Children learn through imitation long before they learn through instruction

Parenting is often imagined as a one-directional act. Adults teach, children learn. Adults guide, children follow. Yet anyone who has walked this path with honesty knows something far more tender, and far more challenging is happening beneath the surface. Parenting is not simply the shaping of a child. It is the reshaping of ourselves. Every stage of our child’s growth invites us into a stage of our own. Every emotional storm they face awakens what we thought had long passed. In raising our children, we find ourselves quietly raising the parts of us that were left behind.
A child’s needs have a way of illuminating the places where our own unmet needs once lived. When a toddler demands patience, we meet the younger version of ourselves who never received it. When a child melts down, we are confronted with the discomfort of emotions that were dismissed or punished in our own upbringing. Their vulnerability pulls at threads we learned to tuck away, and suddenly parenting becomes a mirror that reflects not only who we are today, but who we once were.
This is why parenting can feel like emotional excavation. Our children do not trigger us because they are doing something wrong, but because they are touching places within us that were never tended to. Their cries echo the ones we silenced. Their fears resemble the ones we minimised. Their longing for comfort awakens a longing we once buried. It is no small task to witness a child’s emotions while still learning how to make space for our own.
Raising ourselves while raising our children does not mean fixing everything we didn’t receive. It means meeting our inner child with the same compassion we offer our actual child. It means noticing the moment we feel overwhelmed and choosing presence over pattern. It means acknowledging the tug of old wounds and responding with care instead of repeating the scripts we inherited. Growth becomes a shared journey rather than a hierarchy of adult and child.
Children learn through imitation long before they learn through instruction. A parent who is actively raising themselves: tending to their emotions, reflecting on their triggers, choosing softness instead of reactivity, gives a child something more powerful than perfection. They give a living model of transformation. A child who sees a parent apologise, regulate, repair, and reflect learns that growth is safe, that mistakes are part of being human, and that love does not demand flawless behaviour.
There is a quiet beauty in realising that parenting is not a performance. It is a relationship. It is two nervous systems learning how to trust each other. It is two hearts learning how to stay open, even when old stories try to close them. It is an ongoing invitation to choose consciousness over autopilot, connection over control, healing over repetition.
In raising our children, we raise ourselves into the adults we once needed. That is the hidden gift of parenting: we grow alongside them, not ahead of them, becoming more whole with every step they take.

Hyesha Barrett The writer is a Master Life Coach and Positive Parent Specialist