Eric D. Greene with son Forrest
I call myself “awesome” to remind myself of the kind of dad I aspire to be.
A caring, compassionate, loving dad.
I’m not trying to crush it in business, or to out-hustle anyone.
I’m just trying to be the best parent I can be for my son.
And for me, that means healing from my own past traumas, improving my sense of self-worth, surviving each day somewhat sanely, and at a minimum, trying to not mess my son up more than I’m a mess myself.
I think I discovered the person I was meant to be, shortly after my son was born. Because beyond aspiring to be a great dad, I also discovered I had potential to help other parents with their own struggles and challenges along their parenting journey too.
I realize that is a big claim, to think that I could help another parent. Especially for me, someone who always struggled with a shaming inner voice saying “who do you think you are?”
Parenting is a big task for anyone, and I have struggled seeing myself as someone as any kind of authority on topics involving raising children.
But the more I have written about parenting, talking about my struggles, and shared the insights I’ve learned in my journey (on my Facebook page and group), the more I have people reaching out to me saying amazing things like how I helped them transform their relationship with their children. There isn’t much more meaningful for me than that.
I take any influence I have on other parents seriously, and I hope you find something informative or useful within this website, my ebook, or in my social media posts.
My parenting philosophy
I believe the role of a parent is to provide guidance and support for their children as they grow, learn, and discover who they are and their own place in the world.
Kids learn best by example. That means that the best way to teach children is to model for them what we want for them.
If we want our children to be happy, successful, and treat other people fairly, then we parents must work on being happy and successful ourselves, and model how to treat others fairly. If we want them to be disciplined and handle their emotions well, then we the parents must be disciplined and learn to control our emotions well.
That doesn’t mean we hold ourselves up to an impossible standard of perfection.
But it does mean that we can’t judge our children for not meeting expectations that we can barely live up to ourselves. (And even the ones we can meet ourselves, is it still fair to judge our children for their inability to? I don’t think so.)
Ultimately, the best we can do for our children is to heal, grow and evolve ourselves into spiritually aligned, emotionally intelligent, healthy and mature adults.
I’ve written about what I view as the single best parenting strategy, and it has to do with our own personal development, not trying to force and demand compliance from our kids.
I am also writing now more often at ifsrecovery.com and ifsbasics.com where I talk about how helpful IFS has been for me.
Read more about my personal story here
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