We Chose to Have Kids, Not Other Way Around

Parenting isn’t a lifetime favor 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 favor but a profound responsibility and a even a privilege. It challenges us to become better versions of ourselves, to 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. This is the bedrock of our relationship with our children. Unconditional love means being there for them, not just when it’s easy, but also when it’s tough. 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, and it’s a role that evolves as our children grow. As such, 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 demonstrate 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 that they want to spend time with once they grow up. This is often overlooked but incredibly important. As parents, we need to cultivate our own interests, hobbies, and passions. We must nurture our relationships, pursue our goals, and maintain a sense of curiosity about the world. When our kids see us as more than just caretakers—as whole, vibrant people with rich lives—they are more likely to want to spend time with us, even as they grow older and carve out their own paths.

Parenting isn’t a lifetime favour to our kids; we chose to have them, not the other way around.

Growing Together: Your Inner Child Together With Your Kids

Childhood is about our kids, while parenting is about us, parents, and how our wish to have kids changed us. The decision to become parents is a conscious choice that sets us on a path of continuous personal growth and self-reflection. Parenting is just a mirror that reflects our deepest hopes, fears, strengths, and weaknesses.

By parenting, we are also nurturing our inner child. Each interaction with our children offers an opportunity to connect with ourselves and even to restore 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. Through parenting, we have a chance to heal those parts of ourselves by providing for our kids what we might have lacked. As we consciously raise our own inner child, we become more aligned to the needs of our kids. This dual process of raising our children and nurturing our inner selves creates a deeper, more meaningful connection with our kids and a more fulfilling experience of life for ourselves.