There have always been a great many things about my children that remind me of ME when I was their age. Sometimes the looks they give me, or the color of their hair or some of the things they say are triggers for a stroll down memory lane; other times the things they are going through seem eerily reminiscent of experiences that I had. Still, I have had to learn that they are not simply re-living my life and they are NOT me—I have to keep my own personal experiences in check and allow and appreciate their separate lives and identities.
I know I’ve lapsed into the annoying “when I was your age” or “I know exactly what you’re going through” when my kids will bark, “I’m not you!” Of course, they are right and just because there may be some developmental or circumstantial similarities, we are not the same people and they are not simply living a replication of their mom’s life. I can well remember my own parents trying to convince me that they knew exactly what I was going through because they had been through the same thing—while this may have been true, it certainly didn’t help sometimes (especially during the teenage years when I was determined to live a very different life than my parents’. There was just NO way I wanted to think that I might be anything like THEM).
While my own personal experiences guide me, and give me empathy and understanding in my role as a parent, I do need to keep them in check. There is a productive way to tap into personal experiences, and an annoying, smothering way to force my own experiences onto my children. It’s up to me to figure out how to keep things in balance and know when to keep quiet or appreciate the differences in our experiences.
See Also: Letting Our Kids Live Their Own Lives
Letting Our Children Be Different From Us