Present Child: A Gift For You and Your Family

This methodical approach enables parents, practitioners and educators to understand what children have to say about their parents lives.

Present Child works like a translation programme whereby you suddenly understand your child's intention for you!

The Present Child Method shows clearly how your child's dedication to your happiness in life is just as active and fierce as yours is to theirs. The only difference is that your child uses the languages of play, development, behaviour or symptoms, to make clear what needs adjustment in your life. Using the Present Child Method your child's instructions are translated so precisely that you are able to hear them with your heart, recognize their truth and are motivated to undertake the necessary actions. This not only enriches your life but also has a positive effect on your child's behaviour and well-being, often without additional help for your child! With the aid of practical instructions and exercises and Janita's accessible, recognizable story the chance that you too will be touched by your child is high.

Present Child for practitioners, therapists and educators:
Are you interested in bringing about wellbeing and cure for children and their parents
simultaneously? Maybe you have noticed that a child's cure is often temporary and you would like it to be more long-lasting, and even permanent? Then the Present Child Method is for you!

Imagine curing the recurrent fevers and nightmares of a young girl just by talking to the mother ... and ending the tantrums of a boy just by revealing an unknown truth about his fathers life. The same goes for bedwetting, inflammations, problems in babies, problems at school; developmental and behavioural disorders in children; in fact for innumerable physical and mental complaints that can overshadow family life.

In treating a child you will see the parents anyway; with a few extra questions you'll have a story about the child that you can change into a remedy for the inner child of the parent. An important side effect is the cure of the real child. The two go hand-in-hand. The child and the parent are closely connected. The actual presence and symptoms of the child now form the ultimate mirror for the parent, and the cured parent is the perfect remedy for the child and its siblings. That's how the child's problem can be a gift to the whole family.

The Present Child motto is: when there is something the matter with an apple tree, it shows in the apples. To cure the apples, you should help the tree. By doing that, the apples will automatically benefit.
So basically, you only have two very successful remedies; the child and the parent. But at the same time there are as many remedies as there are people, as each human being is different. Any other treatment modalities you use may never be as specific as a child/parent.

The great advantage of this method for you as a practitioner is that the problem and the remedy come to the office together. When the story about the real child is translated back to the parents, the parents can really take the remedy. In their heart they will feel that their child is giving an accurate, loving message for their lives. By acting on what they can now recognise as their own story they help their child. Deep inside a chord of recognition resonates and healing starts. Their child is the most accurate remedy you may ever find for them, as are they for their child.

The advantages of the Present Child method are:

• Problems are solved at the heart of things
• Both parents and children benefit
• A methodical approach
• Short treatment
• Sustainable results, little relapse
• Little/no burden for the child (you work with the parent)
• Suitable for all ages
• More rewarding, easier and joyful for the practitioner/therapist/educator
• And a great complement to other forms of treatment.

If you are interested in becoming a Present Child Translator or in organising a seminar or presentation on Present Child visit www.presentchild.nl

• Author: Janita Venema
• ISBN: 9789490453060
• 208 pages
• Paperback
• Published in 2012
• Printed in Netherlands

• View PDF

Reprinted with the permission of The Society of Homeopaths, from 'The Homeopath' Journal, Winter 2012. Reviewed by Hazel Partington.

This is a thought-provoking book which opens with the sad tale of the author's difficulty bonding with her first child, and her realisation that his state and way of being was mirroring her own. Classically trained homeopath Janita Venema intersperses her personal story with theories and workbook type exercises from the Present Child method which she developed as she worked on her own self-awareness and built her relationship with her son.

The method is based on the premise that children try to present their parents with clear messages about what they need to change in their lives; for example, a child's poor appetite may be a pointer to the parent not nourishing themselves in their own life. When writing about her methods in Links, Venema encapsulated this as children being the 'ultimate similimum' for their parents.

The book seems to be aimed as a self-help workbook for parents so there is little reference to homeopathy although the author does describe how her practice of homeopathy facilitated her development of the method.

The principle exercise involves the parent fully describing the child's problems, symptoms, modalities, the effect of these on the parent and the parents wish for the child in the current situation. The parent is then asked to substitute their own name into the narrative. Stories may be literally applicable or may be metaphorical and need 'translating'.

Details of how to train as a Present Child translator may be found on Venema's website www.presentchild.com.

Whilst not doubting that children and parents are so closely connected that they can often reflect each other's state I found myself somewhat uncomfortable at times and concerned that seeing the child as a messenger for the parent might devalue the child's own experience. In one example given in the book we are told that a little girl's fear of dogs represented her mother's fear of her alcoholic father and her inability to stand up to him.

The forewords from Dr Roy Martina and translator Jean Thompson along with testimonials on Venema's website indicate that people have been inspired by this method and found it useful. For me the structure of the book was a little scattered, I felt distracted by the author's own story and wanted to read through to see how she reached her happy ending, however I may have felt differently had I been working through the book as a workbook. I was frustrated by the lack of index and found the grouping of the bibliography into sections such as 'Coincidence or co-incidence' and 'Outposts of science' a little idiosyncratic. The author has been influenced by a wide and eclectic range of sources including Jung, Sankaran, Chopra and Steiner to name but a few and this shows in the wide range of topics, such as philosophy, spirituality and religion, other cultures and teaching and education, covered in the framework for the method presented in the latter section of the book.