Excerpt from Nurturing Connection: "Nurturing our relationship with our children is the heart and soul of consciously parenting. Nurturing relationships, once they are established, is really an art. It is about remembering that our children's need for connection is a primary factor in most of their behavior. It is about recognizing that, in every parenting situation, we have choices about how we respond to our children and their behaviors. It is about seeing every parenting situation as an opportunity to create connection or disconnection. It is about looking at our everyday parenting situations and beginning to see how we can choose connection. It is also about being able to admit when something didn't go as planned, to forgive ourselves for not always being the parents we hope to be, and to forgive our children for not always being the children we hope they'd be."