Telling our story as parents

Why tell our story as parents

Does the idea of telling your parenting story seem far-fetched? Would you sit down for a day and write down everything that has happened since you decided (or not) to have children and how you have experienced these different stages? Probably not. 

It’s not something we take the time to do in our fast-paced lives. And yet! A whole approach in social intervention is based on this idea, namely the narrative approach
1
. This means that it is far from being futile or superfluous. But why would we want to tell or write our parenting story?

For more clarity

Often, when you are a parent, life passes by in a fog where the days merge with the years. The famous “The days are long but the years are short” applies particularly well to parenthood! And often we tell the few stories that stand out from the rest when we talk about our family life, but the rest fall into oblivion. We then create a story of our life that is partial at best and probably predominantly negative (we will come back to this).  With these bits of history, we form our perception of ourselves as parents and others form a perception of us as well.  

We can also identify our values and priorities, what really matters in our life through all the things we have to do. 

By telling our story, our whole story, and putting it on paper, we give space to the rest, to the things that have been forgotten and put aside, and we can see what we have been doing all this time with more clarity. We also take the time to stop and chase the fog and take a break to stop the wheel that is rolling too fast. 

Give yourself space

To take this little break also to give us space in our family history. Because most of the time, when we talk about our lives, we often talk more about our children than about ourselves. We tend to forget ourselves and our family narrative becomes, “You don’t know what Lucy did yesterday…” more than “You’ll never guess what I did for my kids today.” When was the last time you said that? Possibly never. Probably rarely. 

And yet we have a special place in our family history, we are also one of the main characters and, since it is OUR story, we are in fact THE main character. But a character who tends to hide behind the secondary characters that are our children. 

Telling our story also allows us to take a distance and to put our situation at a distance, to look at it from the outside, as if we were a witness of what was happening. It allows us to see and analyze it with different eyes and to give ourselves space to breathe a little. 

See our strengths

Because we often tend to tell the worst things that happen, the disasters, the misfortunes. Not only obviously, but mostly. The story of a catastrophic birth is more easily remembered than the one that went super well,  The child who has not slept for years than the one who slept quickly, the child who is disruptive in class than the one who does his work silently or the rebellious teenager than the one who cooperates. Why? Both through our brain’s desire to protect us from danger and through society’s current emphasis on disasters, as if good news were not of interest. 

As we tell our story as parents, we realize the magnitude of what we do as parents for our children. The majority are usually forgotten. We put aside things that seem trivial to us. But when put together, they become important. It allows us to see our strengths as parents, to see how we reacted in many difficult situations and how we got through these situations to come out of them stronger (and probably more tired). 

Seeing our strengths allows us to use them more easily. Because it is very possible that some of them have been forgotten or that we don’t even know that we have them and that it is only by paying attention to our history that we became aware that we had these unsuspected strengths. 

And realizing what our strengths are allows us to nuance our negative vision of ourselves, because we all have one, more or less important, this vision, this little voice that criticizes and judges us. Being able to say to that little voice, “I may not be super patient, but I’m really paying attention” helps to silence it at least a little. The same goes for our tendency to compare ourselves to others. When you see beautiful, well-decorated, perfectly tidy homes with perfectly dressed, clean children on social media, envy and comparison are never far away and it can be hard to ignore them and feel competent. If we can counter, again with our own advantages, it takes the pressure off. 

Realize and take control of repeated behaviors

To see our history is also to see repetitions. Which can be positive or negative. Realize that we react in similar ways in certain situations or contexts and choose whether or not this is something we want to pursue. Once we have made this awareness we can decide to repeat the behaviors that serve us voluntarily, or even to use them more often and to stop certain behaviors that are harmful to us. Obviously, identifying them will not be enough to solve them, since they have often been present for a long time, but becoming aware of their existence is the first step.

We can also see all the beauty in our story (the less beautiful too, we will come back to that). We can choose to focus on the positive and bring more of that part of our story with us when we share it or just live it.

Identify external influences

Telling our story is also telling the story of the people who have an influence on us, on our parenthood, on our children. 

Some of these people are part of our support network and make a positive contribution to our lives. Others less so. Realizing the contribution of each person around us allows us to make more thoughtful choices about the people we expose ourselves to. It is often not possible to cut someone out of our lives completely, especially when it is a family member, although it is sometimes possible, even necessary. But whether we cut people off or not, becoming aware of their influence on us allows us to free ourselves, at least in part, from the impact they have on our lives. 

The same is true for society in general, although it is often more difficult to truly realize the extent of its impact on our daily lives. 

Seeing the people around us also allows us to realize the extent of the resources that are available to us if we need them and the support network that we have but sometimes forget. 

Download the guide 

“Realistic self-care in your busy parenting routine: A free 3-step tool”

Rewrite our history and take control of what happens next

Once our history is written, we can rewrite it. Not to make it wrong or more to our advantage, but to highlight the elements that are most important and bring us the most.

And once we have all this information in hand, we can take control for the rest, at least a little. Obviously life will continue to happen to us and the wheel will continue to turn too fast often. But when we are more aware of how things are going around us, we can more easily make choices that are to our advantage. 

All this will give us more confidence in our role as parents. 

What does our history bring to our children?

Telling our story, if we are not an “important” person, is it useful to anyone else but us? 

Important, what does that mean? Because I would say that we are all super important to at least one person, and when we have kids, we are at least important to them and probably to anyone else on our parenting team. So our history is important to them in many ways. 

It is part of their history

This is the most obvious reason. Our story as parents, and even our life story as a whole, is part of our children’s story. They are here because we decided to conceive them or to bring them to our home, so this story of desire for children, of approach no matter what they are, it is theirs as much as ours. When they want to know more about their story, they will be happy to have this little piece of life told. I gave my mother and grandmother a subscription a few years ago that allowed us to have this story told and it has been incredibly rewarding to read these moments, anecdotes and reflections on their stories. It allowed us to know them better, as it will allow our children to know and understand us better. 

To offer a more real vision of their childhood

When they grow up and are old enough to ask questions about their childhood, they will have their memories, but these memories are often greatly biased, because, like any human and even more like any child whose understanding of the world still has many holes, they will have interpreted their history with their ability to understand what is happening around them. Having our vision of the story will allow them to correct certain interpretations or fill in gaps. 

And if they become parents themselves, our true story will offer them a realistic and concrete image of parenthood, which is not so present around us. 

Give them more aware and confident parents

This is probably the biggest benefit, although it is indirect. When we take this time to reflect and analyze our parenting, we do it for ourselves but also for them. By developing our strengths, becoming aware of our recurring behaviors (both positive and negative), identifying our positive support network and the negative influences around us, we can become more conscious and confident parents who make decisions and take actions. Obviously, not every day, we are human, but more often than before. This is what they will see in our story: That imperfection is human. 

And our story can have an impact on other parents

If we choose to share it, our story can have an even greater positive impact than it has on our family or on us.

Help them feel less alone

Loneliness is a very common feeling among today’s parents in northern Western societies (and in much of Oceania). One reason is that we have lost a large part of our support community through family breakdown and estrangement and the fact that we are now expected to care for our children as a family unit first and foremost. 

Telling our story as parents allows other parents to find commonalities with our own and, therefore, to feel less alone by realizing that their experience is shared.

Allows for a variety of different experiences to be presented

The more parents share their stories honestly, the more we will see the wide variety of stories that exist. Because they don’t really exist as a “normal” family as the media or the two-adults-and-two-children family activity packages would have us believe. There is an infinite variety of stories, all different and all equally valid. 

Do the two elements I just mentioned seem contradictory to you? They may seem contradictory but they really aren’t. We are all unique in our specific stories, our challenges, our victories, our obstacles. But we all have one thing in common: Being a parent. Even if we have not been able to have children or have lost them, even the desire for a child allows us to share similar experiences with the community of parents. 

And it is by presenting all these portraits to society that, slowly, the vision of parenthood and the importance given to the family in society can change. 

In conclusion

Your story as a parent is worth telling for you, your children, other parents and even society. 

But even if you choose not to share your story and keep it to yourself, it can give us more clarity, give us space to ourselves, highlight our strengths, allow us to identify our resources and obstacles, and give us more control over the rest of our story, to give us greater confidence in our role as parents. 

1Introduction to the narrative approach

You can also visit this page to see a good part of my story.