Your child’s childhood can sometimes bring you back to your own.
Parenting has a strange way of revealing things.
Sometimes it’s obvious.
Sometimes we only notice because our reaction to something feels much bigger than what actually happened.
Children can trigger old rules
Perhaps your child talks back and something in you immediately reads it as disrespect.
Perhaps they cry and you desperately want to yell at them to stop.
Perhaps they make mistakes freely in ways you never felt permitted to.
Perhaps their confidence delights you and frustrates you at the same time.
None of these reactions automatically tells us something terrible about ourselves.
But they can give us valuable information.
- What did anger mean in your childhood?
- What happened when you disagreed?
- What happened when you failed?
- What happened when you needed comfort?
Sometimes the parenting challenge in front of us is also touching something we carry from long ago.
Breaking cycles without chasing perfection
Breaking intergenerational patterns doesn’t mean our children will grow up without wounds.
We will get things wrong. We are human after all.
Our children will experience us differently from how we experience ourselves.
And there will probably be things they eventually have to understand about their childhood too.
Perhaps the aim isn’t perfection. Perhaps it’s greater awareness, accountability, repair and willingness to keep looking at ourselves.