Recently, a participant asked me: “Would you ever offer a course for parents on using NVC with children?” I felt my heart jump. A clear yes landed in my body. I had already been preparing a course for teachers this spring—but then something widened. What came to life was a the idea for a course, Living NVC with Children, for parents, teachers, and anyone who spends meaningful time with children of all ages: toddlers, teenagers, adult children, students, young adults. Parents of children of any age are welcome, (also parents-to-be), alongside people working in daycare, education, healthcare etc.
What moves me to offer this course?
I was once a single mom with two young boys, which is when I met NVC in 2010. I held parenting values that were very dear to me: that my children felt seen and heard in their feelings and experiences, and that they could exercise their autonomy while feeling safe and supported. And yet, I often found myself overwhelmed and speaking and behaving in ways that didn’t align with those values.
NVC taught me, first and foremost, to connect with myself—to see and hear myself. From that inner clarity and space, I learned to meet my children with more presence and to approach conflict through empathy and mediation.
My two sons are now young, thriving adults, alongside my two adult bonus sons. There was a time we lived together as a blended family of six, with four teenage boys in the house, and I am deeply grateful I was practicing NVC by then!
In 2015, I founded a democratic school where, for a time, all four boys attended. Over ten years, I mentored, taught, mediated, played with, did sports with, and spent informal time with hundreds of children and young people, ages four to twenty. This included facilitating sociocratic circles, as well as using The No-Fault Zone Game to offer weekly empathy and mediation between students, between students and teachers, and among teachers themselves.
The Living NVC with Children course is an invitation to learn from that lived experience, and to support you in building connection, clarity, and trust in your own relationships. It is an intermediate-level course for those who already have a foundation in Nonviolent Communication. This course is not about teaching NVC as a set of techniques, but about modelling NVC as a way of being. Living NVC with children means seeing all our humanity, beyond labels and roles, like "parent", "child", "teacher", and finding ways to bring ourselves in fully while honouring the experience of the other.
Over eight sessions, we explore staying connected to ourselves under stress, hearing the needs behind behaviour we find challenging, expressing ourselves honestly without blame, and moving beyond punishment and reward. We look at guilt and shame, conflict, resistance and autonomy, appreciation instead of praise, and how to stay connected during difficult conversations with other adults involved in a child’s life.
The course is practical and rooted in real life, with space to bring your own situations and explore them together through empathy, reflection and practice. My hope is that what we learn together in the course finds its way into our every day moments with the children in our lives.
.jpeg)
