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Parent-Child Groups

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New groups forming in January 2025

led by educator Steven Rhodes in the Pasadena area. Sign up below!

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Practicalities

  • Parent-Child Groups meet once per week for 90 minutes.  

  • Sessions run for eight weeks.

  • Groups meet in the Pasadena area.

  • Session fee includes one or two parents attending. 

  • Children are clustered developmentally within an approximate 5 month age range.

 

Values and Aims

  • Each family is unique. Diversity and inclusion is primary.  We strive to meet every child, mother, and father as they are at any given moment.  

  • Parents are invited to see children as whole human beings from birth, always worthy of respect, empathy, and understanding.  

  • Our focus is practical: not only on what and why we do but especially how ​we show up and care for our children.

  • The basis of our time together is shared experience, values, and humanity rather than knowing things. 

  • We aim to cultivate authenticity and balance for every parent and child.  There is no need to mold ourselves into some kind of ideal, perfect parent.​


Support for Parents

  • Parents spend our time together taking off all the pressures of the week, relaxing, and observing the children.  

  • We support each other in dialogue and presence: showing up, listening and sharing questions.  

  • I strive to cultivate a sense of normalcy for parents.​​​​​​​​

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Look to The Relationship, not Tricks

 

  • No prior experience or special qualifications are necessary to have the relationship that we wish for with our children.  

  • Learning to see more, do less is fundamental to our role as respectful, realistic, effective parents.

  • In every situation we look to cultivate freedom and boundaries.  Boundaries can always be empathetic, gentle, clear and firm.

Serious (and Fun!) Play​

  • Play is essential to how children learn about themselves, their peers, how the world works, and what their place is in it.  

  • No matter the age, in play our innate human capacity for creativity, competence, depth, and tenacity is allowed to fully unfold.

  • Play looks different as the children develop, growing in motor, cognitive, emotional and social sophistication.  

  • Each week our play room is prepared to meet the children developmentally with pedagogically appropriate materials and gross-motor equipment designed at the Pikler Institute in Budapest and imported from Austria.

  • I oversee the children during our time together maintaining boundaries that enable a deep sense of freedom and harmony.  Each and every child’s dignity is prioritized no matter the situation. 

  • Parents get to simply relax and watch the children be themselves and "do their thing".  Joy and wonder are regular features of our time together.

 

Caring for and Being with Children with Respect and Empathy

  • Focus on supporting the attention and sense of well-being (emotional and bodily) of the child.

  • I share practices of respectful, sensitive care in diapering, feeding, bathing, dressing, bringing to sleep, toilet learning, etc. Understanding the importance of transitions, rhythm, and reliability is emphasized. 

  • In care we can discover the deepest sense of connection and trust.

  • We attend to how we touch, how we look, how we speak and what these acts may convey to our children.

 

Natural Autonomous Movement​​​

  • Children are given the opportunity to move from the “inside-out”: engaging and using all the sides of themselves.  Autonomous movement tends to be competent, graceful, balanced and authentic.  

  • Parents are able to see for themselves the effectualness of children moving at their own pace, in their own way.

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