Life Changing Ways to Re-parent Yourself
Life Changing Ways to Re-parent Yourself
Healing Your Way to Becoming a Better Parent
In this newsletter, we provide you with notes on Re-parenting Yourself with Parenting Coach Ashley Seling, an episode of Modern Mom Probs.
Host Tara Clark is an author, content creator, mother, and the Founder of Modern Mom Probs. She is joined by Ashley Seling, a conscious parenting coach and a certified positive discipline educator. She's helped hundreds of parents become calm and confident in the most stressful parenting situations through her tantrum tranquility method.
Read our notes below.
Topics Covered in this Summary
What is Re-parenting?
Ways to Re-parent Yourself
Setting Healthy Boundaries
What is Re-parenting?
Re-parenting is giving your adult self what you didn't get from your parents in childhood and then working to fulfill those needs to heal.
Think about what your grandparents passed on to your parents. It could be that the way they disciplined your parents included yelling or violence, and it’s possible that your parents could pass that on to you. At some point, someone has to break the cycle and not accept the trauma anymore.
When you’ve been through some trauma in your childhood, a part of you is still trapped in the past as that child. It draws this parallel between how our own childhood affects our child's childhood, what we are willing to tolerate, and what kind of parent we want to be. Sometimes we fall right in line with what our parents did, and other times, we go in the exact opposite direction from how we were raised.
At the end of the day, we wouldn’t want to pass those negative traits down to our children, which is why it's important that you learn how to re-parent yourself.
Ways to Re-parent Yourself
Wherever and whoever you are, it’s not too late to re-parent yourself. It might take work, but every little improvement helps.
Start by identifying what you need. Ask yourself, "What didn’t I learn in childhood? Which of my emotional needs weren’t met?’’.
Connect with your inner child. Acknowledge your childhood self and let them know that you’re there. Re-parent yourself by treating yourself with the love, kindness, and respect you deserve. Find your inner child and learn how to care for it in a way your parents couldn’t.
Honour your feelings. Validating and meeting your emotional needs is one of the hardest parts of re-parenting. However, continue to remind yourself that all emotions are necessary, regardless of how we feel about them.
Be you. Separate yourself from how you were raised and try not to let your experiences and past define who you are.
Setting Healthy Boundaries
Healthy boundaries create healthy relationships.
There is something about parenthood that is so empowering when we know that we're doing our best for our children, and then that gives us a certain confidence to set boundaries in other ways that maybe we hadn't done before our kids were born.
Don’t beat yourself up. Even though you might have some negative thoughts, be patient and kind to yourself. That’s what we would say to our own children, if they feel the same.
It is said that the words we speak to our children become their inner voice. When you’re getting triggered by your child’s behavior, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and have a conversation with yourself. Examining the ways in which your parents fell short can open the possibility for becoming a better parent yourself.
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