The Stages of Parenting
Who are you, as a mother right now? Likely, you’re busy following the roller coaster of child development as your little one grows, but chances are, you’ve not given much thought to how your development as a parent looks.
Currently available models of parental development pay little attention to the development of the human being who wears this label of “parent”. Even in the depths of nebulous newborn time, parents are also people, despite the seemingly singular focus on the sleep-wake-eat cycle. And just as a child has the developmental need to be “seen” throughout the process of growing up, in our experience pre-baby through the time they leave the nest, we also need someone to bear witness to our process.
Don’t worry—we’ve got you covered. Today, we’re outlining the various parenting stages and the sort of parenting support you might need in each stage. We’ll focus on the process of growing up from your perspective and explore the stages of parenting together.
Before you dive in, remember that our professionals are always here to help
Galinsky’s 6 stages of parenting
Ellen Galinsky is one of the first researchers to explore the idea that, as a parent, we change over time alongside our children. Parenting, she believes, is a parallel process to child development. Her six stages roughly align to prenatal, infancy, toddlerhood, preschool, elementary years, adolescence, and early adulthood.
These stages define the spaces where attachment, authority, and interpretation take key roles in the parent-child relationship and each party’s relationship with the world.
Galinsky’s model does something pioneering when it outlines pre-birth as a part of the parenting experience, but its alignment with the normative growth for children means it’s not always accessible to every family. Still, it’s a good place to begin when exploring how becoming a parent changes you and continues shaping your reality every moment after.
Parenting support through the stages
To bring focus to important moments in parenting, and offer support to our community, we intend to highlight the challenges and joys of each stage. Through a monthly installment on our blog, we’re going to explore the stages of parenting outlined by Galinsky above, and add to it where inspiration strikes and where necessity leads.
Resources that you can look forward to from us include:
- Parenting Before Baby/Preparing While Pregnant (Prenatal Stage)
- Meeting yourself as a mother (Birth Stage)
- Attachment (Infancy Stage)
-Taming the Two’s (Toddler Stage)
-Corralling Curiousity (Middle Childhood Stage)
-An Exercise in Self-Sufficiency (Adolescence)
-Letting Go (Early Adulthood)
In the meantime…
Prioritizing your wellbeing and caring for the state of your emotional landscape is an invisible but critical part of flourishing as a parent. In a world where showering alone and eating regular meals have somehow become synonymous with self-care, how do we begin to synthesize our own experience with the stages of parenting and the support we need during each?
Instead of defining your experience by the developmental needs and wishes of your child, spend a moment thinking about the shifts you’ve already noticed in your parenting perspective and role. How do those look and feel? More radically, how do they align with what’s happening within you as they occur?
If we spend time thinking about it, we often find that even when we are trying to compartmentalize our lives and relationships, they bleed into one another. That feels like failure to many of us, but realistically, it’s not. Our emotions are like watercolors, rolling and blending into one another to create new spaces and bridge the gaps between. With this in mind, your parenting stages are likely to look more like a sunset-streaked sky than the perfect divide of a horizon line.
What if, instead of demanding that separation of ourselves, we began to look within when we arrive in those blended and blurred spaces? Where do you fit into your picture of parenting?
Ways to think about parenting
Let’s explore a couple of ways you can begin to navigate your own identity within your parenting role to find the stages you’ve experienced, and anticipate what comes next.
Chronological stages
Stages marked by time are chronologically situated within our lives. In parenthood, those begin the moment you discover you are pregnant. Much like your physical age, your parenting age will evolve as your role does.
These stages of parenting may coincide with the age and development of your child, but they may not. As time passes and your life changes alongside the seasons, the way you look at the world may shift too.
Seasons of parenting could quite literally align with the seasons of the year and their impact on your wellbeing. If you suffer from SAD, and experience greater joy during one season, your parenting is likely to reflect that in the ways you engage with the world around you.
Milestone stages
Marked by moments that mean something, milestone stages will be different for every parent—and for every child. If you have multiple children, the spaces and ways your parenting changes will be vastly different. For some parents, those milestones may be ones that occur in their child(ren)’s growth, but for most of us, they are a mixture of our own milestones and our children’s.
Milestone parenting may be marked by huge moments: first day of school, a new job, moving. They may also be marked by small moments that no one notices outside of yourself and those closest to you. It could be the moment you felt fear, or pride, or confusion in your own response to something. Moments of acceptance or knowing can be informative of your parenting stage and style.
Milestone parenting stages often form along the spaces where our perception of the world, and ourselves and children within it, changes for one reason or another.
No matter which lens feels most aligned with your experience of parenting, the most important thing to remember is that there is so much more to the richness of life than the perfect moments. In stages where you feel less confident or struggle more to strike the balance that feels right for your family, you are still building toward something beautiful.
Children Experiencing the World
You are, in every stage and sense, contributing to the way your child(ren) experiences the world. In heaviness and levity, there is so much beauty. Let your humanity and experiences guide you toward an empathic space of authenticity as a human. Your children will thank you when—as they reach adulthood and reflect—they find safety in experiencing their own stages because they grew up learning that everyone goes through them, even parents.
