
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 honestly this is not at all what I expected for my life. Before I became a full-time father eleven 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 find great profoundness and depth in each encounter with the youngest children. Watching them unfold week to week, year-to-year, moment-to-moment is endlessly wondrous. We’re so fortunate in our groups see humanity at its finest: competence, creativity, dedication, openness from both child and parent.
Los Angeles has been my home since 2000 when I moved here to continue my career recording music. I worked on hundreds of records in historic studios with the best in the business - prominent artists and fellow craftspeople. I’ve also produced live music events, waited on tables, was a line cook and worked at Microsoft for a couple of years.
I draw on all this experience to relate to the broad collection of parents 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 agenda is not to teach but to meet each parent as they are. My aim is to give context and a sense of normalcy to the experience of being a parent. To do so I strive to broaden the language that I use so that it doesn’t just speak to one type of person. I can’t be all things to all people but whether someone is “artistic”, “technical”, "creative", "hands-on" “spiritual”, etc. I do hope that participants find a real place for themselves here and can speak with their unique voice.
FWIW my other interests are music (mostly Jazz and Soul these days), cooking (mostly regional Italian), archery, gardening and reading (currently deep-diving on Iain McGillcrist, Lev Vigotsky, Heinrich Jacoby, David Bohm and Donald Winnicott).