Would you still have signed up for this parenting gig if you’d known how much of your old wounds it would stir up?

Parenting is a wild ride.

No matter how much you think you’re prepared for it, or how many parents you ask for advice before your child comes along, you’re never fully prepared for the changes that happen to you, the parent.

You weren’t prepared for the wounds that would come back up as an opportunity for you to heal, and you’re certainly weren’t given any tips on how to navigate them once they did start showing up. At best, you receive empathy and commiseration over how hard it can be, but it’s served alongside a plate of suck-it-up-buttercup-this-is-parenting.

We’re given the message that our parents suffered, and we caused them great agony and our children will do the same to us; this is life, get used to it.

This idea that misery loves company needs to go. Why do we wear our struggles as badges of honor, as if the more of them you collect, or the harder you make things on yourself, the braver, tougher, stronger you are? It’s as if we’re trying to prove our worthiness to be a parent by showing that we too can sacrifice, as our ancestors did to hold our rank as a “good parent”.

Your child is unique. They have their own unique needs and quirks, just like you do.

Most of the parenting advice out there is about how to get better control over your child, or tips, tricks, and parent hacks to get your child to do what you want them to do.

We’re operating from an old paradigm. One that reacts out of fear and tries to always have the upper hand.

We must stop seeing our children as a possession to control and realize that they are their own person and when we treat them as such, we help them grow into resilient, self-assured, confident people.

There is literally no other child on the earth that is just like your child, even twins. Every single person on this earth has their own unique likes, dislikes, needs, wants, desires, comforts and more.

We are all designed to be different, and that should be celebrated, rather than conditioned out of us.

Parenting is so much less about what we DO for our kids, but about who we BE for our kids.

If we are operating as a parent from our childhood wounds, we stir up all those old hurts with no place to go but onto our children and the people closest to us.

When we take the time to look at our patterns, needs, wants, and desires and start giving ourselves what we need, we can be the most authentic, grounded, embodied version of ourselves that we know how to be. We teach our kids to be the most authentic, grounded, embodied version of themselves, and they get to grow up feeling safe to be themselves.

They get to see their quirks and uniqueness as an asset rather than a liability.

We get to end the parenting style of “this is how I was raised, and I turned out just fine”, which is a defense mechanism that keeps us from having to look at ourselves and our patterns, and embrace a parenting style where we pause and look at our children, really look at them, and ask ourselves, is this what’s best for them?

And in that pause, we also get to ask ourselves, was that what was best for me? Am I perpetuating a story that as a child made me feel less than? Unheard? Unseen? Unvalued? And if we are, we get an opportunity to choose to change that story for both our children and for ourselves.

We can re-parent ourselves through our own parenting journey.

Parenting the Child You Have with Human Design helps you see the patterns you’re unconsciously repeating and make a new choice. It puts you in control of your own story and allows your children to grow up feeling seen, heard, valued, and loved for just being themselves–quirks and all.

Can you imagine if you’d been allowed to be your unique self from childhood?