Parenting While Breaking Cycles
When I became a parent, I was overwhelmed with many different emotional experiences. Alongside the incredible amount of love I have for my children, I have also been overcome by emotions about my own childhood. Things came up that I hadn’t expected, or hadn’t fully seen before, raising little humans myself. Things like emotional reactions I had towards certain things, an overwhelming desire to do things differently to how I was raised, and how the way I have been treated has shaped who I am, and how much I want to grow as a person.
For many of us, parenting activates old patterns. As we care for our children, we sometimes feel echoes of how things were for us when we were small. It can be surprising to realise how deeply those early experiences shaped our responses, our emotions, and the way we instinctively react to situations. When we become parents, those patterns often come into sharper focus, and that awareness can begin to shift how we think about ourselves, our upbringing, and the way we want to parent our own children.
Breaking cycles while parenting often looks like pausing and taking a breath before responding to things, apologising when you get things wrong or make a mistake, choosing softness or light-heartedness in small moments in daily life, noticing patterns, letting yourself play and have fun, showing your children it is okay to have an emotional experience, and showing them how you soothe yourself in a healthy way when things feel overpowering.
This is profound emotional work. At times, it can feel overwhelming. It asks for grounding, introspection, and a great deal of self-soothing. At times it can feel overwhelming, especially while caring for little humans who need your full attention. In many ways, you are holding two emotional experiences at once – tending carefully to your child’s feelings while also learning to understand and soothe the feelings of the child you once were.
Doing all of this while caring for your little humans is exhausting in itself, and without a village, it can be even more challenging. There are fewer spaces and opportunities to step back and process things, to talk through things, and less emotional support for yourself, which often makes all of this easier to carry and easier to cope with day-to-day. Breaking cycles without a village is a lot of heavy lifting, without people to hold you in moments when you really need it.
No parent breaks these cycles perfectly, either. What matters is that you are doing it, and you are working to change patterns that may have been carried for generations that you do not want to give to your children.
Repair with your children also matters so much more than perfection. A parent that says they are sorry after making mistakes or not handling things the way they would like to models healthy processing, attachment, and self-reflection. It shows them that you care about your relationship with them, and that it is okay to not be perfect, and that your love never goes away. It shows them that there is room for adults to be wrong and that that is not threatening. Repair is a powerful thing. You do not need to strive for perfection in every moment. Awareness of your own patterns and behaviour is also, in itself, a huge shift.
It is incredibly profound and difficult work to hold two childhoods at once: the one you are creating for your children, and the one you are still making sense of within yourself.
To parent while soothing yourself, and to work every day to offer something different, something healthier than you experienced yourself, without a blueprint, or instructions – just an inner sense of what you want to give your children, with limited support – is brave and important. You are doing such meaningful work quietly each day, and that is something to be recognised.
Being your own mum in these moments – when you are choosing to break cycles and do things differently, holding everything at once – often looks like recognising just how much you are carrying. It looks like offering compassion to the younger parts of yourself that didn’t receive it. It looks like softening your inner voice, even when things feel intense, and learning how to steady yourself in moments that echo the past.
This is quiet, ongoing work. And it matters.
Be gentle with yourself this week.