The Struggles of Being an Only Child

The Struggles of Being an Only Child

Over the course of my 35 years of working with parents and writing books on parenting and relationships, I've come to realize that one of the most difficult tasks we face as parents is modeling self-reliance and empathy for our kids. Our kids need to see us as examples of how to care for one another and how to make the world a safe place to be. Both mothers and fathers can teach their children what it means to be responsible adults by showing them how to balance their own needs with those of their children in intact households.

Being a single parent is even more difficult since you have to take on the roles of both mother and father. In contrast to the nurturing energy of mothers, the protective energy of fathers includes things like making a living, establishing personal boundaries, and standing up for oneself. Despite the common perception that males are guardians and women are nurturers, both sexes are equally capable of these roles.

Single parents who are able to raise their children well must have practiced being both mothers and fathers to their own inner child. In other words, we need to have learned how to take care of our own inner child, including how to make money, create boundaries, and deal with our own anxieties, grief, rage, hurt, and disappointment. Each of us needs to be in the process of learning how to do this, because there is no way to teach our children these skills unless we are practicing them ourselves.

To learn to love oneself while simultaneously loving others, we have established a technique. Through what's termed "inner bonding," we learn to nurture both our own "inner child" and the youngsters in our lives. Inner bonding is a six-step psychospiritual process that, when performed regularly, can lead to the emergence of a mature, loving, and spiritually attuned version of yourself.

The term "inner child" is used in the context of inner bonding to refer to a person's essential, pre-adolescent self, including his or her innate capacities for creativity, intuition, playfulness, imagination, talents, emotions, and the capacity to love. The meaning of "our child" comes from the experience it represents. Everything we learn after birth constitutes our adulthood. What we are is the sum of our ideas, convictions, and capacities. From the time we are born, we are taught by our parents and other caregivers how to behave like adults. 

The adult we become is a child-adult, the part of us that developed irrational fears and false beliefs as well as habitual behaviors like substance abuse, compulsive shopping, excessive wrath, and obedience as coping mechanisms. That part of us that has a direct spiritual connection to a higher source of truth and love and is able to bring that knowledge and love down into the child and share it with others that is the real loving adult. The "adult" most of us tend to operate with is actually a hurt kid pretending to be an adult. We have issues with ourselves and our offspring because of our unhealed, wounded selves. Healing one's hurts and maturing into a compassionate, spiritually attuned adult are the goals of the inner bonding process.

There are only two viable goals at any given time in inner bonding, and they are learning about love and avoiding pain. The desire to protect says we want to avoid experiencing our sorrow at all costs; the intent to learn says we want to learn about our grief in order to understand what we need to do to be loving to our inner child and others. The loving adult's primary goal is education, while the child-adult's is protection.

Here are the six phases of inner bonding:

• A readiness to face our suffering head-on rather than seeking refuge from it through a variety of addictive behaviors.
• Making up one's mind to change into a learning mindset
• Engaging in introspective dialogue with our hurting selves to unearth the erroneous thoughts and subsequent actions that underlie our suffering Managing one's emotions in a healthy way
• Learning the truth and how to act with love through communication with our divine creator
• Doing something kind for our inner child
• Process evaluation

Every parent should be working on their own recovery. Since they are their children's major role models, it is especially crucial that single parents participate in this process. Loving yourself and your kids will come more easily as you overcome your anxieties and false beliefs about yourself. Using these six techniques on a daily basis, especially when experiencing negative emotions like anger, fear, anxiety, or stress, will help you overcome the erroneous thinking that underlies those negative states.