People with good hearts often wonder what they can do to become a better parent, or to prepare for parenting. I’ve been coaching parents since the 90s and here’s my first thought on how to become a better parent: heal yourself. Learn to care for yourself. Grow.
Why does this matter so much? Let me state what may be rather obvious. The key component in parenting is the parent. It isn’t that an infant doesn’t have certain propensities, temperament, and uniqueness they bring, they do. But while these are factors, a loving, mindful parent can turn even the most difficult parenting journey into something beautiful, as they nurture their child’s natural beauty.
Let’s ponder for a moment the human brain, and look at what parents can get wrong, in order to understand the significance of the parent’s own growth and health. Parenting is a journey that starts before a child even comes out of the womb. There can be many reasons for this including the ‘story womb’ or culture we create in our home and life, but let’s start with science. I want to think for a moment about a part of our child’s brain called the amygdala.
The amygdala is fully developed at 8 months in the womb, meaning that before a child even enters the world they are capable of having their ‘smoke alarm’ trigger. The amygdala has been called the ‘smoke alarm’ of the brain because it’s a part of our brain that’s meant to keep us safe. Think of it as a primitive cortex that never forgets (in neuroscience terms that’s called ‘persistent dendritic modeling,’ most of our brain ‘forgets’ things but not our amygdala).
Here’s an example of how our amygdala impacts life. If I’m out hiking and suddenly jerk back, then take another look and think, ‘Oh it’s just a stick, not a snake,’ the sudden stop is my amygdala working to keep me safe. I love hiking and this has happened to me many times. Sometimes it is a snake, many times it’s not.
I want to highlight one thing in this above example to help us understand why this matters. Note that I jump back before I think. My amygdala is directly wired to my senses. This makes it’s response time way faster than the cortex or thinking part of my brain. I jump back because my eye sees something, a possible danger—snake—then I think, ‘Oh, it’s just a stick.’ I act before I think. This is meant to keep me safe.
Sadly, however, a childhood and/or life with stress and trauma can result in an overly active amygdala. This sets us up for a lot of anxiety in the world, and can torment us as both children and adults when danger is not present but our brain thinks it is. This starts in the womb, so if there’s stress in the mom’s life it impacts the fetus.
Our ‘smoke detector’ keeps us safe, mostly, but can also cause us to misread situations. Here’s a second important factor regarding how our amygdala functions. Not only does our smoke alarm not forget danger, it generalizes. If I was just bit by a dog, then my amygdala tells me I should perhaps worry about the next dog coming my way as well. All dogs now potentially become scary. If I don’t I have help processing having been bit, and have good experiences and relationships with dogs to overcome the negative, I can get stuck being afraid of dogs.
This generalization can work in both positive and negative ways in parenting. A safe and loving parent, who creates a secure attachment, results in a child who is most likely to assume people are safe and believe they will be loved. Yet the opposite is also true, an unsafe parent can leave a child with social anxiety and insecure attachments that generalize to the world around them as they grow.
The fact that our amygdala is faster than the thinking part of our brain means that as much as we want to believe we are living out of the present moments of life, we are always living out of the past first. Does that make sense? Our amygdala has been logging data, and tracking ‘danger’ our entire life. So any aspect of life that is followed by some hurt, injury, or pain can be logged in our brain, and then pulled up by our amygdala in a current event, before we actually have a conscious thought. We can act before we think, with the past dictating our actions.
Fortunately this isn’t the end of the story for us because our brains can be rewired, but it takes conscious thought, new experiences, love, and security to overcome our amygdala’s trained negative reactions to life. It takes being mindful of what’s happening in our brain and body, creating space between a current trigger and a response, and coming up with a new reaction that’s more ‘present’ and life-giving. If we can do this for ourselves as parents, then we create a new environment for our children, one of calm, safety, and security. We can do this even if we had a crappy childhood ourselves.
As parents we might want to believe that our unborn (or infant) child is not impacted by the chaos, violence, arguing, and overall negative energy we can land in as adults. We are wrong. As infants we are all impacted by the world and our mother’s environment before we even entered the world. Are you anxious? Do you have an anxious child? It’s worth thinking about how your own amygdala and responses to life are being watched and ‘absorbed’ by your children who have brains like a sponge, soaking up everything around them. We need to think about healing ourselves if we want healthy children.
In studying children who had parents who came out of the holocaust, it was determined that these children often carried ‘vicarious trauma.’ They experienced the world through their parent’s ‘eyes’ of trauma, and absorbed it themselves. While the children had not lived through the holocaust, they might act and live with similar responses to a ‘dangerous’ world, a style reflected in the way their parent’s related to the world. We can stop this progression of pain from previous generations by healing ourselves as parents.
A healthy parent helps create a healthy child. A parent with a well integrated brain, helps develop a child with a well integrated brain. A parent who is not whole, is not growing and working to become the best version of themselves, is not going to be able to start their child off on a better path than they themselves have gone down. It takes a growing, healthy parent to give our children their best chance.
So, why seek parenting coaching? Because it gives our children their best chance in this world for a whole happy life. By moving toward our own wholeness we help our children become whole.
Dan Siegel states that the best gift a parent can offer their own child is a more integrated brain of their own. There are not, and have never been perfect parents, but we are all on a spectrum somewhere from destructive and harmful parents to loving, safe, and secure parents. If we want to be ‘good enough’ parents, we need to be thinking about our own journey and the environment we bring our children into. We have either done our own work and provide our kids with a generally calm, loving, and safe environment, or we simply pass down to the next generation all the brokenness we ourselves inherited.
This makes me think of a piece of worse-case-scenario spiritual wisdom offer by Jesus when speaking to a group of unhealed humans. He basically states that when they convert someone to their way of living, they make this person ‘twice the sons of hell’ that they are. As parents we are ‘converting’ our children to a way of life, one that is healthy and whole, or broken. We can’t help a child be healthier than we are, but we can make them worse. Or we can be on a healing journey ourselves.
There’s no perfect time to become a parent, just love your child the best you can by loving and healing yourself on your own journey. There’s tons of hope. Become a parent, love yourself, love your kids. Being a parent has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my life! If we all waited until we were pretty sure we wouldn’t screw our kids up, there would be no children in the world. Just become your best self as you journey through life, recognize how your past shapes your present, grow, be open to your children and let them reveal to you a world of beauty and life. If your story was difficult, don’t let that stop you from becoming a loving parent, just feel the ache of failures from the way your parent’s failed and offer something different to your kids. If we don’t feel our own pain, we’re likely to repeat the offenses with our own children. Reparent yourself so you can offer more to your children. Love. Live. Laugh. Parent. Grow. Becoming a parent can help us grow as never before if we’re open to all these things. Children can be stunningly beautiful part of our healing process if we’re open to them, and do our best not to reproduce the worst of what we’ve lived through ourselves.
All of life is really about seeing beauty, and discovering beauty even in brokenness and healing. When children come into the world they are beauty, and they can also help you discover yours.