TEND: STRENGTHENING LIFE
“In the end only kindness matters,” Jewel.
Tend is the strengthening aspect of Powerful Mother. It teaches you how to strengthen and repair yourself, your child and the relationship web between you, on a daily basis. It requires that you observe your child, not to be critical, but to be aware of emerging growth so that you know what to support, nourish and foster. The tool of tending helps you focus upon what your child needs in terms of support, structure, or guidance at any point in time. This noticing helps you provide the right nourishment at critical moments.
How to Strengthen and Repair the Relationship Web
Tending demonstrates how we further another’s wellbeing by what we focus upon, how we engage them and the supportive structure we give.
The Tend Tool also shows you how to fix any aspect of your parenting or your child’s self that are weak or that have been harmed. Thus, the Tend aspect of Powerful Mother is like the medicine chest, the tool box and the duct tape for you and your child. When you know how to repair anything that has been damaged it relieves you from the impossible task of trying to create a perfect world for your child. When you know how to reweave the relationship web between you and your child you can be more relaxed about the imperfections of daily life and focus on learning rather than perfection. A strong, regularly-repaired relationship web gives your child a sense of security. It is this security that enables them to enter the world with confidence, openness and curiosity.
Tending is the weightlifting section of Powerful Mother. Prepare for heart and mind muscles!
Maintaining focus and attention on the well being of the child, in the midst of the endless repetitious tasks of physical care of a child, strengthens the inner core of the Mother as well as the child.
Tend deals all of the physical we do to take care of growing children: feeding, bathing, clothing, clothing, transport, providing clothing, activities, toys and opportunities as well as all of the training we give our children from how to put their shoes on and brush their teeth to how to take care of others. Tend can be involved in anything that we do to give them tools to help them grow, develop or succeed.
Tending shows how, as we engage with all activities we can simultaneously strengthen our child’s capacity for engaging with others, engaging with the world outside the home and, engaging with life.
This is because all of the activities in tending are underpinned by an essential foundation, not only of love for your child, but of commitment to nurturing and guiding them over time. This foundational commitment is fed by the Mother’s vision of the type of parent she wants to be, the gifts she wants to give her children and her vision of their future as strong, loving adults.This picture guides her behaviour and choices on a day-to-day basis, helping her to tend purposefully and with a clear direction of where she is going.
Thus, tending requires great strength in the Mother, even more than when defending, because Tending requires that the Mother is able to hold her clarity about what she is doing every day so that it guides her behaviour and choices for a long time. For most mothers this is a focus of almost two decades, and longer when there are many children. That is why Tending is the weightlifting and muscle building section of Powerful Mothering.
Powerful Mother Strength – bears the Load over time.
A Powerful Mother holds her strong feeling for her child, her commitment to her child’s nurture and her vision about how she wants to parent in her mind every day. She uses this holding as a compass or North Star to help her know and focus upon what is most important in a day, an hour or a minute. This vision helps her to tend what needs to be nourished.
It is the Mother’s faithful tending to the child’s emotional, developmental and individual needs, day-after-day, that strengthens the child and, in so doing, strengthens the Mother as well.
See “TEND” pinned at: http://www.pinterest.com/powerful4kids/powerful-repair-tend/