Parenting ourselves

My son looks like me.  My daughter looks like my wife.  Eyes, hair, features, mannerisms, emotional triggers.  It’s all there.  There’s no doubt these children are ours.  As the kids have grown, they’ve faced new and different challenges.  My wife will look at my son and wonder what he’s thinking, but I know.  I know because I thought the same thing when I was his age.  I know because I think that way now.  My wife says the same thing about my daughter.  That’s why there are two of us.

As our children grow older, they face more challenges with fewer scripts.  They’re left to come to their own conclusions based on their own worldview.  Our job should be to help them translate what they are seeing, helping them refine their worldview and fit their observation into their story.

This role of translator assumes that we have fluency in both the experience and some explanation; that somehow I have felt enough of his experience to have processed it myself and done the work to understand it.  But what if I haven’t.  What if I struggle to help him process his overwhelming experience at school? I struggle because I had the same experience and it shut me down too — it still does.

This is what we’re finding: while it’s cute to parent a miniature version of myself, we are really parenting the child within us.  I distinctly remember how embarrassed I was in 2nd grade and now I must reenter that shame, reframing my own hurt as I stumble to help my 8 year old process his experience.  This is why Dan Allender says our Children Raise Parents.

We raise our kids, hoping to right the wrongs of our own experience: hoping to give the speech with pants zipped this time, hoping to talk to the girl without being shunned, hoping to engage the cool kids for who I am not what I look like.  This is the hope and hurt of parenting.

So we push harder, expecting our children to sort out their own experience and correct ours in the process.  No wonder it’s hard for them.  And it’s also unfair to them.  I must address my own challenges without asking my son to carry my burden as well.  This is why Dr. Meg Meeker notes that children have a better chance of growing up if their parents have done so first.  I am parenting a mini-version of myself in my son as well as the memory of myself as a little boy arrested in hurt.

I am grateful that my son is willing to let me stumble through my own hurt.
I am grateful that my bride has the wisdom to help us both translate.
I am grateful that through my son I am able to redeem the hurt of my past.