Are You Pouring Love into the Right Person?
Why it’s better to parent ourselves than our children
When I dreamed of having children, I often thought of what I would and would not do as a parent. I actually had a list in the back of a notebook growing up that was entitled “Things for My Kids.” It included instructions for my future parental self such as, “I will support their dreams no matter what,” “I will really listen when they talk,” and “I will remember that their first break up will feel like the end of the world.” Each line was very emphatic and absolute — just as I spoke in those teenage years.
As I grew older, I imagined loving my children unconditionally would be fairly easy. Echoes of Robert Munsch’s famous children’s book I’ll Love You Forever subconsciously ran through my head, and I thought, Who could not absolutely adore a little being with teeny tiny fingers and peach fuzz hair and have that feeling of unconditional love last anything short of forever?
Fast forward a few years and two children later, and it was very startling to learn the answer to that question was me. I did not feel an outpouring of love at 3 a.m. after countless nights of broken sleep. I did not feel particularly loving when food was splattered all over the kitchen floor. And I really didn’t feel loving when my oldest child would throw something at her younger sister. In fact, it took every ounce of energy I had to stay calm when my insides were fuming.
So I read books about how to “connect before you redirect,” I listened to various parenting podcasts daily, and incorporated “scripts” that would help me communicate better with my kids. And still I couldn’t seem to embody the loving presence that I wanted to.
I tried to connect, but my oldest could see my true intention was to direct. I said respectful words and used the scripts, but my tone and energy communicated something different. And I started to see myself falling into some of the exact same reactionary traps my own parents did. When I did manage to avoid some of the traps my parents experienced, new traps popped up as the parenting pendulum swung in the opposite direction from one generation to the next.
Watching this all unfold, my first impulse was to double down on my mission to do a better job parenting my kids. It was during this stage that I emailed a spiritual teacher about mediation practices for children. I expected him to praise my desire to teach children mindfulness and point me in the direction of the resources I was seeking, but instead he responded that rather than trying to teach my children mindfulness, I should focus on embodying the practices myself.
He said the best way for others, including children, to learn is to have the experience of interacting with a conscious human being who handles of the events of life with a smile on their face and love in their heart. For if I could do that, than they will learn from my quiet example over time.
That was definitely not the answer I wanted, but I couldn’t deny that he was pointing to a much greater truth — I would only ever embody the type of unconditional love I dreamed of giving my children if I stopped focusing on parenting them so much and instead focused on me.
A common definition of unconditional love is:
Love without strings attached. It’s love you offer freely. You don’t base it on what someone does for you in return. You simply love them and want nothing more than their happiness.
When I slowed down on pursuing all the parenting information, my predicament started to become clearer. I saw the depth of our unconditional love for our children only runs as deep as the unconditional love we have for ourselves. If there are parts of us that are covered up with shame, guilt and unworthiness, of course, that will be projected onto our children when we think they are doing something “unacceptable” (i.e., not worthy of our acceptance). Then the reactionary traps pop up left and right, enter the books and podcasts, and the cycle repeats.
What stops the cycle is pulling back the spotlight from our children and putting it on ourselves. While parenting resources are helpful, they can’t take us all the way. As the 13th century Persian poet Rumi so wisely writes:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
If we have built barriers to love within ourselves, the barriers don’t simply disappear after having children. It’s a beautiful paradox: we put all of our focus on parenting our children, but what would actually be infinitely more helpful for our children is if we focused on parenting — or reparenting — ourselves.
We live in a world where true unconditional love is rare, and for many of us, unconditional love has been the exception in our lives, not the rule (if we’ve experienced it at all). Then we are thrown into the trenches of parenting where the depth of our patience and acceptance is tested hundreds of times a day. It’s like running a mile once and somehow believing we are ready for the marathon. As with any incredible feat of humanity, we need to train daily, build the muscles, and discover parts of ourselves that we didn’t know existed. The farther we start from our goal, the more training we have to do.
So we hold the North Star of waking up to our own wholeness and completeness, and know in the process, we’ll come to see our children’s wholeness and completeness much more clearly. Byron Katie, an author who teaches self-inquiry, has a powerful framework for this journey that she calls “The Work.” In short, she guides people through the process of taking the spotlight off others and turning it around on ourselves to discover deeper truths about the nature of love. She says:
Self love is living those turnarounds. Then you experience the difference in the way you see that child the next time they walk through the door — and everyone else. Then when you look in the mirror, there’s nothing you cannot do to love what you see.
The irony is that each time we experience our own capacity growing to love our children unconditionally we actually fall more deeply in love with ourselves.
We, therefore, keep chipping away at our own large and small traumas, shame, unworthiness, and beliefs that keep us from fully seeing the truth of who we are. As we practice, our own inner well of love grows and is no longer being depleted by negative self-talk and firmly held unconscious beliefs. It begins to fill with the qualities of love that we can draw upon in the hundreds of moments every day that our children are asking us for patience and acceptance. As our capacity grows to handle our own uncomfortable emotions, thoughts and misguided actions, our ability to access compassion for our children’s grows, too. We come to naturally embody the type of love we know our children, and all children, are so deserving of.
And here’s the really beautiful part — as we love ourselves unconditionally, our children learn to love themselves unconditionally, which is far better for them than merely being the recipient of our love. We want to parent ourselves out of a job so our children can move through the world with their own inner well of unconditional love to draw from. There will be millions of moments in their lives where it will make much more sense for them to draw on their own well than to go looking for us. Ultimately, we want our well to runneth over, so when they most need it, their well, too, can runneth over.
Thank you to Byron Katie for inspiring this post. If you’d like to hear her speak on the topic of parenting, this is a wonderful interview (and also the interview she is quoted from above). And here is worksheet that is part of her self-inquiry process that is particularly helpful for parents.
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 free newsletter: aparentspurpose.substack.com.
© Caitlin Frauton. All rights reserved.
