We Chose to Have Kids, Not Other Way Around
Parenting isn’t a lifetime favour to our kids; it is a conscious choice we made. Our children did not choose to be born; we chose to bring them into this world. We wanted kids so we could call ourselves mom and dad, see them growing, extend our family, and manifest our love. We wanted kids to form lasting connections, to nurture and be nurtured, to be forever important to someone.
In this sense, parenting is not a favour but a responsibility or a privilege. That allows us to become better versions of ourselves, grow alongside our children, and to experience the world anew through their eyes. By choosing to have children, we embraced the opportunity to be a fundamental and forever important part of someone else’s life.
Remaining Interesting People To Your Kids
So now it’s our job to love them unconditionally. Unconditional love means being there for them, not just when it’s easy, but also when it’s hard. It means accepting them for who they are, celebrating their individuality, and supporting their dreams, even when they differ from our own.
Our business is to keep educating ourselves so we can actually be the examples that we sometimes pretend to be. Parenting doesn’t come with a manual, it’s a role that evolves as our children grow, so it’s essential that we remain lifelong learners. That comes with acceptance that there’s always something that we don’t know and we are not prepared to. By doing so, we show to our children that growth and learning are ongoing processes, vital at any age. We show them that being an adult doesn’t mean having all the answers but rather being committed to finding them.
Additionally, our task is to remain interesting as people, so that when they grow up, they will want to spend time with us voluntarily, not because they feel they must. This is often overlooked but incredibly important. As parents, we need to have our own interests, hobbies, and passions. We must nurture our relationships, pursue our goals, and stay curios about the world. When our kids see us as more than just caretakers, but as whole, vibrant people with rich lives, they are more likely to want to spend time with us.
Parenting isn’t a lifetime favour to our kids; we chose to have them, not the other way around.
Raising Not Guilting: Your Inner Child Together With Your Kids
Childhood is about our kids, while parenting is about us, parents, and what kind of parent do you wish to become. The decision to parent is a conscious choice that sets us on a path of continuous personal growth and self-reflection. Parenting is a mirror that reflects our deepest hopes, fears, strengths, and weaknesses.
By parenting, we are also giving what we feel needed to our inner child. Each interaction with our children offers an opportunity to connect with ourselves and even to rewrite our experiences. As we teach them about life, we often find ourselves relearning those same lessons. Patience, empathy, resilience, and love are not just qualities we try to install in our children but also qualities we permanently cultivate within ourselves.
Many of us carry wounds and unmet needs from our childhood. As we consciously raise our own inner child, we can become more aligned to the needs of our kids. If we guilt our children for giving us hard time raising them we simply admit that we lack consciousness, might imply that we continue following our parents’ way of raising kids, or we lack information and tools to improve it. This full circle process of raising our children and nurturing our inner selves can really create a deeper, more meaningful connection with our kids and a more fulfilling experience of life for ourselves.
Want to speak about it in person? Drop me a message HERE
