Parenting Can Bring You Face-to-Face With the Child You Once Were

Parenting can force you to help your child deal with emotions that maybe no one taught you how to cope with.

I think about this a lot when we talk about parenting and emotional regulation, because sometimes the instinct that parents walk into a session with is focused entirely on the child. How do I help my child calm down? How do I respond to the tantrum? But there is another person in that interaction whose nervous system is also doing something: the parent.

Sometimes your child is crying and you are trying to comfort them while simultaneously having a surprisingly intense reaction to the fact that they are crying. Maybe their anger makes you angry. Maybe their sadness makes you anxious. Maybe you know, intellectually, that your child is overwhelmed, but some other part of you is thinking, Why are we still crying about this?

I think this is one of the more complicated parts of parenting, and the part I find so compelling as a parent and child therapist. You are being asked to help another human being develop capacities that you may still be developing yourself, or that an adult didn’t support you with when you were once a child. You might be trying to teach your child how to tolerate disappointment when disappointment was never really tolerated in your home. You might be telling them that it is okay to cry when crying made the adults around you uncomfortable. You might be trying to stay present with their anger when anger, in your childhood, meant danger, punishment, withdrawal, or somebody losing control.

Sometimes no one explicitly said, “Don’t have feelings.” It is often much subtler than that. Maybe certain emotions were acceptable and others weren’t. Maybe sadness was fine, but anger wasn’t. Maybe you learned that adults became overwhelmed when you needed too much from them, so you became very good at needing less. Children learn these things without anyone sitting them down and explaining the rules. And then, years later, you have your own child who has apparently not received your invisible rulebook. It can be disorienting and triggering.

Your child’s childhood can also make you reconsider your own.

There is another part of this that I think can be particularly painful. Sometimes parenting doesn’t only remind you of what happened to you, it can also show you what didn’t happen.

You comfort your child through something and realize how young you were when you had to deal with that all by yourself. I think there can be a strange kind of grief in that. Maybe you spent your whole life thinking, It wasn’t that bad. I was fine. That’s just how things were. And then your child makes a mistake and the idea of responding to them the way someone responded to you feels unimaginable.

That doesn’t necessarily mean our parents were cruel or didn’t love us. I think this is where the conversation gets flattened too easily. Parents raise children from within their own histories, cultures, stressors, capacities, beliefs, resources, and wounds. Many people gave their children things they themselves never received while still being unable to give them other things they desperately needed. You can understand why someone parented the way they did and still grieve what you needed from them. Those things can exist together.

And I think sometimes parenting gives us a very strange vantage point from which to reconsider our own childhoods. We are no longer only remembering what happened from the perspective of the child who adapted to it. We are also looking at another child of roughly the same age and realizing just how little they are.

Parents need somewhere to put their feelings, too.

Parents are doing one of the hardest jobs in the world, and some are doing it alone, without a village, or with added complexities such as having a child with a medical diagnosis or learning need. Some parents are living with chronic illness or going through their own mental health challenges, and still trying to show up for their kid.

And we ask a lot of parents emotionally. We ask them to stay calm during the tantrum, co-regulate, understand the emotion underneath the behaviour, hold boundaries without becoming reactive, repair when they get it wrong, and somehow remain curious about what their child needs while their own nervous system might be screaming at them to make it stop.

There is also such an overwhelming amount of information on the internet, and a new “expert” on parenting seems to pop up in every other reel. It’s a lot to take in. I think sometimes all of this information, even when it is well-intentioned, can leave parents feeling like there is a correct response to every parenting moment and that everyone else somehow knows what it is.

And then there are the feelings parents don’t always feel allowed to say out loud. The guilt, anger, resentment, grief, exhaustion, or the moments when you really just do not want to be needed by another human being for five minutes. Those feelings can exist alongside an enormous amount of love for your child.

I think that’s why parent therapy can be so important, particularly for parents who are feeling overwhelmed.

A place to understand yourself better not only as a parent but also as a human being, all while learning practical tools and information about how to support your kid’s mental health and development.

I am now accepting new clients in Ontario. Book an intake call by clicking on ‘Book With Me’.