By Leyna Krow, Assistant Editor, JTNews
There’s certainly no shortage of parenting classes being offered in the Seattle area. But according to Yaffa Maritz, very few of these classes focus on the emotional connection between parents and their children.
“There are a lot of places parents can go for support or advice, but most classes are dealing with issues like diaper rash, or sleep and eating issues. That’s good and needs to happen,” explained Maritz, a family counselor and the co-founder of the Community of Mindful Parents. “But we deal with a range of emotional issues as well: People feeling the blues, not sure they love the baby, relationship with their partner on the rocks, not really understanding who they are because their identity has shifted so much. It’s amazing the kinds of things that come up.”
It’s this broader emphasis that, for Maritz, makes the classes offered by the Community of Mindful Parents so unique.
Maritz, along with a team of facilitators have been running parenting groups for new mothers and fathers for the last decade. But it was just a year and a half ago that the decision was made to expand the program into a community – a place that parents could continue to get help and support even after they had completed their courses. The result is a Web site with a blog and articles on all manner of topics, a lecture series, and of course, the parenting classes, all functioning under the Community of Mindful Parents umbrella.
Maritz said she was originally inspired to lead parenting classes after working as a therapist and talking with clients about their upbringings.
“A lot of the issues we suffer from and deal with as adults can be traced back to earlier relationships,” she said. “When I was talking to patients about how they grew up, I often wished we could go back in their past. I thought, wouldn’t it be better if we could start early raising children in a way that is healthy?”
In addition to her counseling work, Maritz said much of her motivation to start a parenting program came, not surprisingly, from her experiences with her own three children. Although her kids are now adults (with one about to get married), she still relies on those experiences when thinking about how best to help new parents.
“I wish somebody would have told me it is okay to take some time and help yourself regulate,” she said. “It can go such a long way. Stepping out energizes you so much. It’s really important to take time to center, regulate and reflect.”
The Community of Mindful Parents regularly offers two different eight-week classes: Listening Mothers for parents of children 6 months and younger, and Reflective Parenting for parents with kids between the ages of 18 months and 5 years. Both programs focus on understanding and reacting to children’s emotions and forming strong bonds between parent and child early on.
Classes meet at a variety of locations in King County, including Swedish Hospital, Ballard Pediatrics, Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation and the Stroum Jewish Community Center.
The Community of Mindful Parents classes have become the cornerstone of the Stroum JCC’s Parenting Center.
“The JCC, when we started doing our groups, didn’t have a Parenting Center,” Maritz recalled. “Since then, they have rallied in creating a home for families right from birth. Our program, which was the only one, has become one of many.”
Kara Moscovitz and her husband, Kerry, took Reflective Parenting at the Stroum JCC during the winter.
“It definitely helped us approach our parenting differently,” Moscovitz said. “We find ourselves being more understanding of our kids’ behaviors and a little more thoughtful in how we respond.”
Although the class is aimed at parents with children age of 5 and under, Moscovitz said she and her husband found the information relevant to all three of their children, who are 3, 6, and 9 years old.
“With our oldest, I think it helped my husband to understand her with her emotional ups and down a bit better,” she said.
Moscovitz was so taken with the program that she is in the process of training to become a facilitator for the Community of Mindful Parents. She will begin leading her first classes next month.
For more information about programs and resources offered by the Community of Mindful Parents, visit www.mindfulparentscommunity.com.