Parenting My Children vs Reparenting Myself

Raising Children, Healing Ourselves | Aware Parenting Series, Part 1

Every time I choose to stay present with my children through big feelings, I’m reparenting myself.

I didn’t know this when I first became a mother.

Back then, I thought good parenting was mostly about getting it right. Read enough books. Learn enough. Make good choices. Raise secure, emotionally healthy children.

Simple… or so I thought.

What I didn’t expect was that motherhood would crack me open in places I didn’t even know were wounded.

Parenting has a way of illuminating the parts of us we’ve spent years trying not to feel.

By the time my second child was born almost eleven years ago, I was already deep in attachment parenting. My eldest child, my son, had been parented this way from birth. I breastfed on demand, babywore, bedshared, responded to every cry as quickly as I could, and shaped my whole life around being available to my babies.

I was deeply committed to connection. But underneath that commitment was a belief I never questioned:

If my baby was crying, something was wrong, and it was my job to make it stop.

That belief came from love.

It also came from fear.

Around that time I found a secondhand copy of The Aware Baby by Aletha Solter. I’d seen it mentioned here and there in gentle parenting circles, just enough to know it had some pretty radical ideas about babies and crying.

When I reached the part about allowing babies to cry in loving arms, I physically could not keep reading. I remember feeling almost angry. Even though some deeper part of me sensed there was truth there, everything in me pushed back.

Allow a baby to cry in your arms?

Stay present instead of immediately offering the breast, rocking, bouncing, shushing, distracting?

Trust that tears might actually be doing something important?

Everything in me screamed no.

Aware Parenting wasn’t just challenging my parenting, it was challenging my entire relationship with feelings. I grew up in a home that felt chaotic and emotionally unsafe. There was conflict. Volatility. Unpredictability.

Like many children growing up in difficult homes, I adapted.

I became a very good girl.

I learned early that big feelings were hard for other people to handle. Especially crying.

And then I became a mother. And these tiny humans arrived with enormous feelings. And all of that kept stirring the old pain I was still carrying.

For years, I hovered around Aware Parenting without fully stepping in. I listened to Marion Rose’s podcasts. I took course after course. Slowly, painfully slowly, something started shifting.

I began to realise my children were not the only ones who needed to be listened to.

I began to realise my children were not the only ones who needed to be listened to.

There was a younger version of me still waiting too.

Still waiting to cry.

Still waiting to rage.

Still waiting to be met with compassion instead of discomfort.

I often joke that I’m completing my Aware Parenting instructor training at glacial speed because I have “a lot of skeletons in my closet.” It’s a joke. But also… not really.

Because this work asks a lot of us.

You can’t just study Aware Parenting intellectually and call it done. You have to live it. In the exhaustion of family life. In the mess. In the moments you least feel like you can stay present.

I don’t think I truly understood Aware Parenting with my eldest daughter. Or even my second. I was trying, learning, practising, but I was still carrying so much unresolved pain. By the time my youngest daughter was born, something really had changed.

Years of listening partnerships, crying, grieving, rage work, and slowly learning to stay with my own feelings had changed me. For the first time, I could sit with a crying baby and not panic.

And I could remember this:

The crying is not the hurting. The crying is the healing from the hurt.

With love,

This is the first piece in a new series I’m calling Raising Children, Healing Ourselves, where I’ll be exploring Aware Parenting through both personal story and lived practice.

We’ll talk about crying, listening, loving limits, play, triggers, nervous system healing, and what it really means to raise children while healing ourselves.

If this resonates, I’d love for you to subscribe and join me for the journey.