Are You Raising a Child — or a Second Chance?

TDT | Manama

Email: mail@newsofbahrain.com

Sometimes, we find ourselves quietly angry with our children.

Because they are shy. Because they are not at the top of their class. Because they struggle with a social skill we think they should have mastered.

But before correcting the child, parenting coach Tuqa Marhoon says parents should pause and ask a more uncomfortable question:

Are we angry for the child's sake—or because our child is not fulfilling our own dreams?

One of the biggest traps in parenting, Marhoon said, is trying, often without realising it, to make children into versions of ourselves—or using them to repair what we believe we failed to achieve in our own childhoods.

The pattern becomes easier to recognise once it is named.

If we are afraid of what people will say, we may pressure our child to be perfect. If we were denied an opportunity growing up, we may push our child toward the same opportunity, even when it is not what they want.

What makes this difficult is that almost nobody does it deliberately.

“We do not wake up in the morning and decide that today we will impose our dreams on our child,” Marhoon said.

Instead, parents carry expectations, fears and ready-made pictures of what they hope their children will become.

And sometimes, without meaning to, those expectations leave little room for the child to decide who they want to be.