The One Thing You Can Do To Ensure Healthy Parenting
When I became a mother for the first time I remember being very anxious, over-protective and obsessively worrying about the safety of my daughter. I thought that it was part and parcel of motherhood. However I observed that not all parents around me were exhibiting the same behaviour. This made me curious.
When my daughter was six months old, I remember being gripped with anxiety as I watched her happily playing with her toys on the living room floor. It struck me then that I was exactly that age when my mother left me and went on a scholarship abroad. This was the first realisation that slowly exposed the root cause of my anxiety and overly protective attitude. Unconsciously, my daughter at that age, was reminding me on a bodily level, of the emotions I went through when I was at her age. I was unaware that my own childhood experience was contaminating my parenting behaviour in that present moment.
Parenting is by far the most important role we may encounter with probably the least amount of formal training and preparation. We tend to either parent the way we were parented or do the extreme opposite.
However there is a more balanced way to be the best parent you can be. How? By investing in your own personal growth and development. By reflecting on your own childhood experience and upbringing so you can become more self-aware and learn healthy ways to stop passing on negative patterns from generation to generation.
My desire to be a better parent motivated me to invest in my own emotional and mental well-being and in my own personal growth and development. I was, thus, able to explore and reflect on my own upbringing so that I could identify and understand my own discomforts in the hope of not passing them on to my children. This supported me in learning healthy ways of relating to myself and others, most importantly to my children. This allowed me to process my inherited fear and anxiety so I could stop passing it on to my daughters.
You also can make such an investment in yourself. It will help you reshape that parenting link that stretches way back to your ancestors and way forward to the next generations to come. This ensures that you pass on the good stuff from your own upbringing and hold back on the unhealthy aspects of it.
If you had a healthy and happy childhood then this exercise of examining your childhood is unlikely to be painful. However for many of us that was not the case and therefore looking back on our childhood may bring emotional discomfort. However the rewards for the present and future far outweigh this discomfort.
As Philippa Perry, a renowned psychotherapist, writes in her book entitled, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, “It is necessary to become more self-aware around that discomfort so that we can become more mindful of ways to stop us passing it on. So much of what we have inherited sits just outside of our awareness. That makes it hard sometimes to know whether we are reacting in the here and now to our child’s behaviour or whether our responses are more rooted in our past.”
It is not about being a perfect parent. I personally do not believe in such a thing. As Perry says, children need parents to be real and authentic , not perfect. It is about reflecting on your own childhood experience in order to understand how it may have an effect on your parenting. It is about accepting that you will make mistakes and how to learn from those mistakes. It is about letting go of judgment of yourself and others. It is about improving your chances of having a healthy relationship with your children so they in turn will be able to perpetuate that healthy relationship with their children.
It is important as parents that we do not feel disheartened when inevitably we make mistakes that can be hurtful. Hurts and misunderstandings are common in intimate family relationships. What is important is that when we realise our mistakes we take steps to mend the hurt.
Perry stresses that it is not the rupture that is important, it is the repair that matters. In other words mending the hurt. This can be achieved through working on changing the way we respond through recognising our triggers and using that awareness to behave differently as parents. My personal experience confirms this. Feel proud at noticing the issues and taking steps to bring about a positive change.
As parents we play a major role in our child’s environment, which in turn plays a big part in forming the unique person that our child will be. Healthy parenting starts with looking at you, how you feel about yourself and how much responsibility you are willing to take for your behaviour. If you are a parent or considering becoming one then I highly recommend reading Perry’s book.
Contact me if you are interested to explore this further.
