What Kind of Parent Do You Aim To Be?
Letting go of “should” and becoming the parent you aim to be
The kind of parent that I aim to be isn’t the kind of parent that our society tells me I should be. That’s a lot to sort through and a lot to reckon with.
Let’s just start by putting this out there…the way our society wants us to parent is literally impossible and there is no winning. If you do one thing, someone will tell you that you should be doing it the complete opposite. If you give your all to your children, people will tell you that you should take time for yourself. If you take time for yourself, people will tell you that you should give more time to your children. You get the picture.
Becoming a parent has shown me that leaning in to your intuition is HARD. It involves stripping away the layers of “should”, of fear, of things we have unintentionally internalized about children and parenting. Once you can see through all of those layers, you are able to show up authentically for your kiddo, the one that you know better than any expert.
I’ve realized that for every goal I have as a parent, there is a conflicting message fueled by fear and internalized messages about children:
I aim to be gentle (She will be out of control)
I aim to be responsive (She will grow up to be a brat)
I aim to be respectful (She needs to learn to respect authority)
I aim for attachment (She will never be independent)
I aim for attunement (She is too emotional)
I aim for connection (She is just manipulating you)
I aim to understand my child (It’s your job to control her)
Intentional and intuitive parenting requires me to hear those messages and separate them from what I believe about children. Children deserve to be treated as whole human beings worthy of respect and love and connection. When I start from this place of knowing that children are good, I can quiet the fear, I can quiet the messages of what I “should” be doing. And when those fears aren’t so loud, I can trust my child and what she needs. I can trust myself to meet her needs.
This journey requires a lot of unlearning, re-parenting, going against the grain, and standing strongly in our values as parents and people. And then we can lean into our intuition, because we already know how to be the parent our child needs.
