You either face your demons, or they will raise your children

The Party on the Stairs (1875) by Adelaide Claxton

“A lot of people have kids. Not enough people are parents.” Ryan Holiday’s book The Daily Dad begins with a grim statement that captures the reality of parenting, which, to most parents, is more like checking boxes. Taking your kids to school, putting food on their table, buying them clothes, taking them to Disneyland, and buying them their favorite toys.

On an online forum, likely Reddit, someone who worked as a nanny for ten years and helped raise several children noted in a post that the most negative elements impacting a child generally come from - and are passed to them by - their parents’ unresolved trauma. And this is the part, she wrote, where she feels powerless while caring for a child. This is because resolving logistical issues is easy, but fixing the psychological and emotional issues that are results of being passed from their parents is extremely cumbersome - if not impossible - for others to do.

Regarding the unfulfilled desires of parents, unresolved issues, and emotional patterns that are unconsciously - and often consciously - passed between generations, particularly to children, Carl Jung famously said, "The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.”

“Interpretation in terms of the parents is, however, simply a façon de parler. In reality the whole drama takes place in the individual’s own psyche, where the “parents” are not the parents at all but only their imagos: they are representations which have arisen from the conjunction of parental peculiarities with the individual disposition of the child”. - Jung, Symbols of Transformation (1912)

Going and Coming (1947) by Norman Rockwell  

Avoiding our insecurities, fears, and unhealthy patterns doesn't make them disappear. Instead, these issues unconsciously influence and control how we parent and relate to our children. Someone with unresolved issues linked to anger and aggression who has normalizing yelling and shouting will likely do the same with their children involuntarily and unconsciously. Similarly, a child with impulsivity and inattention may have been unconsciously influenced and “trained” by their parents to live that way.

As ideological polarization rises in the U.S., an obvious example of this "cognitive distortion" is parents holding orthodox and socially unhealthy views on race, region, sexuality, and politics, and unconsciously passing their beliefs to their children through the behaviors they exhibit and the remarks they make in their daily lives.

As the saying goes, children are like sponges. They absorb an enormous amount of information without much conscious effort. They absorb not only what they learn from their parents explicitly, but also their insecurities, fears, coping mechanisms, and blind spots. These learned patterns are how kids relate to and respond to the world, enabling dysfunction to be passed to the next generation.

The journey of a parent isn't just about the parent. In many ways, it’s as much about the children as it is about the parents. One of the goals of parenting should be to break the cycle and prevent unhealthy, painful patterns from reaching the next generation. You either face your demons, or they will raise your children.