Children hold a key.

When we look at our children we see ourselves. The children, or child, that comes to mind in your life doesn’t necessarily have to be a product of your own reproduction, mine certainly isn’t; but, we can learn from any child, even if we aren’t raising them. Seeing ourselves through children is purely a subconscious act. The little mirrors that they are reflect back at us the qualities we remember having within ourselves when we were younger. This act can occur when building connections in other contexts, too.

One in particular, is in romantic connections. A lot of the time the “honeymoon stage” is the period when we look at a fresh new mirror. We’re hoping to see the qualities that we find attractive, which end up being the ones that will trigger our wounds so we can alchemize them. This is what happens when we say “opposites attract.” In another romantic situation, we look for the reflection of the qualities that we love most about ourselves. This is the healthier version of a romantic relationship when we’re capable of receiving the love we think we deserve.

Many of us raise our children similar to the way we were raised and view it as the “standard.” From what I experienced raising my son, it felt as natural as breathing. I don’t mean parenting like an angel or knowing exactly what to do, but I mean stepping into a role that represented the way I was raised. The reasoning is because our children trigger our inner child. That mirror reflection children have is so clear in the beginning that we place our expectations and fears onto them at very young ages, until they’re grown enough to challenge us. This is when the toddler years get difficult. They want to do what they want, unapologetically, but we were raised with intrinsic beliefs about how children are supposed to behave, what they’re allowed to do, touch, see, or simply experience at all.

So we’re faced with a challenge when our childhood rules continue to reside within us, and our kids trigger them. Did your parents yell at you for climbing? You may carry out that rule too, just to protect that innocent child inside of you. You project your response to the trigger onto your child to keep them safe. Except! The reason isn’t to be safe from climbing. It’s to be safe from getting in trouble for climbing. Most of the rules we operate under make sense for children in general, like for their own safety; which is why we don’t often challenge these rules. Climbing on furniture can be dangerous, but it’s not inherently so. Maybe you don’t want your kid climbing, because you’re worried about damaging the furniture. That has nothing to do with safety, but the rule can still apply for both safety purposes and for protecting the furniture. It stands to reason, then, that the rules we place are for fear of our own repercussion and not necessarily due to safety for our child.

There are those, however, like my wife, who became aware of how they were raised and chose a different path. It takes a certain level of awareness to make an alternate choice. My wife, for instance, was physically and emotionally abused, and she chose to take a different approach. Some that take an alternate path look at the child climbing and see it as an act of self expression. There is no triggered response to childhood rules, or maybe there is, and the person refuses to raise their child the same way.

We often judge people that make different choices, because we look at our life as evidence of what worked in the past; therefore, why change it? We defend the way we were raised, because we attribute our upbringing as an aspect of our identity. We may feel as though it’s a direct attack on our parents, and inherently ourselves, when others try to offer an alternate perspective. A big area of parenting that’s seeing the most backlash is in reference to physical discipline and corporal punishment. When people talk negatively about how we were raised, we don’t like looking at ourselves in a negative light. We believe we are good people. Therefore, we aren’t judging people for their new parenting tactics because they hold no ground, we judge them because if we accept them as better, then we accept that we are less than.

Personally, I’ve been working on peeling back the layers of my own parenting over the last 9 years of raising my step-son, who I met when he turned four. I don’t intend to get into the details, but it has been a long journey. I owe my son credit to helping me learn some big life lessons due to the constant triggering of my inner-child and inner-teen. The most important was learning how to treat him with respect and unconditional love. I was raised, and intrinsically learned that children, including myself, were mischievous and always trying to get away with something. (This is not an attack on my parents, or any other adults in my life. Let’s put away the shame and stop passing it around.)

I was raised as though I was already an adult. There’s actually a term for this called adultomorphisme. This means that my parents perceived me as though I already thought like an adult, and that my actions were driven by the same reasonings and intentions an adult would use. When in reality, they were placing their own projections onto me, and then reinforcing them with the way they disciplined me. It’s taking away the innocence of the child’s mind and placing preconceived ideas onto them.

We assume that a child pretends they’re sick because they don’t want to go to school, but where did they get that idea from? Children pick up everything like a sponge. They watch our behaviors and learn from us. So, without educating children on the reasoning behind the things we do, they come to their own conclusions. This isn’t to say that a child watched their parent call out from work when they weren’t sick, but maybe your child learned they could miss school by pretending to be sick, because you accuse them of doing it first. Instead of focusing on the innocent child being sick and taking care of them without question, we’ve taken this view of children (the mischievous little fiend that wants to get away with stuff) and placed it upon them. This provides an opportunity for them to pick it up like a sponge and identify with it.

It took me a long time to understand this. I didn’t trust my child at bedtime to get to sleep, especially with electronics in his room. But that distrust wasn’t created because he gave me a reason to mistrust him. It was preexisting. I’m already instilling in him the fact that I don’t trust him, and he’s learning that he can’t be trusted or that he can’t trust himself with electronics. We’ve had instances where I’ve caught him up all night watching tv, or playing video games. It’s a behavior that may never had manifested if I hadn’t assumed that it existed in the first place.

Children really are blank canvases. We raise them with our preconceived ideas of how children act, which inadvertently creates an understanding of themselves within. Something else I would do is that I wouldn’t take my child’s injuries or sicknesses seriously enough. My son has a very sensitive nervous system due to his ADHD. He gets overstimulated, and he doesn’t like how certain things feel on his feet. When he would hit his foot on a table leg he would practically keel over in pain, and I would look at him like he was being so dramatic. I would ask if he was okay, and then ask him to try to stand or walk almost immediately after. He would limp like he’d broken a hip. At the time, I didn’t take into consideration how sensitive his feet were, and I thought he was trying to get attention. But that preconceived idea was living within me based on my own beliefs about getting hurt. I grew up believing - due to the circumstances of my upbringing and not my parents’ direct intention - that getting hurt means people care about me. It got me the attention I so desperately desired. The correlation that I was projecting onto my son already dwelled within me. He wasn’t trying to get attention through his reaction. He was triggering that correlation within me and how I believed that I didn’t always deserve the attention I received.

I’m writing this to ask that you too attempt to take a deeper look and see what you can alchemize within your relationship to the children in your lives. The way we view our children is the way we view ourselves as children, which is why hurting them means we hurt ourselves. Children internalize much of their experiences by attributing the messages they learn and applying them to build their awareness of self - that’s why it’s crucial to be mindful of how we treat them.