What’s Your Purpose?
A Parenting North Star
What advice would ancient gurus give about parenting in the modern world?
It’s well after bed-time at the end of a long day of travel with my two daughters, ages two and five. Since we arrived at the hotel a few hours ago, I’ve removed my youngest from climbing the floor-length curtains in the hotel lobby, explained to my oldest why she needs to put back on her shoes at the reception desk, pushed an overflowing luggage trolley with a wobbly wheel to the third floor, set up the pack and play (which after years of use still confuses me), and made “dinner” from microwavable packets of mac and cheese.
I’m deeply feeling the absence of my husband who is home sick and is missing this trip to visit my family.
It’s in the midst of the pack and play getting jammed and the wiping up the mac and cheese goo off the maroon upholstered armchair (is that really considered food?) that my five year old begins an exhausted-from-travel meltdown.
My brain immediately goes into crisis management mode: MUST SHUT THIS DOWN. So I raise my voice, enunciate every syllable in her name, and say, “We will pack up right now and go home!” There is fire in my words.
“But, but… will we get to see Gigi?” she asks in a quiet voice and referring to my mother whom she sees infrequently but adores. Her meltdown has stopped, and clearly my outburst is working.
But deep down I know it’s not helping because wielding power and fear isn’t how I want to get through this trip, and a stone heart is certainly not what I want for our relationship.
So I excuse myself and go to the bathroom to open to what is happening. I begrudgingly relax my shoulders and my chest. Under the firey anger, I feel overwhelm, exhaustion, and miss my partner’s calming presence; I allow tears to well up in my eyes. I do the best I can to let all those feelings bubble up and have their moment in the buzzing light of the bathroom vanity. It’s painful, but it’s not long before my insides soften.
Then I come out of the bathroom, and take a deep breath: “I’m sorry I raised my voice. I was not at my best, and it was not your fault. This trip is challenging, and we’re going to need to work together as a team to make it happen. I want to be here as much as you do, but I’m also not going to stay if it’s not working for us. So we need to decide together how we want this trip to go. Can you help me with that?”
With her beautiful, bright hazel eyes, she looks up and says, “Yes.” She’s clearly relieved we can stay and that my anger wasn’t her fault.
From that moment on, our trip wasn’t entirely smooth sailing, but it was different: more enjoyable, more connected, more loving. I realized what I said the first time and what I said the second time wasn’t all that different (I was holding the exact same boundary), but how it came through me and expressed itself into the world was not the same. And that made all the difference.
I’ve often wondered what ancient, wise gurus would have to say about parenting today and the millions of moments when we parents get to choose something different. What follows is my attempt to answer that question.
Before you have a child, most people will tell you that it will be the most beautiful experience of your life. However, they often fail to mention all the challenges during this experience, such as the unpredictable nature of birth, years of sleep deprivation, the intensity of toddler tantrums, sibling bickering, and a host of other parenting challenges that occur for parents throughout children’s lives. The true predicament of being a parent is that challenges are always arising. This is simply the truth.
What is not a hard and fast truth, however, is what our years of being a parent are like. Undoubtedly, being a parent can be a very exciting experience. It can bring enthusiasm, joy, and gratitude at every turn. When it unfolds that way, every day with children can be a beautiful adventure. Unfortunately, life as a parent rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to, and if we resist, our everyday life as a parent can become fairly unpleasant and downright exhausting. Resistance creates tension and anxiety, and can make parenthood feel like a burden.
Parenthood, for many, is also transformational. It has the potential to either help us to transform into a more joyful, present, loving and compassionate person or add new and very deep layers of stress and anxiety to life. We are presented with hundreds, often thousands, of choices every day that will lead us further down one path or the other. Science has shown us that when we make the same choices day after day the pathways in our brain that support those choices become stronger and stronger; therefore, it becomes more challenging every day to break old habits and choose differently. With each passing day as a parent, we make choices that lead to more joy, more presence, more gratitude or choices that lead to more stress, more anxiety, more fear. Parenthood is a path — the question is simply what path are you on?
Making the switch or fully committing to a path of deep joy and love is simple, but like everything with parenting, not easy. The simple part is believing that each challenge we face as parents is part of our personal growth journey. Rather than seeing our role as only helping our children make it to adulthood or to simply make it through the day, the goal is actually for us to grow as individuals. When we approach parenthood from this perspective everything — and especially the challenges — are welcome opportunities to become a greater human being. There is immense freedom in not dreading meltdowns, bickering, nagging, whining, etc. but actually welcoming and delighting in them as opportunities to practice growing.
When a mother said she didn’t have time to work on herself because she was so busy with her kids, Ram Dass, spiritual teacher and author of Be Here Now, responded, “But don’t you see? The kids are the way.” The way he is referring to is the path to spiritual growth, and spiritual growth in its most basic form is simply personal growth. So, you could also say, the kids are the way for our deepest, most profound growth as human beings. The wisdom, love and growth cultivated as a parent know no bounds, so these rewards travel with us wherever we go. They come with us to work, to the supermarket, while sitting in traffic, awkward family holidays, and all the many places we experience stress and face challenges in our lives. When we work on ourselves as a parent all of life becomes more joyful, so in every moment of parenthood we get to choose whether we use the work of being a parent toward our overall growth as human being or not.
The parent-child relationship is incredibly fascinating from an evolutionary standpoint. Simply put, we have all sorts of experiences in our own childhoods and children come into this world reminding us of all the experiences that we never healed from. We grow up, and for the most part, many people adapt to function in the world with these unresolved experiences lingering below the surface — even if that means numbing out the uncomfortable feelings with the various and many coping mechanisms available in modern culture.
Then kids come, and they push every button we have. Sometimes they don’t even push buttons themselves but the mere stage of development they are going through reminds us of a painful experience we went through as a child. Either way, they come into this world ready to challenge us as we’ve never been challenged before. All sorts of triggers and alarm bells go off and we often struggle to put an end to the discomfort.
Often our default mode is to blame our children: if only they were more well-behaved, more patient, more calm, and so on and so forth. When we don’t blame them, we blame other people or external circumstances. Then we spend our time trying to fix our children, other people, or prevent our children experiencing the same pain we did as children. We read parenting books, seek ideas from other parents, try out new techniques, etc. But ultimately, if we do not answer the call for us to grow from whatever the situation is, whatever we do to “fix” our children or the situation is at best a bandaid until the challenge reemerges in some other shape or form. How many times have we used one trick or technique to solve a problem only to have it create a new problem down the road? As many parents experience, the sticker chart has no end!
However, if we use the challenge in front of us to turn inward and grow rather than assuming the problem is with our children or circumstances, then we work, as the Buddhists say, at the root of the problem. We remove the inner baggage that lays the foundation for a particular challenge to exist, and when we do, our perspective, our intention, and the energy we bring to a situation all change. Many times the challenge improves or resolves itself without us having to do anything at all.
When children challenge us and we do the work to truly grow as human beings, everything in the way we approach that situation changes. Our attitude becomes lighter and more compassionate. Our tone of voice becomes more loving, understanding and welcoming. The words we choose and the actions we take become more intentional and effective. As a result of these purely internal changes, our children gain an entirely different experience of us, the situation, and — most importantly — themselves.
When we grow inwardly, we can help our children develop the skills they need to positively handle a similar situation, whether with a peer, teacher, family member or another person in their life, even years down the road. Incredibly, they are such quick learners that they will often mirror back the skills they learned in a growthful moment later on when we are not at our best and offer back to us the very same lesson we taught them. The cycle of growth continues and the relationship can become reciprocal as both the parent and child have a vested interest in supporting each other’s growth.
It’s important not to confuse turning inward and doing inner work though with listening to the mind. The mind can easily go to crazy places, especially in the midst of massive transitions like becoming a parent, having another child, moving, starting a new job, the teenage years, etc. Add in constant sleep deprivation and, when believed, the mind will easily turn the most benign situation into a full catastrophe.
We may even hear our mind say the most shocking of things like… Will I by accident kill this small human being? Would I really be that sad if my child died? Is my child showing signs of actually being a sociopath? Is my child a brat? Do I even love this child? Do I really love this child as much as I love my other child? The mind is capable of coming up with all sorts of highly disturbing and therefore highly captivating ideas that can capture our attention for days, months and, when particularly engaging, even years. The mind is where we hide from our heart instead of actually doing our inner work. When we find ourselves ruminating, we know we are resisting at some level and there is inner work to do.
Turning inward means getting curious about what’s happening on our insides as we parent. It means watching the thoughts — as uncomfortable or shocking as they can be at times — and noticing them rather than getting velcroed to them. It means watching all the varied emotions move through our heart such as joy, anger, frustration, irritation, etc. and letting them wash over us like a wave and trusting they will leave love in their wake. It’s watching the various pains, aches and energy patterns in our body, and just noticing what’s happening in there. It’s sitting in what spiritual teachers call the “seat of self.” Our inner experience is like a 3D movie of thoughts, emotions and physical sensations, and staying in the seat of self means realizing that we are watching the movie but are not actually in the movie.
When we parent from this place of witnessing instead of jumping into fix-it mode, then we actually can see what is going on with our children. No longer do we see our children as people who are willfully defying and challenging us, but we see them for who they are — evolving souls who are learning through all the varied experiences that life gives them. With that perspective, we are not the enforcers or authority figures as parents but rather we are their guides who find and remove barriers (and often the barriers are our own egoic agendas).
The parent-child relationship becomes a microcosm of the larger world, and the family environment, a playground — a safe space for children to explore, take risks, fall down, get back up, and how to meet bigger and bigger challenges. Young children love to learn and grow and delight in the process. They are hardwired for it, so if we can get our baggage out of the way, we can provide them with an empowering foundation for growth that will support them through their entire life. Every day, every challenge becomes an opportunity for us to grow and model that for our children.
The most incredible part is that we get to play right alongside them. When we approach parenting as a playground for our own personal growth, we are modeling for them the joy, passion, enthusiasm, and love that comes from approaching all of life this way. As we become more joyful, they are free to access their own deep well of joy, too.
Future generations will have their fair share of challenges to face where the ability to grow and access joy will be essential. We have an idea about what some of the challenges will likely be: climate crises, resource scarcity, AI and other advanced technologies, geopolitical tensions, and nuclear threats to name just a few. No doubt all are quite massive in scale. If children learn from us how to watch their minds and emotions — and not become them — they will most clearly see the situations, possibilities, and even solutions. If they become wrapped up in overwhelm and fear, then they most certainly won’t fare well in the face of uncertainty. But if they know that they can handle any thought or emotion that comes their way, then they will also be able to handle the challenges that comes their way. Challenges are only truly insurmountable when we believe our thoughts about them.
There will be more space in our children’s minds to solve the largest of challenges because their internal landscape will not be clouded with fear, reactivity, overwhelm, and anxiety. In order to solve big problems or questions there needs to be curiosity, openness, and non-judgment. By pursuing our own personal growth through parenthood we not only are creating more joy for ourselves and our children in the short term, but we are also best preparing them for a future that we will not be able to accompany them through.
The beauty of this process is that we are planting seeds that they can cultivate into new ways of being that are beyond our current understanding. We do our best to grow ourselves for them, and then by the very nature of growth and evolution, they will far surpass us in our current understanding. Undoubtedly, they and their children will look at our way of being and posts like this as archaic in a very short time, and that is exactly how it should be. We can only take the baton so far with our understanding and then we pass it off to our children who will pass it off to their children. In all this mystery and uncertainty, anything — truly anything — is possible.
But it starts with us. It starts with working on our inner landscape. It starts during the late-night feedings, getting toddler socks on when running late, responding and not reacting when the preschooler is melting down, being the space when the door slams to a teenager’s room, and the many seemingly small moments that color the everyday experiences of being a parent. Each one of those is an opportunity to work on witnessing our thoughts and emotions to see the situation clearly without the drama of our own ego. Because ultimately our personal growth is a gift not only to our children, but to the world and life itself.
When we shift and expand our perspective so that we can see both ourselves and our children more clearly in all the moments of our days, wisdom naturally arises in the place of our egos. Let go of you — your ego — so that life can be the parent and you’re set free to enjoy the wild ride.
“If I let go of me, then that which is greater than me will be the parent.”
— Michael Singer
With gratitude for the teachings of Michael Singer, a modern-day sage and the inspiration for this post. The beginning of the second section of this post was adapted from his book Living Untethered to imagine about what he would have to say about the parenting journey as a spiritual path.
About me: Mom of two, wife, writer and podcast co-host who is fascinated by the intersection of parenting and spirituality — one seeker exploring the wild experience of being a parent and being human. For more reflections on parenting and spirituality, follow me on Medium and subscribe to my weekly newsletter: aparentspurpose.substack.com.
© Caitlin Frauton. All rights reserved.
