Parenting in quarantine: Digging deep

The other day, I decided to hop onto Brené Brown’s new podcast, “Unlocking Us.” I’ve studied her work for quite some time since become a Certified Daring Way™ Facilitator in 2015 under her organization, The Daring Way™. Many of my clients have talked about listening to her podcast and finding it helpful during quarantine. Anything that brings comfort, peace, humor, bits of joy, I’m all for right about now.

The episode of “Unlocking Us” that caught my eye was with guest Glennon Doyle. You may or may not be familiar with one of Glennon’s books, Carry On Warrior, Love Warrior, or her newest release, Untamed. In any case, Glennon was a guest on the podcast not just to talk about her new book but to share in her observations about life, her relationship with herself, and her children and her partner, Abby Wambach. 

I’ve read Glennon’s most recent book Untamed as well as her other two prior to the podcast so I was familiar with her style, her curious and thoughtful observations and existentialist-like stream of consciousness her books often illustrate. There was a lot that I took from listening to this particular podcast, but one of the things wasn’t actually from her or Brené Brown, but from the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung.

“The greatest burden that a child can bear is the unlived life of a parent.” Carl Jung

I think about this quote as it’s a brilliant and poignant thought about parenting and something to consider at all times, but especially as we’re all so closely together in our homes during quarantine. Parenting is challenging but parenting in a quarantine can be what I call crazy-making. There are so many examples of how it can go south, and fast. On the one hand, our kids can drive us crazy with questions, seemingly needing our attention constantly, interrupting our work and our flow, and not allowing for mental or physical breaks. On the other hand, our own self doubts about our parenting, our ability to teach them life skills and empathy let alone math is a constant and continuous loud chatter in our heads. Plus of course there’s always the stand-by audience participants, Guilt, Shame, and Perfectionism to keep us on our toes. Parenting is no joke.

But when you can step back from the chatter, from the worry of perception about your parenting, and from the “shoulds” that sometimes feel like they’re playing on a constant movie reel in your mind, when it’s a little quieter, and a little calmer, don’t be afraid to wonder: 

What are the buttons your child most often pushes in you?
What are the expectations you have of your child on a daily basis?
Where did these expectations come from? Think about your own childhood, the people that raised you, the way you grew up.
Do you carry pain or sadness with you from your childhood? What about in particular?
What do you wish you could’ve experienced as a child?
Do you remember longing for something, an emotion, an experience, a relationship when you were a kid? 

Take a look and see what comes up for you.

Where do the values you were raised with show with your parenting?
How are these values aligned or misaligned?
What values do you hold that you created outside of the way you grew up or how you were raised?
Are there things you do as a parent that you wish to become better at, less of, or more of?
Did you make any correlation between an experience you didn’t have to what you expect of your child?

So often, if there were experiences that left an impression upon us as children, there’s a relationship we continue to have with these experiences as adults, especially if we are unaware of the power they may have over us still. Whether they’re joyful relationships that were built over time with people of our past, traumatic events or circumstances, even things you remember being disappointed about, we carry these with us into adulthood. If we’re unaware of them, they can have a tendency to carry out into our parenting as we attempt to control an outcome of one kind or another. The anxiety we carry with us, the plans we make with our kids, even the unspoken or spoken rules of the house, many of these can be traced back to being a kid ourselves.

Whether as children or adults, the relationship to these experiences remains one thing above all else: Nothing happens in isolation or without impacting something or someone else. It’s a wonderment and the perception of such is that which has the power to change pretty much anything.