Dan and Genevieve Simperingham, founders of the Peaceful Parent Institute (NZ) at the Parent And Child Show Auckland 2010.
Genevieve and Dan Simperingham run the Peaceful Parent Institute (PPI). PPI offers support to parents, caregivers, teachers and those interested in practicing healthier and more respectful ways of relating to babies, children, teens and parents. Genevieve and Dan have been running groups together for sixteen years, as well as facilitating hundreds of daytime courses and workshops and evening seminars, they have also facilitated over 150 weekend personal development residential retreats for individuals and couples. They also facilitate Leadership Camps for youth with Dean Alpin.
Genevieve is an Irish woman living in New Zealand, Dan is New Zealand born. Genevieve has been passionate about parenting with connection and without punishments of any kind since the beginning, empowered by an awareness of attachment science, her instincts and a determination to break cycles of dysfunctional relating. Genevieve is an International speaker, a group facilitator, a parent coach, a holistic counsellor, an energy healer and a writer. Also, having a passion for nature education, she is on the committee for and is a presenter at the annual Natural Phenomena Nature Education Early Childhood Conference.
Genevieve is also a Certified Aware Parenting instructor, having trained with Dr. Aletha Solter PhD, psychologist and author of four ground-breaking parenting books and is a Heart to Heart Parenting Facilitator, trained by Robin Grille to teach his parenting programs. Robin Grille, psychologist and pschotherapist based in Sydney, Austraia is the author of Parenting for a Peaceful World and Heart to Heart Parenting (both also available through my books page). Genevieve is also a Beyond Consequences Instructor, sharing the work of Heather Forbes, psychologist, author and founder of Beyond Consequences Institute, who support parents to adopt a parenting through connection model in situations of extreme behavioural difficulties relating to a trauma history.
Genevieve shares her in-depth study of many experts in the fields of personal development, early childhood development, attachment and neuroscience. She brings to all her work the culmination of many years of trainings in the fields of healing, personal growth, family systems and parenting. She has worked intensively with clients over 20 years, facilitating one one one change in private practice and facilitating learning and growth through group education and facilitation. Genevieve also shares lots of examples from her personal experience as a parent practicing this model for 16 years.
Dr. Solter is the founder of the Aware Parenting Institute, who have over 65 instructors in over 15 countries, Genevieve being the only one in New Zealand. Genevieve is an International speaker, who over the last 17 years has presented hundreds of workshops and courses.
Dan brings a wealth of experience in the personal growth field. He has counselling, psychotherapy and psychosynthesis training, and has over 10 years of experience facilitating a variety of groups with both adults and youth. He worked for some years in a residential psychotherapy program for adults. He enjoys the dynamics of working with teenagers and has a particular passion also for supporting Dad’s! Dan also co-facilitates leadership and personal growth camps (read more) for groups of high school teenagers, along with Dean Alpin. Dan has also been very involved in the men’s movement and on several years, has been part of a team of men who annually facilitate “Pathways to Manhood” for teenage boys with Essentially Men.
There is also, behind the scenes, a group of dedicated parents who are endlessly committed to supporting the work of Peaceful Parent Institute, who help promote the groups and support parents who are new to the model. Rachel Anderson, psychologist and founder of Consciously Parenting NZ liases with the early childhood centres and other organizations that host Genevieve’s seminars and Tabitha Johnson, primary teacher and mother of two is involved with the development of eBooks and other products that PPI offer.
Genevieve Simperingham is an Irish woman, living in New Zealand since 2000. Dan is from Auckland, New Zealand. They have been working together since they first got together in Dublin in 1995. They lived together in Ireland for six years before moving to New Zealand. From the time they first met, they discovered that they had much in common in their interests, passions and ambitions. They both were involved in personal development groups for years before they’d met, so they began to combine their skills and build on the groups that Genevieve had already been running, which was a series of about eight weekend residentials per year throughout Ireland and England.
“We are passionate about supporting parents and helping them learn how to stay emotionally connected with their children through the inevitable conflicts and differences of opinion that are normal in close relationships. We share with parents that conflicts offer an opportunity for growth, learning and deeper understanding of each other and ourselves as parents. The skills that we teach allow the bond to ever deepen between the parent and their child.”
Among Genevieve and Dan’s areas of expertise are equipping adults with skills to continually improve and heal their relationship with their self, to continue to evolve their own emotional development, as this relationship creates the foundation and blueprint for all other intimate relationships. They help adults and youth face and recover from arrested emotional and social development relating to early childhood (including recovery from all forms of abuse and trauma). Genevieve helps mothers resolve trauma relating to pre-natal and birth traumas.
In their parenting courses, they bring to parents great wisdom and experience from their years of facilitating inner child work with adults. Their work has taught them that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, but the earlier it happens the better!
“As parents : We are the proud parents of Oisin, fourteen, and Ayesha, nine. They are both very happy about the work that we do with parents because they know that it helps parents and it helps children and that’s all good. Oisin and Ayesha are our biggest teachers. We don’t always hit the spot in balancing all the needs within the family, but we’re all very onto it with listening to and respecting each person’s perspective and repairing any misunderstandings or hurts that arise, there’s plenty of time and space for all the voices and all the emotions. We are very proud to be doing the best we can to end unhealthy cycles of dysfunctional relating that are sadly still more is the norm, in our society.
“In giving to our children the listening and validation that we didn’t receive, we heal patterns from our childhood, in giving to other parents the listening and validation that they didn’t receive, we support them in healing their wounds and hence breaking the negative cycles of hurt leading to hurt, blame leading to blame, abuse leading to abuse. With each genuine heart connection that’s made, the torn shreds of our society are being rewoven into the beautiful tapestry of peace, harmony, love, beauty and interrelatedness that we have the potential to create.
Before becoming parents, we had already been running Personal Development workshops for a few years, so our main aim was to always support and soothe, rather than repress, our children’s emotions and also to keep a strong focus on clean and clear boundaries within our family. We were already immersed in a world of helping adults re-parent themselves in healthier and kinder ways than most people experienced as children. Having the privilege of being right there with an adult who exposes the intense painful feelings they felt as a child when they were emotionally alone or silenced is very profound and each experience opens the heart to the pain that human beings carry that relates back to the emotional vulnerability of the parent child relationship.”