Imperfect Parenting, Real Love.

Parents often feel enormous pressure to get everything right. Yet families are not perfect systems, and children do not grow up in controlled psychological laboratories. They grow up in real homes, with real people, who make mistakes, repair them, and keep learning.

This 1-day workshop explores how everyday interactions between parents and children quietly shape a child’s inner world. Drawing on ideas from Transactional Analysis, we will look at how children form life scripts—the early decisions they make about themselves, others, and life. We will explore the messages children receive from parents, both helpful and limiting, and how these messages can become injunctions that shape confidence, emotional expression, and independence. We will also look at how parents can offer permissions and strokes that support healthy psychological development.

At the same time, the workshop will challenge the common myth that parenting alone determines who a child becomes. Families influence children deeply, but they do not determine their destiny. Children interpret experiences in their own way, and each child’s temperament and resilience also shape how they grow. As one parenting perspective reminds us, families matter—but not in the absolute, deterministic way many people assume. 

We will also explore children’s developmental needs at different stages of growth, and how behaviours that worry parents—tantrums, defiance, emotional swings—are often part of normal development.Rather than offering rigid formulas for “perfect parenting,” the workshop invites parents to become thoughtful observers of their children and themselves. The goal is not perfection but awareness: understanding the messages children absorb, recognising developmental needs, and learning how everyday interactions can nurture resilience, autonomy, and emotional health.

Participants will

- Understand how life scripts begin to form in childhood.

- Recognise common injunctions children may receive in families.

- Learn how parents can offer permissions that support healthy development.

- Understand the importance of strokes (recognition and emotional nourishment).

- Learn the developmental needs of children at different stages.

- Reflect on the limits of parental influence and why parenting is not fully deterministic.

- Identify small but meaningful ways to create emotionally healthy family interactions.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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