Dr. Robyn Koslowitz

Parenting is the vehicle and the venue with which I heal.

I use my parenting.

And for me, at least...

I don't know that I would have ever undone my dissociation had my son not said that to me because it really was working very well.

And like on the surface, I really looked, I was so productive and I had very small children while in graduate school, traveling from New Jersey to NYU every single day, managing my home.

Both me and my husband were students.

So managing like a family on a limited budget and going to work and going to grad school and doing research and getting it all done.

I looked like I was doing great and I wasn't yelling at my kids.

So I looked like I was doing great.

It wasn't until my son held up that like mirror to me of what I was really doing that gave me the energy to even undo it.

Otherwise, I would have stayed that way forever, I think.

So it's parenting that gives us that mirror.

And maybe for some people, it's not parenting.

I think it can be done.

You can do it for your inner child.

It's just I personally wouldn't have ever realized that I needed to.

So I think this goes into this whole debate online between like gentle parenting and more authoritarian forms of parenting.

But and for some reason, the online rhetoric makes it sound like you have to pick one or the other.

Either you're being this like positive discipline kind of one, two, three magic person where it's my way or the highway, or you're responsive to your kids and you're hearing their emotions and you're allowing them to grow.

And I look at it as a seesaw.