Being a superior parent is the goal of pretty much all parents. In general, a superior parent does his or her best to protect and support each child and is dedicated to growing as a parent throughout his or her entire lifetime. Good parenting has universal principles that apply across developmental stages, supported by voluminous research.

Integral parenting is simply parenting mostly from integrally-informed perspectives. Being Integrally-informed helps you be a superior parent, but you don’t have to know Integral to be a great parent.

Parents who are warm, respectful, engaged, and insistent on kids living compassionate and fair family values are best for children, period. Their kids are more likely to be successful, happy, healthy and positively connected with others than children of parents who don’t embody these traits. You absolutely don’t have to know Integral or even be at Integral altitudes on interpersonal, self, or moral lines to be a superior parent.

That being said, being an Integrally informed parent provides a variety of advantages. These include:

• A developmental orientation: Understanding developmental lines and levels and the principles of include-and-transcend progress helps focus parents on what each child needs to grow at any given developmental fulcrum.
• A Four Quadrant understanding: Having the individual and collective subjective and objective dimensions visible helps parents understand and support each child as well as their own relationships within themselves and the family from multiple, cross-validating, perspectives.
• Knowledge of states: Once we can perceive defensive states and states of healthy response in ourselves, our spouse, and our kids, we are way less likely to have intergenerational transmission of trauma and pathology, and more likely to transmit affect regulation and self-awareness.
• Acceptance of types: Knowing that each family member is a different type protects us from trying to force round pegs into square holes and helps us find the type-specific inputs that individuals needs to thrive.

Join us in this episode of Live with Dr. Keith where we’ll explore many of these dimensions and have some fun conversations about Integral parenting and what it means to those of us who value it.