“PARENTING IS NOT ABOUT CONTROLLING CHILDREN BUT GUIDING THEM ON THEIR PATH TO AUTONOMY AND RESPONSIBILITY.”

Jane Nelsen.

My name is Marta. I am from Barcelona and since 2009 I live in Switzerland. I am married and have three wonderful teenagers.

When we moved to the Alpine country, my first two children were 2 years and 5 months old. So, in addition to the difficulty of raising two babies, living abroad, with a culture so different from mine, with a language I didn’t know and far from my loved ones, made it even more complicated and stressful. It was not easy.

So, the first few years I was a stay-home-mum, my husband and I decided that, because of the circumstances in which we lived, that was the best option for us. I learned German, and got to know and adapt to this new culture. Later, when my children were a little older, I started to teach Spanish, as well as to initiate a new project: Loving it!

I have always been interested in psychology and education, that’s why I graduated in Pedagogy at the University of Barcelona. In 2020 I Certificated as a Positive Discipline facilitator, in 2021 I repeated the Certification  in person. In 2022 I completed the Peaceful Parenting Educator course and in 2023 I concluded the Encouragement Consultant training. But for me, despite having done these and other trainings, my best teachers are my children. They are the ones who inspire me to learn and improve every day.

My story is not original… Like many parents, I had read about education and tried to do the best I could, but I felt that I was failing. The yelling and punishments, in addition to disconnecting me more and more from my children, were not helping them learn to be respectful or responsible, or to do their homework or collaborate at home. I needed to learn to be a better mother to them!

So, I started looking for more respectful and conscious ways of parenting, and I found P.D. Through this form of parenting, I have learned to guide my children in a respectful way so that they learn important values and life skills. To attend to their needs, but also to my own. And that the most important thing that exists between me and my children is our relationship.

Eventually, I decided that I wanted to go deeper and learn more about Positive Discipline, and I took the facilitator course. Since then, I continue to learn in this field, to be able to give workshops to other parents and make this wonderful philosophy of life known, thus contributing my bit to make this world a little better.

But not because I have been educated and read a lot in this field, we enjoy a Disney happy ending at home. I am still a perfectly imperfect mother, which is to say a perfectly normal mother. I still have a lot to learn, practice and improve. We continue to have challenges, which allow us to learn and grow every day, by practicing everything that P.D. teaches us, so that in the future our children will be responsible and resourceful adults. But above all, with P.D., we enjoy raising our children. And as Jane Nelsen says, “Positive discipline is not easy, but it is worth the effort.”