what can I say? Once an educator, always a lover of power point!
I believe with all my heart that you once you jump into this material, you will gain the insight and tools to create the relationship you KNOW you want to have with your children.
Teresa Graham Brett, JD, founder of the PLA and author of Parenting for Social Change.
Purchase Your Parent Liberation Project Program
If you would like a sliding scale to purchase the program, or a gift economy price, please use this link.