Re-Parenting Yourself: Nurturing Your Inner Child While Raising Your Own

Parenting has a way of bringing us face-to-face with ourselves—often in ways we never expected. We enter this role believing we’ve worked through much of our own history, or at least the parts that matter. Then our children arrive, and with their presence comes a profound invitation: to revisit old stories, unhealed wounds, and younger parts of ourselves we didn’t even realize were still carrying so much.

Children truly are a gift—but not only in the ways we imagined. They are also mirrors. Guides. Catalysts. And sometimes, the sparks that ignite inner work we didn’t anticipate doing. In many ways, the result of raising a child isn’t just the child—it’s the parent we become along the way.

What Parenting Brings to the Surface

When we’re in the thick of daily life—exhaustion, schedules, crying, big feelings (theirs and ours)—parts of us emerge that can be startling. Parts we don’t recognize. Parts we don’t like. Parts we feel ashamed of. Maybe we snap. Maybe we shut down. Maybe guilt floods in so quickly we feel sick.

We find ourselves behaving in ways that feel in stark contrast to how we thought we’d show up. And when we love our children as much as we do, the dissonance can feel crushing.

But these moments are not evidence of failure. They are evidence of activation—older, younger parts of us surfacing because they feel threatened, overwhelmed, or alone.

The Inner Work Beneath the Outer Work

In my work with parents, we often explore how parenting awakens childhood trauma, family values we’re now questioning, or messages we absorbed that no longer align with who we want to be. Many parents describe feeling “ungrounded” until they reclaim pieces of who they have always been—pieces that got buried under expectation, survival strategies, or silence.

When your child reaches an age that you remember vividly—an age when you were shamed, dismissed, controlled, or left alone—you may find yourself reacting from that very place. Without noticing, you might project your old story onto your child’s present moment.

This is where re-parenting becomes essential.

What Re-Parenting Really Means

Re-parenting is the process of turning inward with curiosity, compassion, and steadiness. In Internal Family Systems language, it means letting your inner wisdom—the Self—tend to younger parts of you that are activated in parenting moments.

It means asking:

• What is this younger part trying to protect me from right now?

• What is it afraid will happen?

• What did it long to hear that it never heard?

• What comfort or understanding did it never receive?

  
  

When you can pause after a difficult exchange with your child, instead of turning toward shame, try turning inward. The part of you that showed up—whether angry, overwhelmed, or shut down—has a history. It’s been protecting you for a long time.

Re-parenting offers these parts the safety, voice, and compassion they never had when they first formed.

A Path Toward Compassion and Strength

As parents move through this process, many eventually find space to understand their own parents—the limitations they had, the wounds they carried, the capacity they simply didn’t possess. Not everyone reaches this place quickly, and no one should be rushed there.

Compassion for your parents is not a requirement for healing.

The first and most important step is compassion for yourself.

Tend to your own wounds. Acknowledge the parts of you that have been bracing, surviving, or protecting for decades. Offer yourself the words, understanding, and emotional presence you longed for as a child.

Re-parenting isn’t about becoming a perfect parent—it’s about becoming a gentler one, to yourself first and then naturally to your child. It’s one of the most profound, courageous forms of love you can offer: love that flows backward to your younger self and forward to the child you are raising.

And along the way, you may discover that parenting is not only about guiding a child through the world—it's about learning, slowly and tenderly, how to guide yourself home.