Parenting & Family Life

Join the Club

Parenting isn’t quite what you imagined? Join the club.

Maybe you always knew you wanted children. Maybe you weren’t so sure. Perhaps you imagined being a completely different kind of parent from the ones who raised you—or hoped to recreate the childhood you loved.

Maybe being a parent is central to your identity, or maybe it’s just one part of who you are. You may be raising children with a partner whose ideas about parenting are very different from yours, or perhaps you’re doing it on your own.

However you got here, parenting has a way of challenging just about everything we thought we knew about ourselves.

When Our Own Childhood Comes Back to Visit

We all bring our histories into parenting, whether we realize it or not.

The things we loved about our childhoods, the things we wanted to do differently, the patterns we’ve worked hard to change—even the things we thought we’d already made peace with—can resurface in unexpected ways.

Sometimes our children’s behavior brings out reactions we don’t entirely understand. Sometimes we hear ourselves saying something we swore we’d never say. And sometimes we discover that being the parent we intended to be is a lot harder than we expected.

Understanding where these reactions come from doesn’t make them disappear, but it can give us more freedom to respond differently.

Whose Problem Is It, Anyway?

As parents, we’re held responsible for an extraordinary amount. And we often hold ourselves responsible for even more.

When our children struggle—with school, friendships, behavior, disappointment, or simply growing up—it can be difficult to separate their experiences from our own fears, expectations, and sense of responsibility.

We want to protect them, help them, and spare them unnecessary pain. Of course we do. But how do we know when to step in and when to step back?

How do we help our children become independent, capable people if we’re always trying to solve their problems? How do we recognize that their struggles belong to them, even when those struggles affect us deeply?

And how do we distinguish between being responsible for our children and feeling responsible for everything that happens to them?

Who Are We Raising—and Who Are We Becoming?

What exactly is our job as parents?

Are we trying to raise happy children? Successful children? Kind, thoughtful, independent adults? What happens when our children’s interests, personalities, or choices don’t match what we imagined for them?

Parenting also changes our relationships—with partners, co-parents, extended family, friends, and ourselves. We may discover differences in values we hadn’t anticipated or struggle to find room for our own needs and identities.

Who are we in relation to our children? And who are we apart from them?

Therapy offers a place to explore these questions, understand the ways our own histories shape our parenting, and think more clearly about the kind of relationships we want to build with our children.

The goal isn’t to become a perfect parent. It’s to become a more thoughtful, intentional one—while allowing our children the space to become themselves.