Conscious and Connected Parenting – with Joanna Watters and Anna Cole

Sharings from our ‘Grow The Grown Ups’ host on connected parenting, in this time of profound disconnection. Parents, carers – you are not alone!

Joanna Watters

I’ve known about Embercombe since Spring 2008 when I was introduced by friends whose children were part of a Steiner school residential.  I loved what I found, how Embercombe’s core mission is to grow people, and to strengthen connection to where and how we live, and I felt inspired to bring another strand of work in addition to the already brilliant education work: to specifically and directly support parents with the challenges of parenting, and thereby acknowledge the place of conscious parenting in cutting edge activism.

With the support of others, I devised our Grow the Grown Ups programme, a residential family week specifically developed to support parents of young children into authentic realistic conscious parenting, valuing our connection to ourselves, to each other and to our environment.

Anna Cole

Anna Cole, PhD, was born in the UK and emigrated as a child with her family to Australia. In 2001 she returned to live in the UK with her London-born husband. Anna has taught at Universities in Sydney, London and Brighton and worked as a consultant historian and co-writer of a documentary film recording Indigenous Australian women’s urban culture, short-listed for a United Nations Media Peace Award (November Films, 2010).

Since the birth of her daughter in 2004 and her son in 2006, Anna has focused much of her research and practice on the “emotional ultra-marathon—as Patty Wipfler calls it—of parenting”. Anna is deeply inspired by the Parenting by Connection approach and its gentle and effective way of marrying insights from recent neuroscience with over thirty years of practical, compassionate experience in listening to and supporting children and parents.

In January 2013, Anna became the first certified Parenting by Connection Instructor in the UK and runs in-person Building Emotional Understanding classes in the London, Brighton, and South East area. She has a particular interest in sharing the Parenting by Connection approach with economically disadvantaged inner-city London communities and with building wide-spread support for parents.