Feeling overwhelmed by your children is a sign that something isn’t working properly. A lot of people have kids and they still manage to have a rich life of their own, with professional activities, lots of friends, travels, etc.

The first thing I need you to understand is that no kid in this world want their parents to sacrifice themselves for them. None. It doesn’t exist. Kids love their parents more than anything else and the only thing they want for them is to see them happy, successful, building interesting projects, having interesting friends, being genuinely in love, being fit and enthusiastic.

So the first and main way to love your children fully is to love yourself first

That’s what your kids want for you so the first question you can ask yourself is: do I want all of that for myself?

And if not, you need to explore why. If you don’t want all of the above for yourself, it means you’re a little bit depressed and living life through a sad and disempowered pattern.

The foundation of a happy family is two individuals who are solid in their own sense of selves and who are happy enough in life and together to generate a positive energy that will enable them to give to the children.

You can’t pour from an empty cup

Also know that kids get unconsciously nurtured at a very deep level by the love that emanates from the love their carers share. The more in love you are with your partner, the calmer the kids will feel around you. Love grounds them naturally while a cold or broken bond between parents causes them a lot of anxiety and unexplained reactivity.

Now my question to you is: As a parent do you know how to

Set boundaries

And you do you understand why you need to do that? If not, keep reading.

You need to set boundaries about what you’re going to give to your kids because if you don’t, they will eat you alive.

You may think: but my kids are not my enemies.

And I would answer you, yes and no.

Of course they are not your enemies but they also are not a 100% safe relationship because there is no such thing in life. Every single relationship comes with challenges, it’s just the way it is. We are able to connect with each other, but nothing can never be full and complete, especially if boundaries are not respected.

The fantasy of completely melting into love with your children can happen in some phases but fusional relationships can never last for ever and when they end, it’s the worst case scenario. That’s why everyone has interest in keeping a space of their own and accept to exist for themselves first.

One of the most important spiritual concept around parenting

Your kids are souls that came through you in this world, not from you. Meaning that their souls chose to be incarnated in your family and that this soul is free and is not something you will automatically understand or align with. Your kids are not a part of you. They are something / someone else that can be very different from you.

Why are so many parents and adult children disconnected? Because of this lack of understanding and acceptance from an early age.

You need to understand that your kids are human beings totally separated from you. Just like in life when you meet people at work or elsewhere, you have no idea who they are going to be or become. They have a personality of their own that may have nothing to do with you. And the more your child grows different from you, fulfilled and realized in his own being, the more you can think you have been successful as a parent.

Behind a kid that does everything your way, that looks like you, acts like you, there is a human being who could not find enough resources to dare being themselves.

Watch out here! If you haven’t received that for yourself (which is the case for many of us), it may be hard for you to envision and build the framework of that selfless space for someone else. But guess what? It is still possible because the more you will invest time in learning about this concept and getting to know your real self, behind all of your conditionings, the more you will feel comfortable about your kids and partner to be who they really are and appreciate them from that spot, even if they are very different from you.

You can influence your children’s lives but there’s a part in them that only belongs to them and you have no access to that. It will be revealed over the years and you’re here to bring them enough safety and unconditional love for them to dare being themselves. Everything else ends up being pretty unnecessary.

No need to spoil

Spoiling kids is not and will never be the path towards building respectful relationships with them.

Spoiling most of time means missing out on nurturing the basic needs and over compensating with unnecessary things that make everyone tired and overwhelmed.

So, from now on, observe yourself while being around them and start asking yourself: is this fuss or detail going to make a difference in their lives? Is it important, necessary, essential, linked to their sense of worth and self esteem?

If not, you can slowly release some very complicated things that you impose to yourself in the daily life. Stop driving yourself crazy when kids don’t even bother that much. Learn how to say no and feel assertive when doing so. No is healthy as long as it comes from knowing that thing didn’t matter that much.

Teaching patience to kids is also a big gift to offer them. All the valuable things in life take time to build. Why not showing that to them?

Keep in mind that they can’t know

The second element that is essential is that you need to keep in mind that kids don’t know life and they can’t know what’s truly good for them. You do – so you need to trust yourself before listening to them and you need to choose where you follow their desires and where you don’t. As immature human beings, they don’t know limits and the need for them. So it’s on you to set boundaries, because if there are none, it will be detrimental to all of you.

Having worked with small children in kinder gardens in France and as a nanny in London, I’ve learnt that there is a relationship to establish with kids, exactly as you would with an adult friends. There is respect to build. And if you don’t, again, they will eat you alive. In French we call this “le rapport de force”, it is when they test how far they can push you. And you need to resist and really know who you are in that phase, if not, a lot of the respect can be lost and this can affect the relationship on a long term basis.

Also know that natural respect comes from you being fully aligned with your own soul and commitments. If you tip toe, pretend or lie in your own life, kids can feel it and they can’t fully listen to you and trust you. So you need to know yourself first, respect yourself and then respect from others can flow more easily your way.

Human beings have a tendency to be abusive. Kids are human beings in a wild format. So they will always tend to take, too much, with no limit. But this is where you need to set a loving education with strong boundaries to show them that happiness can be found in a life led with healthy boundaries.

Do you take care of yourself?

Many parents get completely overwhelmed by the daily life as it can be very challenging. So there could be an interesting effort to make – September being a good date for that – to organize a set of healthy practices to preserve your own energy and personality.

I must repeat that the last thing you want is to disappear behind your kids. It may look like the easy way now, but you don’t want to live the consequences of living like that in ten years time.

I want you to tick the boxes where you’re already taking care of yourself properly:

• Do you go to the gym or to practice your favorite sport every week? Yes / No
• Do you practice at least once a month something else you really like, such as going to the cinema, for a long walk on your own or doing music? Yes / No
• Do you work with a therapist for the issues that keep bothering you and where you don’t seem to find the answers by yourself? Yes / No
• Do you make time to hang out with your favorite friends, at least once or twice a month? Yes / No
• Do you have professional goals that really excite you? Yes / No
• Do you make time every week, maybe just one hour, to move forward with those goals?

The worst trap about parenting is to think that if you give them all that you have, it will work out, but it’s not the way it works: the more you have for yourself, the more you’re able to give to them!

Things work out the best when you are the happiest version of yourself

If you let yourself down, you will transmit a very low energy to your kids and you will give them the patterns that life is not worth living for themselves.

You may think: “I won’t tell them that, I will tell them to value themselves” but this will be very limited and most of the time it won’t work because you won’t be able to embody that power and what kids get the most is what they download unconsciously from who you are. The more disempowered you feel, the more you will pass on that feeling to them and they will live like that too.

My own story

Why do I know all of the above for sure? I don’t get that from a book, but from my own life experience.

Nothing has made me sader in this life than to see my parents give up on themselves. I’ve seen all of the short and long term consequences of this type of mindset. The excuse, because it is an excuse and a way to escape, was “we stay for the children”.

But as their children, I can talk and I can assure that I would have never ever wanted my parents to sacrifice anything for me.

Having unhappy and frustrated parents have made my sister and I women who have experienced multiple difficulties in how we grew and became adults and it is still a burden to this day. Growing up in a home without any true love and personal alignment to what was true is a burden children will carry on their body and soul imprint almost for ever. It is like a silent handicap that is very hard to recover from. Something we live with, fight to cover with something else but the deep wound will always be present and painful.

This is what has caused me the biggest amount of pain in this life: to see my parents, the people I loved the most, being so unhappy and not fighting to be happier – just giving up.

Thinking that life is ruled by some kind of fate and that some have the right numbers and some have the wrong numbers so from there, sinking slowly over the years into a life that went from mediocre to extremely painful at times for everyone.

We all need to take responsibility for our own lives. We need to build what we want to experience and give our children to experience.

Life is what we manage to create, nothing else

What kids wish for their parents

Children need their parents to be assertive about who they are and who they are not. And to live in full alignment with that.

For most of us, being assertive can only come after we have done some inner work with healers, guides, coachs and professionals.

Because we all have wounds and inherited from negative patterns and we need to address them deeply so their lives can stop with us.

Some of the main negative patterns we can carry are:

• Avoidance: avoiding your feelings takes you an empty space where, yes, you have avoided a bit of pain, or a lot, but you end in a place where you don’t even know who you are, what you like and how you really feel about things
• Criticism: being criticized and dismissed as a child will result in being an adult who does the same thing to their kids, even if you don’t want to, some forces are stronger than us when we haven’t worked on healing those wounds and patterns
• Dreams are for others: lots of us have been consciously or unconsciously wired for not to believe in our dreams – dreams are for others, not for us – which may result in an adult life where there is no direction because we have been too disconnected from our dreams

…

So I guess this is it for now, that was quite a lot of content and ideas shared here. Some of them will move you and some of them will take time for you to accept them. Some realities we learn from the spiritual guides can be surprising and hard to understand at first, but as the time goes by, you will understand how much they make sense.

Let me know in the comment section what you think…

With Love & Care,

Emi

Positive Social Impact offers a safe space for us to open up and talk about what we face, as human beings. I you feel like to go on private chat, contact me from the Contact Form or by email contact@positive-social-impact.com

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