How To ‘Parent Yourself’

How To ‘Parent Yourself’

As a child, we’ve all had someone to guide us at every step of our lives. To correct us whenever we did something wrong and to help us strike the right amount of balance between work and play. Let’s check to How To ‘Parent Yourself’.

Our parents have always guided us with our best interests in mind. From barring us from eating too much junk food to not allowing us to play video games for too long. From not letting us watch too much TV to not letting us stay awake till late night-they’ve done it all.

Parents have always been there to make us do tasks that we didn’t want to. But were necessary to shape us into responsible beings. But will they always? That’s when ‘Parenting Yourself’ or ‘Self-Parenting’ comes into the picture.

Just as a parent loves their child and creates structures and sets certain boundaries to help their child grow into a healthy happy human being, parenting yourself is all about putting yourself in your parent’s shoes. It’s about encouraging yourself, having high expectations from yourself. Setting goals and also patting yourself on the back when you achieve something good.

Now, whenever we feel like, procrastinating overwork rather than getting done with it,’binge-watching’ Netflix rather than doing something productive, lazying around rather than exercising or doing yoga. We can allow ourselves to tell ourselves ‘NO’.Because sometimes self-parenting also means smacking yourself on the head when you commit a mistake or do something wrong. Sometimes you have to be hard on yourself to achieve a good, sustainable life.

Some people might argue that it’s just another phrase for ‘Self-Discipline’.But ‘Self -Discipline’ is a slight indicator of being wrong while ‘self-parenting’ is a slightly positive term. It’s about self-love. It’s about helping yourself live the most fulfilling life you can.

Adulthood is much more of our lives than childhood. And it’s a bit challenging to face the reality that we have to hold ourselves accountable for life’s outcomes once we enter it. But it also provides us with so much freedom and so much empowerment.

But, no matter how hard parents try. They couldn’t have possibly been able to teach their children anything and everything about every aspect of life and it’s happenings, correctly. There might come an instance where the solution taught to us by our parents might not be a suitable one. We might have to come up with solutions of our own along the way.

So, we might not have the ability to change or to control the past. But we can preside over its repercussions.

Raising ourselves to a certain high standard first might also help us in raising kids who will make the world a much happier and better place to live in.

“The child has brought up to know its social duties using a system of love-rewards and punishments, and in this way, it has taught that its security in life depends on its parents (and, subsequently, other people) loving it and being able to believe in its love for them.” —Sigmund Freud.