Am I Parenting My Child or Reparenting Myself?

Lately, I’ve been noticing that everywhere I go parents are trying so hard to do it differently. I was sitting at the gym watching mothers crouch down to meet their children in the middle of huge emotions, watching them pause instead of punish, regulate instead of react, and it hit me how deeply this generation of parents is reparenting themselves in real time through the way we care for our children.

In this episode, I’m talking about emotional regulation, reparenting, and the moment I realized that tending to my child’s emotions was also teaching me how to finally tend to my own. I’m talking to the parent who feels overwhelmed by their child’s emotions, who worries they’re getting it wrong, or who is realizing that parenting is bringing their own unresolved wounds to the surface. It’s a reminder that our children don’t need perfection from us. They need presence. And sometimes the most healing thing we can do, for them and for ourselves, is to pause, soften, and choose to respond differently than what was modelled to us.

Highlights:

• Why so many of us freeze when our children have big emotions
• The difference between reacting to our children vs. regulating with them
• How parenting is revealing the emotional support we may not have received ourselves
• A real-life moment with my son that reminded me it’s never actually “about the trash”
• Why Human Design can be such a powerful tool for both parenting and reparenting yourself

You’re Invited is produced by Six-Two Studio.

Transcript

Alex Cantone (00:17.486) I was just sitting in a little cafe work area at the gym reviewing some things. And it felt like every couple of minutes, a parent, mostly mothers, with their kids would walk by. And I'm experiencing a child having a really big emotion. And I'm watching some parents, most parents.

meet their children where they're at. And as I'm watching this over and over and over again, and I am watching these parents actively with some of that strain and frustration and maybe even that awareness that, gosh, this is taking everything out of me to pause and get on my child's level.

And help them work through this big emotion and watching them do it. And it feels so in line with what I'm experiencing personally right now as a mother, with the conversations I'm having with so many of my friends and loved ones right now. And it seems like this pattern is orbiting me, this idea is orbiting me.

And it's all leading me back to one thing. And it's that this generation of parents, this new wave, this new paradigm of parents, we, in the face of our own struggles, challenges, and capacity are making conscious choices and conscious efforts to.

Parent our children in a way that is different from what we experienced. At least that's what my reality is showing me right now. As I sit there on my laptop and I watch a seemingly very tired mother of three kids tend to her middle child who is screaming, My foot hurts, my foot hurts, and is wailing. And I watch her.

Alex Cantone (02:40.056) Take one of those exasperating deep breaths, crouch down and say to her, I am going to sit with you right now and I am going to look at your foot and I am going to give you some time to move through this. And I think how beautiful is that? Because how often are we the parents, or are how often were we parented?

in a way that when we were having a big emotion, we were told to stop having that emotion, to pick ourselves up, to suck it up, to get over it, to stop having it, to stop being us, was the messaging. And this is not a bash session on

our parents' parenting style and what that did to us. But it's more about recognizing and an appreciation for the parents who are actively trying to do it differently and are doing so successfully in ways with a blank slate. I certainly feel that way when it comes to dealing with conflict and helping

Cope my child and helping my child regulate their emotions. And it's just so funny that these have been the conversations I've been having recently. That so much of what we are all going through, and so much of what we are needing right now is not just the acknowledgement of it, but the awareness to reparent.

You know, I think that I found myself recently in this season where I'm really looking at how I have outsourced my own inner authority, where I have maybe leaned on my husband for emotional holding and support in a way that has led to our dynamic feeling a bit imbalanced at times.

Alex Cantone (05:06.842) And where I have relied on him to pick up the pieces of our emotional, sometimes strung out kids, dysregulated kids, because I myself don't have the capacity to face it and to hold it and to regulate with them. And that's been this really sobering sort of discomfort and this thing that's led me to really think.

Am I not equipped? And why am I not equipped? Or am I equipped? And am I just not seeing how? And I think a lot of what I've been talking about recently is speaking to this journey that I'm on, which is coming back to myself and tending to myself and caring for myself, not in a generic way.

Or what is normally prescribed to us as quote unquote self-care, but really deeply looking inside myself and asking, what is it that I need? And I think what I've been doing lately, which has been the key that's been unlocking it all, is I've really just been reparenting myself. And that's what I see.

When I see that mother crouch down, meeting her daughter with her gaze and looking at her and telling her, I'm going to pause and I'm going to give you space and I'm going to help you through this. Because in that exasperated breath, I could see a mother who maybe was never given the pause, who, despite everything screaming at her.

To just get on with the program and tell her daughter that her foot is fine, she is walking, you're just overreacting. She decides, no, I'm going to tend to this right now. And I do believe that those of us who are parents of this next generation that we're raising.

Alex Cantone (07:35.03) I believe that we are the new wave of parents. And that's been pointed out a lot recently by family members who are maybe telling us that we are not disciplining our children correctly, that we need to have consequences and punishments for their actions. And in the face of that pressure that we feel, we're getting curious.

And I ask, well, how was it that you were disciplined? How was it that your emotions were handled? Because it was your parents' job as your parent, as your caregiver, to be the external regulator for you. And so did you receive that? Or were you told not to have it? Or were you shown through modeling to avoid it?

To push it down, to pretend that it wasn't there. And how does that come out in your current parenting style? These are the questions that I have been asking myself in the face of my child melting down and breaking down, and me staring at him frozen, asking myself, What the hell do I need to do right now? Because I feel like

I'm making it up as I go. And when I choose consciously to make a different decision, to linger a little bit longer in the feeling and to hold him in it, to name what is happening and to embrace it and to encourage him to feel it through. When I say less and just meet him there in it.

I notice that in that moment I'm doing something so important for myself. I am meeting myself in that freeze state. I am meeting myself in that fear of my body feels out of control and I don't know what to do with all of this energy and chaos inside of me. And I need

Alex Cantone (10:01.92) Someone outside of me to hold me and help me sort it out, not necessarily with words, but with presence. In that moment, I'm reparenting myself. I have a family member who's going through this right now. And without divulging too much details, we were talking today about this concept of outsourcing our inner authority.

Of triple checking our math on our own decision making. Not just single checking, not just double checking, but triple checking our math. And why don't we trust ourselves when we're in the peak of something really challenging? And it feels like I need to get someone else's opinion or approval or forgiveness on this thing.

Where are we not trusting ourselves, meeting ourselves, forgiving ourselves, validating and affirming and seeing ourselves? And how funny it is that when we just turn inward and tell ourselves the simple sentence, I'm here. I've got you. I see you.

I'm going to stay with you through this. No fancy formulas or 10-step programs for how to create a perfectly well-behaved child, because it's really not that complicated. It's so much simpler than we make it. And I think when it feels like

This giant mountain that we have to summit. That feeling, you know, that feeling when you're having a day and your kid is freaking out, and you know, because you're the adult in the room, that what they're freaking out about really isn't actually the thing that's happening. They're just dysregulated. But because the thing seems so nonsensical, there's maybe that initial

Alex Cantone (12:27.092) reaction that we have, which is, gosh, this is so silly and meaningless and such a waste of time. Like, what are they actually crying about? You know, I have those thoughts. I have those thoughts a lot of like, my gosh, really? I mean, it happened this morning with some thing that was out of place.

And some piece of garbage on the ground that I wanted to throw into the trash bin. And my son is like, no, you can't throw it in the trash bin. And I'm like, but it's garbage. And I'm trying to explain it. And I'm sitting there looking at him and I'm going, this is trash. This has germs on it.

We need to throw it away. We can't just leave it out in in the open for your little sister to grab and play with. He's like, I don't want you to throw it away. You know, the whole thing: the stomping, the screaming, all of this stuff. That in that moment there's a little voice that might be telling you, gosh, he is being a brat. But then there's a voice that follows for me, which is, I hear you, but

What is actually happening? And so I looked at him and I ignored the whole thing about the garbage on the floor and stopped trying to win this battle of wills. And I said, Do you want to cuddle right now? And he melted into me. And so it was never about the trash. It was never about me being right or winning that battle. None of that matters.

It was never about me being the authority figure and showing him who's boss in the room. It was about seeing the child who I brought into this world as a being who needed support in being regulated in that moment. And if I can remove my ego from it and see the emotion for what it is, this is a stress response happening.

Alex Cantone (14:51.616) As some form of whatever it might be that I might pick up on the environment, right? When I'm thinking about it. it was sensory overload. He was experiencing sensory overload because he had taken off this sopping wet pull-up that was super heavy. And all of a sudden he's exposed. He's just waking up. I'm already just.

Writing this list of to-dos and demands for him to take care of upon arrival upstairs. And he's like, I just need to land. And so can I get out of my own way and stop trying to prove that I am the authority figure in the room, that I am the adult in the room, and rather just be the adult in the room.

Who's not thinking about how to teach my child a lesson? But rather how to show my child that when we are experiencing an emotion or a sensation that is overwhelming us, that there are healthy ways to regulate and cope and get our body back to a state of homeostasis. How many of us have lacked that?

Not because our parents were so shitty and didn't know anything, but because they were simply just giving us what they could with the tools and the resources that were available to them. And there's a whole other episode on divulging and unpacking what that might mean and what that might have looked like. But what this is about is reparenting. It's reparenting.

By making a different choice in the moment when your reactive self wants to react, wants to be done with the discomfort of the moment. Because maybe you never were co-regulated with. Or maybe the way that you were wasn't what you needed. And this is really where I love.

Alex Cantone (17:12.76) human design as a tool for reparenting, because you can look at your chart and you can look at your child's chart and you can unpack all of the ways that you are designed to be brilliantly yourself. And the reason why it's so permission giving and energy giving when someone reads you your chart or when you get some tidbits of information on it, I believe

Is because you're finally being shown what you needed in the face of what you didn't receive. You are finally receiving that exhale of like, my gosh, this totally makes sense. Why I experienced X, Y, and Z when I was younger, and why that thing that my parent did or my caregiver did just didn't meet the mark for me.

And that's why this system is such a beautiful and in my opinion, a necessary tool for parents to have in their back pocket. But not just for their kids so that they can meet their needs, but for themselves so that they know how to reparent themselves and make a different choice along the way. And so that we can look at ourselves in that impulse to react. And in that moment, make a conscious choice to respond instead.