My own childhood carried a core wound of people pleasing that was rooted in fear, guilt and the need for approval. I learned at a very young age to monitor the emotional mood of my environment, to earn love that felt conditional and suppress my own emotional needs to avoid conflict. The same core wound was evident in my relationships and recognising this was a fundamental part of my own personal healing journey. Bringing awareness into my own conscious parenting took a little extra compassion and patience.
My unconscious belief as a parent was wanting my child to be happy, I didn't want my child to experience the same pain I felt as a child and I didn't want my child to live in fear or feel they couldn't open up or talk to me. My motivation was to ensure my child felt loved, heard and happy. These were all beautiful intentions with many positive traits. What I had not yet learned was how to separate love from approval. The desire for my child to be happy was driven by my own need for my child to be happy, and that's a very different thing.
I learned through my own experience of parenting that I had difficulty saying no to my child which was derived from a deep-rooted unease around seeing them upset. Seeing them upset unconsciously meant I was somehow failing as a parent, and I took on the responsibility for their emotions to fix, appease and compensate because I could deeply relate to and feel my own child's emotions as though they were my own, triggering my own childhood experience.
The hard truth I had to accept was that I was teaching my child the difficulties I had around setting boundaries to the point where if I tried, they would challenge these boundaries with persistence, knowing I would eventually give in. Not because I was weak, but because of the emotional upset that came with saying no. It was the very emotional upset I learned in my own childhood to monitor and avoid. And through this approach, I was unknowingly teaching my child that emotional discomfort had to be removed or avoided.
The beautiful part of conscious parenting is that the very same qualities, if applied from a place of awareness, can become our parenting strength. We move from emotional responsibility to emotional awareness. I can deeply understand my child's feelings without the need to carry them or fix them, I can validate their feelings without validating all behaviour. I can set boundaries that come from a loving place and disappoint them without abandoning them.
Instead of a child who may grow up learning and apply the same behaviours of becoming highly attuned to emotions, avoiding conflict, or uncomfortable with boundaries, my child can experience something different from a parent who now shows up as a conscious parent, giving them the opportunity to learn and choose differently.