Reparenting Is How I’m Becoming the Adult I Needed 

No one really tells you how much of adulthood is spent unlearning the things you never signed up for in the first place. You grow up, you keep going and then one day somewhere between a difficult conversation and a meltdown over the wrong brand of bread, it hits you that maybe you’re not fine. Instead you are just well-practiced at surviving. 

That is where reparenting begins. You realize you have been waiting sometimes for years for someone to finally give you what you needed a long time ago, gentleness, patience, permission to feel, room to not be okay. 

Reparenting isn’t about blaming your parents. It is about picking up where they left off. Sometimes they loved us but didn’t know how to hold us. Sometimes they gave us rules without warmth. Sometimes they taught us to study hard but not how to rest without guilt. And sometimes, they were doing the best they could while quietly falling apart themselves. 

So we learn to do it for ourselves. 

We sit with the part of us that still thinks love needs to be earned. The part that flinches when someone raises their voice. The part that thinks being tired is weakness and asking for help is failure. And yeah, sometimes the part that spends ₹3,000 at H&M and calls it self-care because emotional regulation wasn’t exactly covered in school. 

We start asking, what did I need back then that I can offer myself now?  

It doesn’t always grand sometimes it’s a voice in your head that says, “You’re allowed to rest even if your to-do list isn’t finished.” It can also look like holding your own hand through anxiety instead of spiralling. Other times, it’s saying out loud, “That hurt and I didn’t deserve it” without immediately following it with, “But it’s fine, I’m fine, everything’s fine.” 

It is strange, isn’t it? You grow up thinking your struggles are flaws and that you are just “bad with money,” “too emotional,” or “not disciplined enough.” Then a word like reparenting shows up and reframes everything into, Maybe I was never taught. Maybe I can learn. 

The truth is, reparenting isn’t cute, to be honest, it is awkward. It is the long, unglamorous process of meeting the unmet needs you have carried into adulthood. The ones that show up in your nervous system before they show up in your choices. It is telling your inner critic to take a seat while you Google how to make a budget. It is choosing not to chase emotionally unavailable people because you’re finally starting to feel emotionally available to yourself. It’s unlearning survival habits that once protected you, but now just leave you exhausted.  

But little by little as you choose care over criticism, boundaries over burnout and presence over perfection you start becoming the adult your younger self needed. It doesn’t mean you’ll never feel small again. It just means now when you do you will know how to hold yourself. Still learning to hold your younger self? Share your reparenting revelations, submit to iDare and let your story nurture others on this tender path. In the unlearning, you're already enough.
 
Image credits - UnSplash