Seeing Ourselves in Our Children
Read time: 2 minutes
Welcome to issue #061 of Unicorn Parents. Each week, I share practical insights and reflections to help you build a profitable business without missing the magic at home. If you’re serious about winning at work while raising great kids, you’ve come to the right place. This is a community built for ambitious parents who want both.
There’s something deeply humbling about becoming a parent.
You spend your whole life thinking:
“I will give my children the best parts of me…and protect them from the worst.”
And then one day, you realize:
Apples don’t fall too far from the tree.
Today, I watched my three-year-old son absolutely demolish a fried chicken drumstick.
Not casually eat it.
Devour it.
Crunch the cartilage.
Finish every last bite.
Leave nothing behind but the bone.
No one taught him to eat like that.
Yet somehow, there he was.
Exactly like my mother.
Exactly like me.
And honestly?
It made me weirdly proud.
There’s something strangely beautiful about seeing yourself continue through your children.
The tiny mannerisms.
The instincts.
The preferences.
The unspoken inheritances.
But then there are the other moments.
The moments that scare you a little.
When something small doesn’t go his way, he gets deeply agitated.
He wants to stop everything.
Reset everything.
Start over completely.
He could keep going.
But he doesn’t.
He freezes the room until it feels “right” again.
And as I watched him, I had an uncomfortable realization:
“I do that too.”
Suddenly, I started seeing my own mother differently.
As a child, I thought she was trying to control me.
Trying to live through me.
Trying to overcorrect every little thing.
But now I wonder:
Maybe she was simply seeing parts of herself in me that she knew could become painful later in life.
Maybe her frustration was fear.
Maybe her correction was love.
Maybe she just wanted to spare me from battles she knew too well.
Parenthood has a strange way of turning judgment into understanding.
We want the best for our children.
And sometimes, when we see our own shortcomings reflected back at us through them, we become desperate to fix things quickly.
Not because we hate them.
But because we know how costly certain patterns can become if left untouched.
Still, maybe part of parenting is learning that our children are not our second chance at perfection.
They are not ours.
They belong to God.
And like us…
they are human beings still learning how to live.
And perhaps the real goal is not removing every flaw…
but helping them carry their humanity with more wisdom, grace, and self-awareness than we did.