DOES Parenting Get Any Easier As The Kids Grow Up?

This week, a family of 5 came to stay.

For four days the house was overflowing with children - twin 5-year-old girls and a 7-year-old boy joined the usual fray of my 9, 10 and 12-year-olds.

Watching them compete for attention from each other and from us adults, provoked that age-old debate: whether it does in fact get easier to parent as your children grow up, or not.

The truth is, there are so many ways to define what parenting entails, that the answer depends on which angle you are taking.

Firstly, there is the amount of physical energy that needs to be expended on babies and small children in order just to keep them alive. Which, I think most parents would agree, definitely decreases as they become less dependent on you to do everything for them.

But in terms of the presence that is required to support a child’s emotional needs, in my opinion, this increases exponentially as they get older - which I personally find just as (if not more) exhausting than the physical exertion needed earlier on.

Because you can feed/bathe/entertain and even play with a small child whilst being somewhere else altogether in your head.

And whilst attachment behaviours are solidified before the age of 7 (by the primary caretaker), an older child, tween or teenager is much more aware of and sensitive to your capacity for deep listening, to hold space for their feelings without centering the situation on yourself, and, most of all, to your perceived judgement or acceptance of them - particularly when they are feeling vulnerable or ashamed - than a younger one.

The success of which all depend on your own adopted attachment behaviour, developmental trauma and the depth of the inner work you have embarked upon so far.

IN SHORT, THE DEGREE TO WHICH YOU ARE COMFORTABLE ACKNOWLEDGING, ACCEPTING AND INTEGRATING THE WOUNDS OF YOUR INNER CHILD, DICTATES HOW ABLE YOU WILL FEEL TO ACKNOWLEDGE, ACCEPT AND CO-REGULATE THE EMOTIONAL GROWING PAINS OF YOUR CHILDREN.

And this ability comes from exploring the extent to which your primary caregivers were able to meet your emotional needs in the past, and learning to fill whatever gaps were left by either their unwillingness or incapacity to do so - from within - through reparenting that inner child.

This has been my journey so far: as my children get older and more emotionally demanding, I find myself pulling deeper on my inner resources than ever before as my inner child is triggered, or provoked into jealousy or feelings of unsafety by their age-appropriate emotional instability, volatility or fear (and the ways in which this manifests in them as aggression, collapse or indifference).

It’s not easier than having 3 kids under 3 melting down all at once (which my inability to handle in a regulated way first led me to explore my past).

It’s just as taxing.

But the healing work that I put in as a result of that first foray into why I react the way that I do, laid the foundations for the self-love and self-belief that are carrying me through this next phase.

And it’s THIS - the ability to trust in myself - rather than anything external to me changing, that has made parenting feel (slightly) easier.

Would you agree?