Hello again!
I’m so honoured that Rosa Comellas, an Aware Parenting colleague and friend in Spain, has written a guest post.
She writes;
“How I used attachment play with my son’s school homework and how it helped us both.
My child goes to a mainstream school, mainly due to lack of other options.
One of the things that I get continuously annoyed about is the amount of homework that they get and sometimes also at how ridiculous the type of exercises are.
Two days ago I sat with my son to do the homework and I managed to turn it into an opportunity for connection, laughter, special time and power reversal games.
I realised that I had been already doing it a bit, but always with some resentment, anger and impatience, because I wanted him to do the homework on his own, so I could have time to do other things and then enjoy some nice together time.
He would often feel frustrated with the homework and ask for my help.
So, this time I dropped the judgement about how annoying and “stupid” the homework were and I decided to be fully present with him and to use the homework as an opportunity for connection.
I used the calculator to do some easy calculations and I pretended I was useless at numbers, my son laughed and was telling me how I had to do it and he was being very competent at finding the right answers.
He also had an assignment about some theme they had studied in class that involved answering some questions, I wrote one of the answers in his school book trying to imitate his hand writing and asking him if the teacher will notice that his mum had done it.
He thought it was funny and laughed at how slowly I was writing.
We had to read a poem that said “Flying flower, butterfly….” and then make our own poem and I said “Flying little leaf, mosquito” we both laughed and had fun making silly sentences for the poem (that we didn’t write on the school homework).
I guess, what we did was helping him, but also me relieving some of the frustration and anger around school homework.
It was also healing for the little girl in me that didn’t enjoy the school homework that she was made to do.
And we felt really connected too.”
Rosa Comellas.
I feel so deeply touched reading Rosa’s post again. What I love about reading it was not only that it helped her son, and created such lovely connection between the two of them, but it also helped her heal from past experiences too.
Rosa, along with another dear Aware Parenting colleague and friend, Carolina Valencia Coleman, (who I interviewed and will be sharing our conversation soon!) have set up a FB group on Aware Parenting Conscious Education in Spanish. The link to the group is HERE.
I find attachment play to be so incredibly powerful.
I think it’s no accident that His Holiness The Dalai Lama is often smiling.
And Rosa’s post is perfectly timed, because I’m relaunching my Attachment Play Course, and it starts on the first of May (I thought May Day was very apt!). And you can sign up for the Attachment Play Course any day of the year!
I have a free ebook on attachment play, if you want to find out more about attachment play, and you want really tangible strategies to help your child and yourself – preventatively, strategically, and in the moment of challenge.
CLICK HERE or on one of the memes below to get the ebook.
Love,
Marion
xxx