Many people think that history repeats itself, but this isn’t always the case.

What does happen, however, is that certain things can play out in a similar way. How we have experienced parenting in our own lives will generally inform how we in turn raise our own children. Those experiences we’ve had in our younger years can create a psychological set of blinkers, where our own pain or reactions now cause us to be blind to certain needs in our own kids. This is especially prevalent when it comes to their emotions.

If we have grown up feeling a lack of nurture in a specific area, it’s fair to say that those wounds might make us oblivious to the type of nurturing our children require. Becoming an adult with insecure feelings might mean a sense of disappointment with your own child.

It’s vital to identify those areas in ourselves that need support and help in order to be the most present parent we can be, kind of like putting on your own life jacket before helping your child with theirs. In taking care of yourself, you can take care of your child and respond to their needs in a secure and balanced way, because you have dealt with your own triggers and pain.

When you become a parent, you may find those long buried issues come bubbling to the surface. You then have a choice to try to bury them again (but they have a habit in leeching out with how we deal with our own children), or you take time and do the work of dealing with them.

It’s a mistake the feel that parenting is entirely outwards-focused. To be able to parent effectively, we must first look inwards. In doing so, we will be better equipped to raise our families in a healthy way.