We’ve Spent Generations Raising Kids. Now It’s Time to Raise Ourselves

No book, degree, or professional experience could have prepared me for birthing and raising four children within four and a half years. Not my master’s in education. Not my years in early childhood development. Not even the countless hours spent studying emotional regulation.

Nothing prepared me for the radical restructuring that occurs during matrescence, when your nervous system becomes fluent in everyone else’s emotions before your own.

Motherhood exposes every part of yourself you didn’t know was hurting, the fears you thought you’d outgrown, and tests the limits of how long a human can live without rest.

Your child’s tantrum awakens the rage you were never allowed to express. Your oldest’s perfectionism echoes your buried fear of not being enough. Partners who once felt aligned can become adversaries overnight, quietly keeping score of who’s doing more, who’s seen the least, and who feels most depleted.

And our children? They mirror it all back, every insecurity, every wound, every unprocessed emotion.

Parenting doesn’t just bring out the best in us; it brings out everything.
And it will keep doing so until we are willing to look at it, feel it, and grow through it. So let’s go through it.

The Mirror of Motherhood

Children are mirrors. They reflect what we suppress- our anger, our anxiety, our overstimulation.

Every tantrum becomes a nervous system collision.
Every bedtime battle tests our capacity for calm.

Parenthood demands a level of patience, understanding, and emotional intelligence most of us were never taught, yet we’re expected to develop those skills in real time, while sleep-deprived and stretched thin.

There are plenty of tools out there: apps, breathing techniques, therapy, community circles. They work but they all rely on one critical step: the parent must notice they’re overwhelmed before they can use them.

And that’s the paradox. In the moments we need help most, our brains are least able to reach for it.

The tools we have are like study guides handed out after the exam.

What if we taught the course differently, giving parents real-time awareness of their own nervous systems, not just advice after the storm?

The Missing Curriculum

I’ve spent my career advocating for young children, building programs and schools across socioeconomic backgrounds. But I’ve come to understand something deeper: the most important curriculum lives inside the parent.

We prepare children for learning and growth, so why don’t we do the same for parents? Parenting isn’t just instinct, it’s learned and it’s a developmental process, too.

If we treated parenthood like a stage of human growth, not just a role, we’d design a curriculum for the adults one that teaches not how to manage children, but how to understand ourselves while raising them.

A curriculum of nervous system literacy, so we can recognize our triggers before they spill over.

Of emotional translation, learning to name and navigate what we feel.
Of repair and rupture, understanding that healing, not perfection, is the goal.
Of identity and matrescence, honoring who we’re becoming, not mourning who we were.
Of relationship repair, learning to navigate shifting roles with empathy, not scorekeeping.
And of reconnection, rebuilding interdependence and returning to what restores us.

Because raising children is only half the story. The other half is learning how to nurture and raise ourselves.

A New Vision for Families

Stay with me for a minute because I want to dream out loud.

Imagine if every new parent was given this curriculum “notes before the exam” and a quiet companion that listened beneath the noise. Something that could sense the storm before the meltdown.

What if technology wasn’t another demand on our attention but a bridge back to our nervous system, a tool that reminded us how to return to calm, how to understand ourselves before we react.

What would that look like?

Maybe it looks like a world where lights dim when our voices rise.
Where fabric feels our fatigue before we do and gently reminds us to breathe.
Where notifications wait until our pulse steadies.
Where technology doesn’t replace human connection but restores it.

Maybe that sounds idealistic. But we’ll keep having babies as technology keeps accelerating beyond our control, so our humanity must evolve too.

Empathy, connection, and nervous system literacy are the new forms of intelligence the future will depend on.

And while the future of parenting will always be challenging, it isn’t about algorithms or perfection. It’s about staying human enough for our children to remember how.