What is Preparenting?
Preparenting is preparation for parenthood that requires deep introspective work, lifestyle and mindset shifts that help ease you into the next chapter of your life with new tools rather than intergenerational patterns, cycles and beliefs that no longer serve you. It is the phase before(pre) becoming a parent where you unpack your intergenerational story, trauma and self-concept to clearly identify what you want to continue and pass on to your children, and what ends with you. It’s a deep dive into your roots, your childhood and your current situation to look at how your parents’ parenting impacted you, unlearn what does not serve you and build a solid foundation for what is to come. Though similar to reparenting, this work is different by being executed with the intention of becoming a parent as a key focus. I use the term preparenting as an umbrella term that covers many branches all exploring different chapters of this work. It is a roadmap I have developed from research, interviews, others’ experiences, personal experience and through my background as a first responder, postpartum doula, journalism graduate and personal training and wellness graduate.
Why is Preparenting important?
Preparenting is important because it leaves the person going through the process with more knowledge, information, tools and self-confidence, and with a more solid foundation upon which they can build a family and prevent perinatal mental health struggles. Our matrescence is a crucial part of our life, perhaps the most important as birthing women, yet it is often completely overlook and missed. While childhood is where our identity is formed and our sense of self is shaped, being the child of unconscious or unprepared parents who have never faced their own trauma, patterns and toxic cycles, can be utterly detrimental to our development. Preparenting is being accountable and doing our personal development and healing work so our children don’t have to do it for us. Without preparenting, we jump into parenting not knowing what to expect on various levels. Preparenting work takes us from self-doubt to confidently making decisions and standing firmly by them, preventing us from being constantly triggered, acting and reacting outside of our truth and integrity. It helps us expect our struggles and imperfection and move through it, with it, while giving ourselves the compassion, patience, love and grace we deserve. It teaches us to prevent trauma not with perfection but with reparations. Without preparenting, we might stay stuck living in ‘what if’, letting anxiety and worst-case-scenarios play over and over in our minds, rather than moving into a place of ‘what is’ and focusing on what is true right now, being present and intentional in all we do. Parenting a child while juggling all of our own childhood trauma, learnt behaviours, limiting beliefs, and emotional dysregulation or unavailability leads to perpetuated patterns, repeated trauma, continuing cycles and teaching emotional dysregulation. It’s removing a heavy armour we have been carrying around for years, decades even, to have the space and ability to carry our children with more ease, strength and availability. It is not only a gift you give to your children but a gift you give to yourself, your co-parent and the next generations.
How can I start Preparenting?
Everyone’s journey is different and there is no one path to preparenting, but I have developed a roadmap that will put you on the right track. The Preparenting Workbook is coming soon and will help you on your journey. This work is an adventure with no finish line, because the goal is the journey, not the ending. It is never completely done, as this work continues well into parenting and beyond. A good place to start is with commitment and awareness. It’s deciding to dive deep into personal development and paying close attention to patterns or learned behaviours that are harming you more than serving you. It’s committing to doing the work no matter how difficult it gets and what it entails. You must own your new role as a transitional character in your lineage and learn about it. Let me help you with this right now by sharing Dr. Broderick (a renowned marriage and family scholar at the University of Southern California)’s definition of a transitional character:
A transitional character is one who, in a single generation, changes the entire course of a lineage. The changes might be for good or ill, but the most noteworthy examples are those individuals who grow up in an abusive, emotionally destructive environment and who somehow find a way to metabolize the poison and refuse to pass it on to their children. They break the mold. They refute the observation that abused children become abusive parents, that the children of alcoholics become alcoholic adults, that “the sins of the fathers are visited upon the heads of children to the third and fourth generation. Their contribution to humanity is to filter the destructiveness out of their own lineage so that the generations downstream will have a supportive foundation upon which to build productive lives.
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On this blog, I will offer thoughts, experiences, stories and resources that have helped me on my preparenting journey, and will share more about preparenting, pregnancy, birth and postpartum.
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