10 Thoughts on Reparenting
Most of us aren't going to bully a child, and that’s why this works.
Reparenting is a therapy term that has started showing up everywhere. It gets paired with ideas like “healing your inner child” or “speaking to your younger self,” but those things don’t necessarily make it any clearer what reparenting actually looks like.
For a long time, even I wasn’t sure what people meant by it. So, instead of overcomplicating it, here are a few ways I think about reparenting in practice.
Reparenting doesn’t exactly mean becoming your own parent.
Reparenting is just about learning to give yourself some of the emotional support, boundaries, safety, validation, and care that you may not have consistently received growing up. A lot of the time, these are things that you or your therapist might identify as “missing,” or as experiences that shifted your worldview and self-talk in a negative way.
The way we’re treated as children can affect the way we talk to ourselves as adults.
If you learned that mistakes make you “bad” you might be incredibly self-critical when you get something wrong. If you learned that your needs were too much, you might have a hard time asking for help, setting boundaries, or figuring out what you need in the first place. Repeated patterns usually matter the most.
A lot of those reactions can become automatic.
You make a mistake and immediately think, I'm so stupid. You feel overwhelmed and think, Why can't I just handle this? You need reassurance and think, I'm being needy. You set a boundary and immediately feel guilty and selfish. The thought can arrive before you’ve even had a chance to question it.
Ask yourself if you would talk to someone you love this way.
A first step might look like noticing the self-talk and imagining someone you naturally have compassion for. I will often ask my client to name someone they care about: a best friend, their younger self, maybe their own child. If they made the same mistake, would you call them stupid? If they were overwhelmed, would you tell them to get over it?
The goal isn’t to make negative thoughts disappear forever.
Reparenting can start much smaller than that. Sometimes it starts with just noticing the thought, understanding where it might have come from, and starting to respond to yourself differently.
You don’t have to replace the negative with fake positivity. You don't have to tell yourself "I'm amazing and everything is perfect!" when you don't believe it. Reparenting doesn’t have to mean swinging from cruelty to unrealistic or false affirmations.
Sometimes it sounds ordinary: “This is really hard, and I'm going to help you get through it.""You don't have to solve everything right now."“You are allowed to have feelings about this.""You messed up. Let's figure out what happened and what we can do differently next time."
Being a good parent isn’t just about being nice.
Healthy parenting also means teaching, setting boundaries, helping to fix mistakes, and making space for difficult feelings. Reparenting holds both compassion and accountability.
You don’t need to have had the worst parents in the world for reparenting to be useful. You don't have to have experienced severe abuse or an obviously traumatic childhood for this to be relevant and helpful. Sometimes the things that affect us most are the patterns that happened over and over again. Even very loving, well-meaning parents can miss things that we needed.
Most of us wouldn’t bully a kid. Start there.
You don’t have to know exactly what “healing your inner child” means or is supposed to look like. Start by noticing the moments when you talk to yourself in a way you would never speak to a child, and see what happens if you actively choose something different.
Reparenting can be one of those therapy terms that sound a lot more complicated than they need to be. These are just a few practical ways to think about it, especially now that this kind of language seems to be all over the internet.
If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: pay attention to the way you speak to yourself when you’re struggling, overwhelmed, have made a mistake, or have gotten something wrong. You don’t need the perfect therapeutic language.
What does reparenting look like for you in practice? What have you learned to say (or to stop saying) to yourself? Let me know in the comments!
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