Parenting Pitfalls and the Quiet Healing of My Inner Child

For most of my adult life, I have worked with children.

I have studied them, supported them, and built a career around understanding how early experiences shape who we become. But the most profound lessons about childhood didn’t come from my education or my profession.

They came when I had children of my own.

And parenting, as it turns out, is the most humbling experience of my life.

Like many parents who grew up with adverse experiences, I entered motherhood with a quiet promise to myself: my children would have what I didn’t.

Stability. Safety. Opportunities. 

In many ways, they live in what sometimes feels like Pleasantville compared to the childhood my husband and I experienced growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our neighborhoods were vibrant and full of culture, but they were also environments where safety could never be assumed. I went to schools where fights weren’t unusual. Getting “jumped” wasn’t something you only heard about—it was something I experienced more than once. Physical violence, gang presence, drug use, and shady things happening around you were simply part of the landscape.

Children adapt to the environments they grow up in. We normalize what surrounds us.

And sometimes, those environments shape parts of us in ways we don’t fully understand until much later.

Environment matters. Safety matters. What children grow up around matters.

Now, as an adult raising my own children far away from our early beginnings, the contrast sometimes stops me in my tracks.

My kids go to great schools. They live near the beach. Their biggest worries are homework, friend drama, or clothing trends.

Sometimes when I watch them walk into their school, I actually get a little teary-eyed. Their campus looks like something out of a TV show or a movie version of high school—think 90210 versus Stand and Deliver—beautiful buildings, kids laughing and carrying backpacks in the sun. I feel so excited for them, so grateful that this is the environment they get to grow up in.

And at the same time, there’s a quiet sadness for my younger self, who didn’t experience school that way. It wasn’t exactly a battle zone—but my nervous system read it that way.

Both feelings exist at once.

A part of me feels deeply grateful.

But another part of me—if I’m being honest—realizes that some of what I’ve been doing as a parent isn’t just parenting. It’s also reparenting my own inner child.

There’s something profoundly healing about creating the kind of calm, safe family life I didn’t always experience growing up. The predictable routines. The quiet evenings. The sense that home is a refuge instead of something you brace yourself for. 

I’m not Pollyanna enough to think I can shield my children from every hardship or make their childhood completely perfect. I’m not so naïve as to believe they will go through life unscathed or that I can control all the challenges they may face or the battles they might be fighting internally. What I can do is create a home filled with safety, love, and support—a foundation that gives them the grit to navigate whatever life throws their way.

Still, I feel healing in small moments—watching my kids feel safe enough to be silly, or seeing them trust that the adults around them will protect them, and not be the source of danger. It reaches a younger part of me that once learned to stay alert.

But parenting also has a way of revealing your imperfections in real time. Love this for us. Despite my time in CPS and training in child development, I still lose my patience. Shocker. I still respond in ways I later wish I had handled differently. I still fall into the everyday pitfalls of parenting—being distracted, overwhelmed, or simply human. Knowing the research doesn’t magically make you a perfect parent.  

Sometimes it just means you’re more aware of the moments you fall short. 

And maybe that’s part of the work too.

Because what I’m learning—both as a mother and a therapist—is that children don’t need perfect parents. They need repair. They need love. They need safety. They need to know that even when things go wrong, relationships can be mended. By acknowledging my own shortcomings, I hope I encourage them to admit to theirs. Having a parent say they were wrong and not always get it right is humanizing. 

Ironically, those same things are often what our own inner children needed most.

And yet, parenting has a way of surprising you. The truth is, I didn’t set out consciously trying to heal myself through parenting. But somewhere along the way, the calmness of our family life began to soften parts of me that had spent years bracing for chaos, violence, and danger.

Driving out early to a weekend baseball tournament. Watching my son ride off on his bike with his friends. Seeing my daughter on stage playing in the orchestra.

The ordinary safety of our home. The simplicity of beach days and school drop-offs.

Seeing these small moments unfold in their lives—moments that feel so normal for them—often carries a deeper meaning for me. They hold a quiet kind of healing.

Not because my childhood was all bad—it wasn’t. There was love there, too. But creating a life where my children feel safe, supported, and free to explore who they are has allowed me to experience, in real time, the steadiness every child deserves.

Every so often we gently remind our kids that their lives are a bit cushier than ours were growing up—not to make them feel guilty (maybe just a little), but to remind them that their now–SoCal-chill parents still know how to hold their own. In giving our children the childhood we hoped for, and grieving the ones we did not have, we also discover something unexpected: we are offering a small measure of healing to the child we once were.

Parenting my inner and outer children, 

Mandy