Why Do Our Kids Push Our Buttons?
As winter finally starts to retreat and new signs of life are finally peeking through in nature, we’ve been reflecting on birth and rebirth. Isn’t it incredible how each time a child is born so is a new parent. For many of us, we have spent a lot of time imagining how we want to raise our children and the type of parent we wish to be. While we might wish to enter parenthood as a clean slate, the reality is much more complicated.
They say that experience is the best teacher so of course as we navigate becoming parents, we all draw instinctively on our primary experience—our own childhood.
If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking something along the lines of, “I want my kids to have what I didn’t” or, “I sound just like my dad,” or, “I’m turning into my mother,” or “I don’t want that for my kids,” then you already know on some level that our own childhood leaves an imprint on our parenting—for better or worse.
Our earliest models for what it means to be loved or to be a good parent are formed by our own childhoods. Consciously or not, we will find ourselves grappling with that internal blueprint throughout our parenting journey. Our upbringing shapes who we aim to be with our children--what do we hope to replicate, to change, to avoid, to improve.
Of course, it’s a cruel irony that we are doing so much of that work at a time when we have so few extra resources with which to unpack it. It isn’t enough to be sleep-deprived, physically drained, and trying to figure out how to raise a tiny human. We are also navigating a complicated dance with our past as we set off on our future.
The good news is that even if there were parts of our childhoods that were imperfect or traumatic, we aren’t destined to repeat them. The biggest predictor of success isn’t the quality of our own childhood, but rather the degree to which we have processed that childhood.
Regardless of the heartaches we endured in our early life, what matters most is that we’ve taken the time to make sense of the experience and understand how it shapes us.
We can take note of some ways that we might see our past experiences popping up in our present in less obvious ways.
Here’s a few:
Recreating: The patterns of behavior in our early memories are easiest for our brains to recreate in the present. We can find ourselves imitating our parent’s discipline, values, and even phrasing without giving it much scrutiny. We can find ourselves replicating the power dynamics of our parent-child relationships in our own home. It’s important to think critically about what parts of our childhood home we want to embrace, and which pieces we want to change.
Overcompensating: If there’s an unpleasant experience in our past, we as parents can find ourselves on high alert to avoid the same with our own children. But it is a difficult balance. A parent who grew up in an overly disciplined household, can find themselves struggling to hold boundaries and being overly permissive. A parent who didn’t get the chance to participate in all the activities they wanted growing up can be tempted to overschedule their children. A parent who grew up without financial security can find themselves worrying too much about work and not enough about home.
Projecting: As deeply as we love our children, they are their own people with unique personalities, fear, hopes, dreams, and needs. Our children are not extensions of ourselves who need to fulfill our own dreams or achievements. We try to parent ourselves and respond to our own unmet needs rather than attuning ourselves to who they are. A former wild child might find themselves wanting to tamp down their child’s freedoms, and the parent who had their championship dreams ended by injury can overemphasize athletic achievement. When we try to project ourselves onto them, we miss the uniqueness of who they are.
Survival Techniques: No one goes through life without accumulating a few scars. The techniques we used to survive traumatic experiences in our lives stay in our defensive arsenal. If our parents were rejecting, we may have learned early on to distance ourselves. If our parents were unpredictable, we may have learned early on to be people pleasers who avoid conflict. While defense mechanisms are understandable, we need to recognize them so we can choose how we want to show up for our children.
Internal Monologues: The way that we were spoken to as children becomes our own inner monologue. People who grew up hearing that they were inferior, might find themselves thinking that about themselves as parents (I’m failing them. I can’t handle this.). Or perhaps someone who grew up without a positive parent role model, might find themselves with an internal voice that says they don’t know what they are doing. If we can spot these destructive inner monologues, we can change the conversation to help us be better parents.
Triggers: All parents find themselves agitated by situations that remind us of pain and fear in our past. What a terrible twist of fate that the things that were hardest for us as children will be hardest for us as parents. In these moments, we can find ourselves mentally right back in our childhood selves and acting in ways that don’t match our current self. For example, we might lose our temper with our children over behaviors that we were punished for as children. We might be overly anxious about a child’s needs if those needs went unmet for us. When we reflect on intense or extreme reactions to our children, we can look for what in our past might be impacting us in the present.
Our team is fond of calling parenthood the great excavator. It unearths everything we’ve long buried, and it begs us to look at the messiness of our own lives. We can choose to examine parts of our own upbringing, relationships, and childhood that have been pushed to the surface. Once we know how our reactions, values, and experiences are shaping us, we can make conscious decisions on how we want to parent our children.
In order to make that leap, we need to reflect on what our goals and values are for our family and how are those the same or different from what we grew up with. Ask yourself:
What ways did my family life have a positive/negative impact on me?
Is there anything about my parents’ parenting that I would like to change for my children?
Did I have any major life experiences that might be influencing how I parent now?
What were the messages I received about my value as a person and are they the same messages I want to send to my children?
Once we are aware of our influences, we can decide what our priorities are with our own family. If we can recognize our past hurts, we can begin to heal them. There is no perfect parenting, and we will never stop making mistakes. The road to good enough parenting is wide and forgiving, and you need never be alone on the journey. We are here to help you unpack your past and plan for the future you want.
Warmly,
Kellie Wicklund, LPC, PMH-C
Principal + Clinical Director
Christina Moran
Executive Director
