Reflective Parents

Reflection is a great skill for personal growth because it allows us to rethink about our decisions and help us make better ones next time. Same applies to parenting. Reflective parents examine own choices as parents and interactions with children and evaluate if they are beneficial or harmful to the relationship or child’s development. Then, they work on changing what they need to change and continue with good choices.

Reflection is an essential aspect of good parents. We cannot improve ourselves as parents without reassessing our parenting choices everyday. In order to become better parents, first we have to face today’s mistakes and admit our wrongs that have negatively affected our child and the relationship. This, like many other important things in life, does not come easy and sometimes it can even be painful to reflect what we have done. It seems so much simpler to push it away from our brain and move on the next day.

Unfortunately, pushing it out of the brain and moving on is not going to help us do better next time. Especially if we keep making similar mistakes, something needs to be changed fundamentally. This will take not only our time but can also drain energy. It takes our commitment to reflect. Yet I want to argue that it will absolutely be worth the effort.

Understanding why we went too far, overreacted, overprotected, neglected, and/or dismissed is an important step to prevent them in the future. We need to ask ourselves what exactly was that we tried to teach our kids, how our fears and anxiety got in the way of our good intentions and if our negative feelings or unresolved issues unfairly attacked our children. Again, these topics can be uncomfortable and distressing but we will come out so much more grounded as parents after we figure out what were our issues to deal with and what were their lessons to learn. After we gain this clarity of the situations, we can then be closer to becoming ideal parents that we aspire to be.