For people who grow up under difficult circumstances having children can feel like a really big choice to make. And part of that choice depends on the confidence we have that we can do parenting differently than our parents did. But we CAN give our children a kind of childhood that feels healthier, with more good relationships and self-confidence than we had. 

(If you'd rather watch the video than read, you can go to the Landscape of Mothers YouTube channel and watch this video).

Once we find ourselves as parents it's likely that we're still struggling with some of the effects of our childhood experiences. We have internalized a lot of what we saw and understood when we were young and we don't know it's there anymore until we're exhausted, overwhelmed, and stretched too thin. And that's when all of our intentions to do things differently implode. We can't parent through our will anymore and we revert to the strategies our parents used because they are the most available in our tired brains.

For some of us this turns into a bad cycle. One where we feel like we've failed, we're not doing a good enough job, and the shame and sense of failure overtake us. When we hear ourselves sounding like our parents, and the disappointment in our ability to parent arises, we might overcompensate. This cycle creates instability, a sense that we can't rely on ourselves to behave as we intend to, and for our children they become uncertain of what to expect from us. 

What we are really looking for is the stable ground in the middle where we are present to our own inner workings and feelings, as well as to the needs of our child in front of us. But how do we get there AND STAY THERE!

Short answer is we don't always. But there is the possibility of being on that stable present parenting ground much of the time (enough of the time that our children can form some expectations around their needs being met). 

The enemy of the solid ground is the shame and urgency that comes when we blow up and do or say something we regret. We've treated our children like we were treated, instead of from what's really important to us. There's a deep discomfort that we want to get away from. So we're likely to try to patch things up as quickly as possible through overcompensating. This tends to feel yucky too, so we try to move on as fast as possible.

But what we all most need in that moment is presence. We need that for ourselves, and our kids need it from us. Our ally here is, paradoxically, slowing down. It helps to drop any pieces of urgency that we can, that are coming from our desire to rush past this discomfort, and to sit with it a moment. When we develop an Inner Mother who is capable of tending to our own disappointment and discomfort we are doubling down on that solid ground we are always trying to cultivate. We are bringing our distressed Inner Child to that landscape, as well as our child in front of us. 

This is growing up with our children. This is why having children can be considered a spiritual practice. This is why it can be healing for those of us with relational wounds from our family of origin to have children. There are other ways to do it, but if you find yourself in this cycle of "up and down" parenting know that this dedication to parenting through presence and relationship is healing to your Inner Child, your family line, and to your ancestors. It is doing repair on many levels.

Parenting from this solid ground with presence is the best way to build a relationship with your children that will last through the developmental stages as they grow, and on into their adult years. Most often when I hear of people who aren't in contact with their parents anymore it's because these relational tasks were left undone. Because they rushed past the difficulties and wounds of parent-child relationships, and the adult children feel like their parents don't see or acknowledge their experience. 

If this feels like a struggle that you see in your friends, please forward this post to them to let them know they're not alone. And if this is you, and you want some structure for this journey you can find my mentoring services on my website. 

While the science suggests that nature is good for us, that it calms our nervous systems, lowers our blood pressure, and makes us healthier, the truth is nature probably doesn’t do that for everyone. 

There is a real thing about fear in nature. Fairy tales tell us to fear the dark forest through which we cannot see. Our minds tell us that what we can’t predict is dangerous. And there’s some truth to that. 

Nature is also an open slate for our projections. Nature won’t resist them. So, it’s possible to spend time in nature and see the things we are most afraid of, things that seem brutal, dominating, and cruel. If that’s what we see in nature we may be deeply afraid of being further brutalized by spending time outdoors.

It’s true that some people will not feel comforted by nature. But there is an opportunity here. That is, no matter how you feel about what you notice in the natural world, how does that reflect what you are thinking? That is, you might see something in nature that makes you feel… yes, good, grounded, relaxed, etc… and/or agitated, worried, vigilant? 

I remember walking in the forest near my house for exercise sometimes with the thought that I would receive this gentleness and blessing of the forest while I walked. But when I was on the trail, I also noticed that I was worried and anxious… less about animals like coyote or mountain lion… and more about people. Men in particular. The fear that I might be attacked around any corner was deeply and persistently present. It gave me the opportunity to feel and understand all of the fears I had in my life that were keeping me in a situation that I didn’t like. My walks in the forest were metaphors for my life at large and allowed me to the opportunity to see and become aware of my own fears. 

There were a few ways I came to find more comfort and blessing in the forest, but the most important part was to be reflective so that I could base my excursions into the forest on something that was true to my current moment, rather than keeping away from the things that could potentially comfort me. That is, once I recognized how I was projecting my fear of the unknown on the forest, I could decide more clearly if I felt it was truly unsafe, or if my visit to the forest with self-awareness was actually going to be therapeutic. 

I wish I could tell you a story of grace and redemption in the forest. I wish I could say that while my early personal and social life was so hard, nature saved me, gave me a sense of belonging, and made me feel that things were going to be OK. But that’s not really what happened. 

I grew up in the suburbs. My dad liked the outdoors, but it always involved an activity or sport like snow skiing, water skiing, or gardening. My parents weren’t the wilderness types. We didn’t camp to immerse ourselves in nature, we did it to be near a lake for skiing, or to go hiking with a goal. It wasn’t about pleasure or relaxation.

So, honestly I didn’t really feel comforted by nature when I was a kid. I was lucky enough to live near the ocean for part of my childhood, and I knew that was compelling and lovely. I fell in love with individual oak trees when I lived in Southern California. I dreamed of coral reefs and ocean animals, but didn’t know a lot about either.

It was that compulsion toward a nature I did not know that lead me to studying the ocean. I didn’t know how to just be with it, in order to have a relationship I thought I had to study it. So I did. And I got a couple of really gorgeous jobs that took me to remote islands for months at a time. Some of that was a struggle. It was good to be away from so many people (usually the island crews were small… 2-5 people). 

And, I had experience living with little, so not having electricity or running water didn’t feel particularly alarming, even though I’d never really lived that particular kind of minimalism before. The hard part was finding out what nature is really like. The hard part was living on an island with seabirds for whom it’s commonplace to lay several eggs, and for the first to hatch to kill the others as they break through their eggs. It isn’t always quick or efficient. It can feel brutal and cruel. I’ve also listened to mother elephant seals cry out for their dead or missing pups, and I’ve seen the carcasses of seabird chicks decay around piles of plastic they were fed unknowingly by their parents. 

It’s hard to be in the world… for sure. And that’s always going to be true. There’s no enlightenment in nature, unless you define transcendence to mean learning to be with things as they are. Sometimes we hear people say “there is only the here and now”, but that’s only kind of true. I mean, it is true that we can only act now… we can’t go back to the past and change things.

We are not only embedded in the right here right now, we bring with us the patterns, biases, and understandings of the past. We are not free from our own histories. 

So, how does nature help us? It doesn’t help us by being perfect and showing us how to “do it right”. It doesn’t help us because it’s inherently good or romantic. It helps because nature is somewhere safe where we can project our stuff. The natural world isn’t going to react to how we see it or what we think of it. Nature is neutral to the workings of the human mind in that regard. What isn’t neutral is what we see back.

​What we see in nature is a reflection of what is already true in us. 

If I think back to my walking in the woods story, the forest reflected back to me that I was afraid of all the ways I couldn’t see how to move forward. I couldn’t see what the real threats were to my safety and well-being. I was afraid of so many things that were unnamed, and those things were keeping me to the path someone else created. That’s fine sometimes, it’s nice to travel in the footsteps of pioneers before us, and it’s not fine when it feels like it’s costing too much of your sense of self. And that’s where I was at the time. I knew I was not on my life path, I knew I wasn’t doing what my heart felt was mine to do in the world, but I was so afraid of all the things I was unsure of, that I couldn’t deviate. I wasn’t brave enough to make my own way. 

The forest was neutral on the whole thing. It turned out that by naming and facing all of the other stuff in my life, I realized the forest wasn’t unsafe. Not where I was walking. That forest loop held me as I transformed my relationship with the unknown. I walked there often. The way I’ve told this story looking back on it may make it seem like I knew what I was doing there… but at the time I really didn’t. It’s only in retrospect that I understand the overarching theme of what I was doing there. 

And even now, this is just my story. This is my experience with nature and the forest and learning to see my own reflection. But maybe this won’t be your story. I’m just making room here for us to be scared, joyful, open, clear, reflective, and true to ourselves. And things can always change in the future. Maybe now it is scary to be in the forest alone, maybe it won’t be later. Or maybe it always will be. It’s OK, however it is.
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At face value that's obvious. But how often do you give up yourself in order to meet someone else's needs? How often does some part of you that has needs, feel abandoned and left behind? 

I'm not saying to only ever consider yourself. I am saying that caregivers and parents are often put in positions where they have to tend to someone else's needs before they take care of their own. I am saying that when we grew up being the one who got into a pattern of letting go of (or ignoring) our own needs so that we could keep someone else (usually parents) to be calm or take care of business, we can get used to not tending to ourselves. 

Not tending ourselves is not sustainable. That's where burnout happens. That's where we revert to the behaviors we are most familiar with. That's why, even when we are trying to hard to parent differently than how we were raised, we end up sounding like our parents. We end up yelling or sulking or manipulating just like they did. 

And, if you're like me, it brings up grief and shame when I hear myself say some of the hurtful things they said. It feels like failure to end up behaving as they did even though I had such strong intentions to not repeat those wounds. 

But it's really not about being a "good parent" or a "bad parent," in most cases it's just about whether or not someone had the skills, tools, and good relationship modeling. It's about being able to be whole humans with good awareness and the desire to learn how to be together even when things are difficult.

So when you find yourself sounding like your parents, and the grief and shame rolls in, know that you are likely over capacity and you are overriding your own needs. Compassion for yourself because you're managing a lot is the first step. It's ok if you mess up sometimes. It's part of being human. And your ability to do the relationship repair with your family members is part of creating strong ties. 

Don't leave yourself out. Taking care of you when you find yourself outside of your current capacity is not shameful, it is human. Tending to your relationships through your shifts in capacity is how you BECOME the person who is the parent you want to be. This is not accomplished through managing your behaviors and suppressing what's happening in you.

Since the 1980's family therapists have recognized four different parenting styles and researched outcomes for children even into adulthood. The styles are authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and neglectful. While other researchers went on to refine this and change the titles of the styles, I want to share what I think is most important about these studies collectively. 

1. The degree to which parents support their children by guiding them through problem solving, being aware of what's going on for kids and involved in daily interactions, and by providing positive reinforcement has been shown to have positive impacts on children's behavior and academic performance. 

2. The more parents tell their kids what to do and think, the more likely the kids will be behave in aggressive and controlling ways with their peers. They are likely to have low awareness of their emotional state or the emotions of others, lack empathy, and resort to control as way to interact with others. This makes sense, right? We treat others as we've been treated because it's the set of strategies we learned to interact with. 

​3. There is an insidious nature of neglect in which without rules or support, the child is seen as a resource for the adults to get their own needs met. The child is left feeling unseen, unvalidated, and has no framework for creating their sense of self. This can lead to co-dependency, and extraction of the energy of the child for the benefit of the parent. So, just because we're not brutalizing our children doesn't mean we don't hurt them. 

4. These are somewhat artificial delineations. While some parents may employ some strategies more than others, know that it's possible, likely even, that a given parent may use all of these strategies at different times depending on their own capacity. The corollary to that is that even "good" parents sometimes punish or don't meet their kids' need for support sometimes. 

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
I am increasingly hearing public conversations about estrangement in which adult children and their parents disagree on the cause of separations. I'm not saying one side is right and the other is wrong, but it strikes me that there is a consistent lack of listening to each other's perceptions that keeps reconciliation off the table. Both sides appear to me to just be screaming to be heard and acknowledged in their perception.

So, why would this be happening? Because there was a lack of empathy, communication skills, and capacity to truly understand and be understood by one another that long predates the estrangement. There is a lot of blame, blatant expectation, and shaming happening. These are the ways humans go about trying to coerce someone to give them the type of attention they want when the direct request is either not made or not met. 

I believe so much strife is rooted in the internal framework we have around our roles, the expectations our parents have of us, and the stories we are told about who we are. We are also limited by the relational skills we may have never learned from our parents. When we examine our past experience, our current desires, and our relational skillset, we can find our way to a way of healthier relating that leaves us feeling like our families are our refuge from the harsh world.
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RESOURCES

• Maccoby, E. E., & Martin, J. A. (1983). Socialization in the context of the family: Parent-child interaction. In P. H. Mussen (Series Ed.) & E. M. Hetheringtono(Vol. Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. IV. Socialization, Personality and Social Development (4th Ed., pp. 1-101). New York: Wilepy.
• ​Kuppens, S. and Ceulemans, E. 2019. Journal of Child and Family Studies. 28(1): 168–181.
• Rekha, S. 2020. Authoritative and authoritarian parenting with respect to emotional and social development in their children; an evidence based analysis. International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Development, Vol. 7, (12): 24-33.