About Steven Rhodes

I’ve spent thousands of hours in parent-child groups. Other than being with my family, there is truly no place I’d rather be. But this path was not at all expected. Before I became a full-time father twelve years ago, I had exactly two (!!) hours of prior experience alone with babies. (Thank you nephews Mark and Tyler!) Childhood development has been of great interest since I was a teen. In the years after I graduated from college, I taught high school in the US and Japan. But this curiosity never carried down to the first three years.  

 

Maybe because of this, I now find great profoundness and depth in each encounter with the youngest children. Watching them without prejudice week by week, year-to-year, moment-to-moment is endlessly wondrous. We’re so fortunate in our groups to see humanity at its finest: competence, creativity, dedication, openness from both child and parent.

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I lived in Los Angeles for many years recording music, working on hundreds of records in historic studios with the best in the business. I’ve also produced live music events, worked at Microsoft for a couple of years, waited on tables and was briefly a line cook. My family recently relocated to New York City due to the fires in our town of Altadena.

 

I draw on all this experience to relate to the broad collection of mothers and fathers who participate in our groups. Being the parent of a baby is likely different than anything that you’ve ever done. But it’s not that different.

 

My aim is not to teach per se but to meet each parent as they are. My agenda is to give context and a sense of normalcy to the experience of being a parent. To do so I strive to broaden the perspective so that it doesn’t just speak to one type of person. I can’t be all things to all people but whether a participant is “artistic”, “technical”, "creative", "no-nonsense", "hands-on", down-to-Earth", “spiritual”, and so on I do hope that every parent can find a real place for themselves here and are supported to speak with their unique voice.

 

FWIW my other interests are music (mostly Jazz and Soul these days), cooking (mostly regional Italian and Japanese), archery, gardening and reading (currently deep-diving on Iain McGillcrist, Lev Vigotsky, Heinrich Jacoby, David Bohm and Donald Winnicott).