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iHeART
Parenting
intergenerational Healing, Empowerment, Awareness, Resilience, and Transformation
Parenting with Nonviolence
Collective Wellbeing
Creative
Connections
“Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities”
A 12-week program for people who care for children and want to build more connection, respond with greater intention, and create healthier patterns across generations—rooted in nonviolence, intergenerational healing, social justice, and collective well-being.
We love our children deeply, and parenting can still bring us face-to-face with stress, fear, anger, uncertainty, and parts of our own story we did not expect to revisit. iHeART Parenting creates space for parents and caregivers to slow down, understand what is happening within themselves and their children, and practice ways of responding that strengthen trust, dignity, connection, and resilience.
Rooted in Parenting With Nonviolence
iHeART Parenting is informed by A Compassionate Guide to Parenting with Nonviolence, by Ruth Beaglehole with Kim Pesenti.
Ruth Beaglehole’s lifelong work as a parent educator, activist, and advocate for children’s human rights centered on ending violence and oppression toward younger human beings and supporting parents and caregivers in the practice of parenting with nonviolence. Her work was shaped by her own childhood, her understanding of early trauma, and a belief in our capacity to heal.
Healing and Justice Center has woven this foundation together with lived experience, community wisdom, mentorship, and other healing practices. iHeART makes room for the ways trauma, chronic stress, culture, injustice, and our own family experiences can shape how we care for children. Through reflection, connection, creative practice, and learning about stress and the nervous system, we explore how we want to care for ourselves, relate to the children in our lives, and carry nonviolence forward.
Parenting With Intention, Not Perfection
iHeART is not about becoming a “perfect” parent.
It is about becoming more aware of what happens in the moments when parenting gets hard—and building enough space to choose how we want to respond.
Throughout the program, parents practice a shift:
Parenting with nonviolence does not mean having no limits. Children need safety, structure, guidance, and boundaries. iHeART helps us hold those limits while protecting connection and dignity—without shaming, threatening, or relying on fear as the primary teacher.
Why Intergenerational Healing Matters
None of us begins parenting with a blank slate.
We bring the love, traditions, values, strengths, survival strategies, losses, and lessons of the people who raised us. We also parent inside real conditions: work, money, housing, discrimination, migration, community stress, safety concerns, systems, and history can all shape what we carry into our relationships with our children.
iHeART makes room for that whole picture.
The program does not blame parents for the ways stress, trauma, or systemic conditions affect family life, and it does not suggest that individual coping tools can fix the larger systems and inequities families face. Instead, parents are invited to understand what has shaped them, recognize the strengths they already carry, notice patterns that may no longer serve them, and choose what they want to continue, repair, or transform for the next generation.
When families are carrying trauma or navigating racism, migration, financial stress, community conditions, or other pressures, safety, choice, dignity, and culture matter. iHeART makes room for those realities without blaming families for what they are navigating.
No one is required to share more than they want to, and facilitators work to create a relational space where parents can participate in ways that feel safe and meaningful to them.
