therapy

Scared You’ll Mess Up Your Future Kids? Here’s What You Need to Know

You can’t bring up a child completely free from hardship. And honestly, if you somehow managed it, it wouldn’t necessarily serve them well. Children need to learn how to move through challenge, how to regulate in the face of difficulty, and how to cope when life doesn’t go their way. That’s part of building resilience, confidence, and emotional strength.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you purposely cause harm. Abuse, manipulation, or putting a child in danger is never acceptable. But it also doesn’t mean you have to control and pre-empt every scenario to keep them perfectly safe from all harm. Life will happen. Your role is to help them navigate it - not remove it.

In this age of mental health awareness, a lot of people thinking about having children worry about this exact thing: “What if I pass on my trauma?” This fear often comes from those who’ve had difficult upbringings themselves, who are determined to break the cycle and offer their children something better. The fear makes sense. You don’t want your child to experience what you did.

But better doesn’t mean perfect. Better means showing up differently. It means understanding that, yes, life will bring your child difficult moments - and your job isn’t to shield them from all of it but to help them feel safe, validated, and supported through it. That’s how they’ll learn to regulate. That’s how they’ll build the tools they need for the big, wide world.

It’s not just about helping your child through their emotions. It’s about modelling how to move through your own. Children are sponges. They watch how we cope with life and learn from what they see. When parents hide their feelings in an attempt to protect their kids, the unintended message is often: ‘Big feelings aren’t safe. They’re unusual. They should be hidden.’

That said, this doesn’t mean unloading unprocessed emotions onto your child. It doesn’t mean making your struggles their responsibility. It means doing your own inner work - so when hard things happen, you can show up regulated, accountable, and compassionate or they can see you move from unregulated to regulated on your own, not making it their problem.

That work starts before you ever have children.

Reflect on the things you’re carrying.

Talk about the experiences you’ve never processed.

Take responsibility for the patterns you don’t want to repeat.

Challenge the beliefs that no longer serve you.

Learn how to be with your feelings in healthy ways.

No one becomes a perfect person before they become a parent — that’s not possible. But what you can do is become more self-aware. You can begin to understand yourself more deeply. You can take small steps toward healing. You can read, reflect, learn, and keep growing.

And if you do become a parent one day, the work won’t stop. Your children will mirror things back to you - your limits, your boundaries, your coping strategies - and you’ll keep evolving. But it won’t be from scratch, you’ll have laid a solid foundation.

So if you’re scared of becoming a parent because you don’t want to pass on trauma? That fear alone already tells me something important:

You’re already thinking with awareness, intention and care.

You won’t get it perfect. None of us do and perfection doesn’t exist.

But you will show up differently.

You will break patterns, even if it takes time.

And you will teach your future children something far more valuable than perfection:

How to meet life with honesty, courage and compassion.

That’s what changes everything.