If you are like most parents, you wanted something different for them than you had –happier, more exciting school experiences? Most likely, you perceived that Montessori would support your own family values. Whatever your initial reasons, I suspect that after discovering Montessori and learning more about it, you realized it offered something much larger and grander than you ever suspected at the beginning.

Parenting is such transformational experience for most of us. Did your world-view shift significantly when you became a parent? Mine did. Many of us try to be “differently behaving” than our own parents in order to break harmful family patterns. We do not want to repeat them with our children. While we do not lack in honest desires to do the very best we can, we often fall short in those areas where we have blind spots or a lack of information. Often, in times of stress, we say and do the very things we promised ourselves we would never say and do. Why does this happen?

A very wise person once said “None of us see the world as it is, but as we are… our experience –induced perceptions greatly influence our feelings, beliefs, and behavior.” This is particularly true when it comes to our children. Our parenting – lenses are clouded by our experience-induced perceptions which greatly influence how we see our children and how we behave toward them.

As we discover more about Montessori, we intuitively know that it holds some “grains of truth” to help us with the challenges of parenting. Montessori catches hold of us and pulls chords deep inside that stretch us beyond our ordinary reference points. As we observe our children in their Montessori classrooms and attend parent meetings at their schools, our awareness continues to deepen. The process of becoming more conscious parents accelerates when we realize how important our home environments are to the development of our children and their progress at school.

So our tasks are to study and understand to see ever more clearly what we must change within ourselves, what we must change in our values, what we must change in our practices. As we start a process of gradual change, our perceptions about our children change. We begin to re-prioritize our time and reorient ourselves to the realities of their growth.

When we realize that our children are agents of change, we begin to learn a lot about ourselves from them. New qualities emerge as we deepen our relationships with them. We grow and the children grow –each in our own unique ways. We still get stuck in different places for different reasons, depending on who we are. We do not all grow at the same rate, nor do we all grow evenly as parents. Old belief systems and habits that find us overstating or over generalizing about the children, help us to stay stuck in ineffective parenting techniques. When this happens, it is our responsibility to seek help to change what is not working.

In The Secret of Childhood, Dr. Maria Montessori writes about the unconscious errors of parents:

“We are all pained by conscious error but attracted and fascinated by unknown error, for it is this type of error that holds the secret to progress beyond a known and desired goal and which can, as a consequence, raise us to a higher level. All spiritual development is a conquest of consciousness which assumes to itself something that was formerly outside. It is by going along this road of discovery that civilization advances. Adults must find a different point of departure and find within themselves, the still unknown error that prevents them from seeing children as they are”.

Dr. Montessori urges us to see the children as they really are. When we fail to do this, she warns, we unconsciously suppress the full development of their personalities. For the sake of our children, let us keep our fascination for unknown error. It holds the secret to our progress and the progress of civilization.