Sacred Parenting Education Program

Sacred Parent Education Program honors our ancestors and children. We revisit the journeys that our families have made, which includes remembering and acknowledging their legacy through storytelling. There is a legacy of survival in all our indigenous communities. Whether our families were touched by war, dispossession, relocation, boarding schools, slavery, or loss of language and culture; we are still here. The Sacred Parent Education Program uses wise indigenous ways of parenting and evidence-based parenting practices. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts recognizes Sacred Parent Education Program as an approved Parent Education Program.

Sacred Parenting connects parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, and caregivers together building a community of parenting strength. It provides a framework for communities to make the program their own. Each community uses their own place-based stories and medicines. There are 8 one-hour meetings that begin and end with a prayer, incorporates storytelling, healing practices, breathing and mindfulness. 

Indigenous parenting means we are all caring for each other. A person does not have to have their own child (ren) to be a part of Sacred Parenting. Many people who want to be parents or who have already raised their parents find value in the program and connection with others. Sacred Parenting is caring for those who are not our children so they will grow up and pass those values onto our communities and eventually to future generations. It means looking out for others. Our strategies are practiced by the participants so they experience the benefits; then they will share these strategies with their children, family, and community. Sacred Parenting includes not only remembering our communities core values and teaching them but also emulating them in each of our own daily lives. Indigenous parenting is a beautiful and sacred role that carries on the connection from one generation to the next. Communities stand in their strength to create a pathway toward healing and education for their children, their community, and the betterment of future generations. 

*IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: Sacred Parenting is Not Therapy. It is not meant to diagnose, evaluate, treat or in any other way provide clinical mental health services. Though it can be therapeutic to participants it is solely intended to be educational. It is meant to be used as an educational tool to alleviate the shortage of licensed mental health providers in Indian Country. It is important for these educational tools to be accessible and sustainable for tribal and urban Indian communities.