Something that always draws my attention is human behavior. Curious since forever, I find myself imagining what the childhood of this one, that one, the other was like. What happened to generate fits and misfits? What were the parents, the family like, in what context did these beings grow up, sometimes so lost along the way?

Parenting is the great challenge for everyone involved in the undertaking. And it is a great life event, for which we very rarely prepare. Mothers and fathers, each with their little package of lived repertoire, lodged in the viscera, receive the baby making a debut in life, an illustrious stranger.

With a real and sincere desire (most of the time) to get it right, they go forward, listen dazed to the advice (and criticism) of aunts, mothers, mothers-in-law and grandmothers and go on, sometimes by fits and starts, sometimes by rough roads, carrying the mission forward. A cauldron of intense emotions, of wide spectrum, is the setting.

This tiny being, the baby, needs full attention, love, touch, care, attention to basic needs. They need the humans around them to have the emotional availability to accompany them closely for a stretch of the journey, to stimulate their autonomy in another stretch and, finally, to leave the scene gracefully, with an available and overflowing love from a distance, staying off the stage.

Hard, isn’t it? And you know who interferes, full time, in this healthy development? The inner child of the caregiver. Focus is divided between the children’s needs and the pains of the unmet needs of a child sheltered in the parents’ mental basement. And the children come to serve as intermediaries for resolving those needs.

Without enough resources to understand or deal with quite pragmatic aspects of routine, the child sheltered in the adult body starts competing for the stage with the real children, who go on experiencing their discoveries, pains and wonders.

The movement of encouraging children’s autonomy, of encouraging their exploratory flights, of letting them develop their own repertoires of successes and mistakes are actions directly connected to parents’ awareness and self-care.

The greater pain is realizing that, from the end of early childhood, children no longer “need” their parents as much and have already expanded their social circles. Despair sets in over the “teen” years, adolescence, when the expansion continues and the first knowledge, values and repertoires are contested and validated (or not). Keeping a respectful distance can be a gift to the children.

The inner child, at these moments, in lively debate with the remnants of parental figures from the past, insists on controlling, overprotecting, curtailing. It fears something might happen, that the children will not get past the barriers, that the world is too hard.

It is frightening to think that we need to raise our children so they do not need us, so they develop their own resources, so they trust themselves and their inner strength. Because this is the deepest and most sophisticated manifestation of love: respectfully accompanying the children’s capacity building and watching them fly along trails we often do not even know.

At this moment, I need to ask for your permission, reader. I must share here something very complicated to hear that may sound a little too harsh.

It is almost dishonest when I, from a position of parental power, take from my children the right to live their own lives.

When, to meet my egoic needs, I reject the expanding human being in front of me, extorting ritualized respect. When I force conformity to what I think, what I believe, what I do.

These are simple recipes for marking that child in such a way that, when the moment comes to take on the parental role, the cycle will repeat itself: a suffering child competing for space with a developing child.

I can and must validate and give meaning to this precious relationship through love and small loving practices. I need and must renounce practices that encourage dependence and lack of autonomy. How?

By a path of full presence in the present, permeated by awareness, by strengthening independence, by practicing detachment and by example. We need to devote significant time to parenting ourselves, to understanding and meeting our needs and pains, so that the relationship with our children is not ruled by our inner child.

By finding my own meanings, I do not need to fulfill them through my children’s lives.

Letting them go, keeping the door and the heart open, honoring each one’s capacity to think, to handle their own decisions. Escaping the temptation to judge and intervene; respecting contracts, lined-up tasks that seem so simple but whose application is far more complex. Many abandon the purpose, whose operationalization is so full of successes and mistakes that, at times, the air runs out.

The conflict between the inner child and the children is so great that, in some situations, the child sheltered in the adult body wins and the children are abandoned. But that is a subject for another Sunday.