When Becoming A Parent Brings Up Your Own Childhood Pain
All of my clients have experienced something similar.
You become a parent. You love your child more than you thought you could love anything. You can’t imagine ever hurting them, invalidating them, or leaving them alone in their experience.
You’re exhausted, trying to do your best to raise what seems like a wild animal so they become a kind and compassionate human being who will contribute to their community. And on top of all of that - you get hit in the face with your own childhood pain and the ways that your parents failed you as a child.
You think to yourself, “How could my parents have treated me in x,y,z ways? I could never do that to my child. I love them too much. Did my parents not love me?”
Here’s the thing: I truly believe our parents do the best they possibly can with the tools they have at the time. I think something important to keep in mind is that the context of parenting has altered drastically in our lifetime - and even more so over the last century.
Let’s look at a brief history of the last 100 years of parenting:
1920s–40s: Behaviorism & “don’t spoil the child”
The main points of this movement was children should be trained with routine, restraint, and minimal coddling; affection as risky “spoiling,” there’s an emphasis on compliance over connection; short-term obedience often at the cost of emotional attunement.
Late 1940s–60s: Dr. Spock & the humanizing turn
Key concepts from this era: your instincts; be warm and responsive. Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (1946) massively reshaped middle-class guidance—normalizing affection, flexibility, and reading the child. There’s more of an emphasis on parent–child warmth and individualized care; less rigid scheduling.
1950s–70s: Attachment theory arrives
Secure attachment (consistent, sensitive caregiving) supports healthy development; Bowlby/Ainsworth’s research shifted attention to the child’s emotional bond with caregivers; Practices that foster responsiveness (soothing, picking up crying infants) gain scientific footing; secure attachment links to better socioemotional outcomes.
1960s–80s: Parenting styles & social policy shifts
Family structure and gender roles start to change (more maternal employment, rising divorce rates), altering day-to-day parenting; research by Diana Baumrind and later Maccoby & Martin linked authoritative parenting to the most positive outcomes, guiding educators and clinicians. Federal programs (e.g., Head Start, 1965) infused “enrich the early years” into U.S. culture.
1980s: Safety era, “stranger danger,” and the missing-kids moral panic
Constant vigilance—child abduction and harm loom large; so the idea was to protect your children at all costs. High-profile cases and media campaigns (e.g., “milk carton kids”) amplified risk salience. Growth in supervision, organized activities, and safety regulation; and there was a reduction in unsupervised, free outdoor play.
1990s: “Intensive mothering” & attachment parenting
Intensive mothering (Sharon Hays): posited that good mothers are ever-present, expert-guided, time- and labor-intensive. Attachment parenting (Sears): extended breastfeeding, babywearing, co-sleeping, near-constant responsiveness to the child. Cultural ideals valorized maternal devotion amid rising work–family tension; higher expectations and guilt load on mothers; benefits from sensitivity/connection, but real risk of burnout and inequality in who can actually “perform” these ideals.
2000s: Helicopter parenting takes flight
Close monitoring and intervention to maximize achievement and minimize risk. Higher education stakes + inequality (economic research ties intensive parenting to unequal, high-stakes environments). More structured enrichment time.
2010s–2020s: Positive/gentle parenting, brain science, and anti-spanking consensus
Empathy, co-regulation, firm but kind limits; skill-building over punishment. Pushback against overprotection (e.g., “free-range parenting”comes into play; Neuroscience translation (Harvard Center on the Developing Child), public-health resources (CDC), and AAP policy moved norms toward non-violent, connection-based discipline; social media popularized “gentle” parenting approaches (sometimes imperfectly).
So, you can see how research, content, media, and historical social norms all played into how parents raised thir children. So in some ways, how your parents treated you as a child wasn’t personal to you. It included many factors such as:
Social context
Cultural and social influence
How they were parented
Their own personal strengths and weaknesses
What kind of content they were consuming
Who their friends were, etc.
AND - even though, in some ways how your parents treated you as a child wasn’t personal to you, the impact of how they parented you is HIGHLY personal to you. You did not get everything that you needed as a child, full stop. No child does, at least not in the single-family-home society we are currently living in. It is impossible for any adult to give each child in the home what they need all the time. Working parents, the stresses of running a household, multiple children, and not living in multi-generational homes anymore where children have multiple adults who can attune to them and meet their needs —all of these things contribute to this phenomenon.
When you recognize the ways you were failed as a child - this is GOOD information to have. Parenting shows you where your deepest wounds are, and what there is for you to heal. There is no greater transformative mirror than children showing you where the blindspots are.
So what do you do when your triggers, wounds, and pain are revealed to you?
I believe where the growth and healing comes from is holding space for the pain and allowing ourselves to feel it. It is facing fully the recognition that we didn’t get what we needed and holding our younger selves in that pain — that little girl or little boy who felt alone while facing something hard, felt like they were not good enough, felt like something was wrong with them. When we can FACE and FEEL the pain of that recognition, we can heal from it, forgive our parents, and choose what we want to pass down to our children, instead of unconsciously passing down adaptive behaviors we picked up to compensate for what we didn’t get as children. We will be able to better attune to our children when we’re not trying to give them what we needed and are able to recognize the unique child who has different needs and desires than we did.
Most people will do is avoid the pain of not getting what they needed as a child by coming up with excuses for their parents, invalidating their own experiences, or numbing themselves with addictions to alcohol, drugs, social media, constantly doing, people-pleasing, shopping, etc. Or, on the flip side, they will feel anger and resentment towards their parents, cutting them out of their lives or keeping a wall up so that they don’t have to deal with them. However, what I believe is what they are actually avoiding is facing the pain that I am speaking about.
Freedom, peace, and joy are at the other end of the dark valley you must cross when you allow yourself to fully experience the pain of childhood (which we all have, no matter how good your childhood was!) I know because I have spent the last 11 years crossing this valley myself, doing deep work to heal my childhood wounds, reparent myself, and learn how to give myself what I need. (We are the only ones who really can! YOU are the person you’ve been waiting for!)
If you need support in navigating that valley, that is what I do. It is my gift, my passion, and my honor: to hold space for you so you can feel your feelings and cultivate deeper love, joy, and peace in your life.
Reach out by replying to this email if you need support in this.
