Children Are The Mirror We Didn't Know We Needed
A kind reminder to myself...
Read time: Approx 3-5 mins
There’s that magical moment in parenting, somewhere between a child screaming "NO!" in a grocery store and expertly hurling a grape at your face like a rabid primate, when you catch a flash of something eerily familiar. It isn’t just the dimple on their left cheek or the way their nose crinkles when they’re “not buying it.” It’s that unmistakable spark in their eyes when they're about to push every one of your buttons. Not randomly…but with the kind of precision only someone who has studied your soul can manage. That flash of rebellion? That uncanny mimicry of your more questionable habits? Yep. That’s you.
Children are our mirrors…and not the flattering “let’s catch a perfect angle” type. They’re more akin to those unapologetically honest department store mirrors under unholy fluorescent lighting…the ones that not only show you the jacket you tried on, but also that weird pimple forming behind your ear.
Kids absorb everything. I mean everything. Mutter one sarcastic comment under your breath about “grandma’s secret stash,” and suddenly your four-year-old is doing stand-up about it at Thanksgiving. Drop a casual F-bomb mid-sentence, and it will be the first and last thing you hear repeated for the next six months. Think of them as extremely devoted stenographers with no professional boundaries.
But the mirroring goes deeper than sound bites. It’s not just what we say, it’s how we are. Our moods, our coping mechanisms, the way we handle anger or anxiety—all of it seeps into their developing little psyches. Our children, in their unfiltered, chaotic glory, are walking reflections of our inner weather. If you have a short fuse, you may find it echoed in a pint-sized volcano. If you're conflict-avoidant, you might notice your child sulking in their room for hours instead of just saying, "I'm mad at you."
And yes, when they mimic our best parts, it's magic. When your daughter sings in the car like you do, or your son comforts his friend with an empathy that feels straight out of your heart, it’s almost too much. You see the pieces of yourself you’re actually proud of, refracted through the light of their newness.
But then comes the mirror we’d rather avoid…
We all carry baggage. Maybe it’s childhood stuff, maybe it’s the fallout from one too many bad relationships, maybe it’s Big-T trauma (war, violence, abuse, etc.), or maybe it’s the accumulation of small disappointments we never fully acknowledged. Most of us find ways to stuff it down, slap a label on it, and soldier on. Children don’t give a damn about our neat little emotional filing system. They came to f**k sh*t up.
When your child refuses to listen, and your immediate reaction is to bark back louder, ask yourself—who are you really talking to? When they burst into tears because their favorite spoon is dirty and you want to scream, "It’s just a f**king spoon!", perhaps it’s your own buried need for predictability rearing its head. Their raw, honest reactions scrape against our carefully constructed personas. They dig up the feelings we thought we buried beneath “adulting” and to-do lists.
And sometimes, it’s startling. When your kid sulks in a way that feels all too familiar, when they say something cruel in a tone that makes you wince, it might be a direct line to your own shadowy side. It can feel accusatory, even though it's not. It’s just reflection.
The good news? This isn’t all tragedy and trauma. There's absurdity too. A great deal of it, actually. Parenting is a long-running improv comedy show where everyone is sleep-deprived, over-scheduled, mainlining Lexapro…and nobody remembers their lines.
I once told my son, with full dramatic flair, that he couldn't eat cookies for breakfast because "we don’t eat sugary trash that early in the day"… only to remember that just two weeks earlier I’d had leftover birthday cake and coffee at 7:00 a.m. He looked at me with the disappointed wisdom of someone who’d just seen Oz behind the curtain.
These contradictions are not failures. They’re opportunities. Or, at the very least, they’re decent material for your memoir someday.
Children are deeply attuned to our emotional frequencies. They don’t need to understand the content of a conversation to feel the tension in the room. And while this sensitivity can be terrifying, it’s also a gift. They invite us to try again. To approach life with more intention, more transparency, more grace. I credit a lot of my self-improvement desires to my mini-me…
Kids move at a different pace. Watch a child try to zip up a jacket, and you’ll see a kind of fierce determination rarely found in adults. They get distracted by the feel of the zipper, the color of the lining…and then finally lose all focus to the ant crawling on the sidewalk. It’s maddening…and also unbelievably endearing.
Children remind us that life is more about process than product. That feelings are meant to be felt, not overly-intellectualized and packaged into a ChatGPT prompt. That it’s okay to be wildly inconsistent sometimes, as long as you keep showing up.
And here’s something else…when we take the time to heal ourselves, to reflect, to grow—they notice. Even if they can’t articulate it. The home becomes a softer place. The mirror less harsh.
As much as the control-seeking part of my brain would like to think otherwise, children aren't clay to be molded. They're fires to be tended. They don’t come to us as blank slates. They arrive with their own blueprint, their own temperament, their own odd little quirks and beautiful complexities. But they do look to us for direction, for meaning, for the tools to build their emotional vocabulary.
And in doing so, they hold up that mirror. Not to shame us, but to help us remember. Remember who we are, where we came from, and maybe where we deviated along the way.
So the next time your child throws a tantrum about wearing socks, or delivers a painfully accurate imitation of you losing your keys for the fifth time in a week—laugh. Reflect if you’re able. And forgive yourself for being an imperfect human.
Parenting isn’t a mastery project. It’s a living, breathing relationship. One that will stretch you, wreck you, delight you, and humble you—often all before 7 a.m.
In the end, maybe that’s the point…not to be perfect, but to be present. To admit when we mess up. To apologize. To resolve. To show up in the mirror, every messy inch of us, and say, "I'm still learning." And then, if we're lucky, get invited to a dance party in the kitchen with a four-year-old DJ and some cringe Disney classics.
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