Questions About Parenting
“Children don’t listen to your words. They read you. If what you are being is real, then you’re in your words, and they listen, not because of your words but because of you.”
Latest YouTube Video on Parenting
What Your Children Need in Times of Great Difficulty
November 3, 2018 @ 7:15pm
A woman speaks the extreme difficulty of her circumstances: her husband is in a coma and she doesn’t know how to handle all it means, and parent her children through the crisis. John shows her how goodness can thrive in hardship and how this deeper perspective can be a nurturing ‘love school’ for them all.
Latest Podcast on Parenting
John de Ruiter Podcast 545
From Fighting to Flourishing: A New Way Forward with Your Teenager
November 3, 2018 @ 7:00pm
For this mother, who is struggling in relation to her teenage daughter, what begins as a hard lesson to learn becomes a beautiful crossroads that will deeply change them both.
Latest Transcript on Parenting
Becoming A Real Mother
February 22, 2023
Q: I feel so happy! There’s a child growing inside of me. Can you speak about becoming a mother, a good mother, and being this as much as possible? Thank you.
John: Instead of you being mother, which you don’t really know how to do, receive this child for the being that it is and listen to this being. Let this little being teach you. See the being in the child. That brings out what you are as a being. Relate to the child as a very tender being, and then that’s how you will be with it. That is the energy of what a real mother is. Tender beingness.
When your own heart is very delicately teachable toward this little being, then that’s what it will be.
Q: Thank you.
John: A real mother is tender availability. A real mother is you being nectar. Such nectar you won’t find in your mind, so it is not about you thinking about what a mother is. The nectar you find only in your heart.
When you’re enjoying the nectar within your own heart, then that is how much nectar you’re being. What makes the beingness of a child grow is only nectar, not your efforts or your beliefs. When you are loving the nectar within your self, that is you giving beingness food to this child.
Enjoy knowing that you don’t know what a mother is. As much as you thoroughly enjoy that, that is how good a mother you’ll be. As convinced as you are, or as convinced as you would be of what a mother is, that is how much your child won’t like you.
What you are pregnant with isn’t what you think. What you are pregnant with is tenderness. Let it teach you how to be a mother.
