After putting my mother through hell as a teenager, I decided not to have children in case I created another “me”. Eventually, I changed my mind, and now my children are adults starting families of their own. Guess I did alright because my son suggested I write a blog on parenting. So, I’m beginning where I did, with myself. If you really want to succeed, fix yourself first to be a great parent, no matter what stage of parenting you’re in.
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Below are quick-links to jump ahead to the specific steps, or points in my life, that helped me with the fix yourself first to be a great parent journey:
- want change
- my fix-me list
- emotions are your guide
- sharing, self-help, and personal growth
- pregnancy – parenting boot-camp
- the rage
- I’ve got the power
- don’t give everything
- do your best
want change
“Fix yourself” sounds harsh, but we all have something we can work on. If you haven’t already, read my about middleagedteen and about me pages, they explain a bit about my life B.C. (Before Children). I grew up just in time for parenthood.
the teenage years
Parenting didn’t come naturally to me, the first time I had maternal instincts was when I got pregnant. Growing up, I despised my siblings and I never played with dolls and Barbie’s, I organized them.
As a teenage babysitter I was the worst and didn’t do anything more than I had to. I had a regular babysitting job after school a few nights a week and one time the kids asked me to play instead of watching Polka Dot Door. I had no problem saying “no” and when they compared me to their other “fun” babysitter it didn’t bother me at all. That night we continued watching TV and they never asked me to play again.
the realization
When I was 18 years old I moved to Vancouver, B.C. and spent a lot of time alone being new to the city. This gave me lots of time to reflect on myself and what I wanted out of life. I didn’t like what I’d become so made a plan to change.
Even though children were the last thing on my mind, wanting to change was how I began the fix yourself first to be a great parent journey. If you’re reading this blog, likely you’ve already figured that out. My next step was creating my fix-me list.
my fix-me list
In that little Vancouver bachelor apartment I made my first list, a fix-me list. This list included everything I wanted to improve on: my goals, bad habits to stop, good habits to start, becoming a nicer person, and going back to school. I even had stop nail biting on that list.
I didn’t think about how to complete my fix-me list, I just tackled each item and somehow got it done. With what I know now as a Life Coach, I tweaked my fix-me list and made the exercise, 10 steps to a better you.
With my fix-me list shrinking I was feeling better about myself but guilt, regret, and anger kept creeping into my life. These feelings were the result of the way I was and what I went through as a teenager, not who I’d become. If I wanted to be at peace, I had to do something about those feelings and that’s how I learnt emotions are your guide.
emotions are your guide
Acting on my guilt, regret, and anger was one of the most freeing things I’ve ever done. As I unloaded each thing that was the source of my negative feelings a burden was lifted. A few decades later I came across the documentary, The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, which has what I call a voodooish out there theory on getting what you want. What I like about The Secret is it explains how good and bad feelings are a guide. If something feels good keep doing it and if it feels bad, fix it.
My father died when he was 41 years old so I learnt at a young age life is too short to have negative emotions as your companion. See my post, your emotions are telling you something on the steps I took to get rid of my negative emotions.
The fix-me list and using emotions as my guide were both turning points in my life. They were the foundation of what I would discover next, sharing and growing to fix yourself first to be a great parent.
sharing, self-help, and personal growth
Whether it’s friends, family, a spouse, partner, or even a pet, you live longer, and life is more fun and meaningful when you share it.That’s one of the things my favourite health and well-being book, Younger Next Year, by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge, M.D, explains.
Although starting my journey of growth in the mid 1980’s by myself wasn’t lonely, I did feel isolated with how I felt about myself. I didn’t feel comfortable talking to anyone about how I felt and there weren’t the resources we have now on self-help.
In the early 1990’s my fix yourself first to be a great parent journey stepped up when I made friends with someone on a similar path and shared her experiences.
sharing
The makings of a good friendship is having someone you trust to share your feelings and experiences while not being judged. Throw in some fun so it’s not all doom and gloom and you have the foundation of a great friendship.
The self-help journey my friend introduced me to was mental health issues. Eventually, this allowed me to accept my quirks with an “if you can’t beat them join them” attitude and that’s when my journey shifted to personal growth.
my introduction to mental health
The friend I made in the 1990’s came at the perfect time. Sharing experiences opened up the world of mental health issues and included talking about things I never spoke of before. Everything made sense when my friend shared that certain behaviours are the result of being raised a certain way and/or from abuse.
This got me thinking about a recurring nightmare that haunted my childhood. To this day, I can still see it, the dream was always the same. I’m little so slowly make my way down the stairs into our basement and am greeted by the person who was living with us wearing a big blanket as a cloak. We always played the same make-believe wizard game…and then I wake up screaming!
This was the only thing I could think of to explain my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) tendencies. Not that this knowledge cured me, but it was a potential reason to help me understand why I had certain habits.
A decade after sharing this with my friend, my suspicions of abuse were confirmed but by that point it didn’t matter. Justice had been served, I couldn’t change the past – I could only learn from it – and my OCD was working for me.
if you can’t beat them join them…
…and that’s what I did. Understanding my childhood trauma didn’t change my OCD tendencies, quite the opposite, I embraced them. My OCD tendencies made me a better person and an amazing employee – as long as I didn’t have to babysit. I’m a hard worker, reliable, meticulous, meet deadlines, take pride in my work, and am one of the most organized people you’ll ever meet.
My sister was the opposite of me, messy and disorganized. Sharing a room with her growing up prepared me for living and working with others in a world I have no control over. Knowing this when I got pregnant allowed me to plan for a fun, toy-scattered home by day, balanced with a neat orderly home at night.
Armed with this knowledge I changed how I viewed the world of self-help; I shifted to a personal growth lense, a much more optimistic outlook.
personal growth
Personal growth covers many areas. What I’m talking about here is mental health, something that wasn’t talked about when I was young. Back then, if you saw a mental health specialist like a psychiatrist, or shrink, as they were called back then, you were labelled as messed up. Now, there’s lots of publicity, organizations, information, and professionals for mental health and it’s not all bad.
Sometimes you just need to talk to someone to get a different perspective or get some tools to achieve a goal or get over something holding you back. Below are some resources I’ve found useful:
books
Books are my favourite resource allowing me to reflect as I read. I still have my first self-help books, small one-hour reads my friend recommended, Life’s Little Instruction Book, by H. Jackson Brown and Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and it’s all small stuff, by Richard Carlson, Pd.D. These books whet my appetite and opened my world to non-fiction improving every facet of my life.
Although libraries are a great places to get information and a librarian can save you time, there are lots of online books found in apps. You can read reviews and, for many, you can read part of the book before buying it. Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and Audible are three popular book apps.
internet and AI
There was a time when I went to the library to find information but since the internet exploded I haven’t been once. Using your favourite internet browser (i.e. Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) you can find all sorts of posts on whatever you’re searching for. Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes this even easier now.
AI not only answers your questions in detail but supply options, variations, and the resources on where its information is found. I love research but AI saves time sifting through millions of internet articles. If you’re looking for local resources, just name your city and you’ll get that too.
professionals
Psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors, therapists, and social workers are professionals supporting mental health. Other professionals who work with providing guidance on where you are and where you want to be include mentors and life and business coaches.
Depending on what your help and growth needs are you can find a professional near you by searching the profession title and your city. If you’re not sure there’s lots of campaigns and organizations to guide you.
campaigns and organizations
For mental health help there are campaigns, such as Bell Let’s Talk, non-profit organizations like the Canadian Mental Health Association, and government municipalities providing resources with their public health division, such as, Mental Health – Ottawa Public Health.
Help of any kind is just an internet click or phone call away. There are many “crises lines” available 24/7 since mental health issues are so common in Canada affecting 1 in 5 people in their lives.
sharing and growing to fix yourself first to be a great parent…
…is so much easier now with the vast resources available. If it wasn’t for my friend, likely my growth would have been delayed for at least a decade. Or maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all and I wouldn’t have done more than my fix-me list and recognizing emotions are your guide. Of everything I did and learnt to fix yourself first to be a great parent, the most impactful happened when I got pregnant.
pregnancy – my parenting boot-camp
Children with a good solid upbringing in their first 10 years usually turn out fine as adults.”
Words of wisdom from my grandparents.
There’s nothing like getting pregnant to kick-start change. Pregnancy was the first time in my life I had maternal instincts and those nine months were my parenting boot-camp.
As a teenager, I was pretty messed up after my father died but as soon as I became an adult I began working on getting my solid base back. My British grandparents talked about this after working with what they called “mal-adjusted children” for over 30 years. They were the master and matron of homes with children who were wards of the court. My grandfather, the master, dealt with the psychological side of things, and my grandmother, the matron, ran the household.
Their experience was that children with a good solid upbringing in their first 10 years usually turn out fine as adults. Five years is good but 10 years are better. They were right, the 13 solid years my parents gave me paid off.
With this in mind, I planned my parenting role and personality. My goal of raising children to become what I wanted for myself forced me to become their role model, an independent, functional, happy, moral, and values driven parent. My children didn’t need to be doctors, accountants, lawyers, or any other professional, I just wanted to create kind contributing humans.
That left me with a few things to tackle after a fun selfish decade of adult life. So, I did the one thing that worked for me, I made a fix-me list, this time for parenting. For more about this, see my post, pregnancy, my parenting bootcamp, 12 things I did during pregnancy that helped train me for parenthood.
Overwhelming is an understatement of all I needed to do and learn in nine months but my biggest fear was my children turning out like me with a bad temper. Something I call “the rage”.
the rage
Looking back on my childhood, I recall feeling annoyed, irritated, and intense anger a lot of the time with zero love and patience for my siblings. Small noises bothered me, I hated disorder, lots of materials felt itchy, and when I lost my temper I found peace trashing my room and destroying my art.
Those intense feelings eased off after my father died as a young teen when I “self-medicated” with marijuana. As my use decreased “the rage” slowly crept back into my life.
The first major red flag incident resulted in my mother giving me 30 days to find another place to live after she had to pull me off my sister in a fight. That’s how I ended up in Vancouver when I was 18 years old.
Other than the odd slip, I managed to keep the rage to myself till I had another incident in my mid 20’s and got my partner and I kicked out of our apartment. As someone exploring personal growth and self help this was a sign, I needed anger management tools.
Martial arts was what I really wanted to do but couldn’t afford it so tried Tai Chi. I stopped that after a few classes when everyone thought I upset a student who shared her recent MS diagnosis with me. In the end, gardening ended up being my therapy and other than my monthly blues during my menstrual cycle everything was fine till my second child came along.
the rage and motherhood
Like most new moms, I was overwhelmed with a two year old and a baby at home without any support. My answer to that was going back to work early from maternity leave. What was I thinking? Now I added work to my long days and nights while doing everything else around the home too. What a mistake!
It had been some time since I felt “the rage” but I knew the signs and had to do something about it before I blew up. My answer this time was a few things. First, I renegotiated our mortgage to consolidate our credit cards and loans so I didn’t have to work.
Then I committed to do something just for me while I stayed home with children. Even though we didn’t have much money I decided my spending money would go toward a martial art. After my last shift I drove around till I found a martial arts place to vent my frustrations. I hadn’t done my research and lucked out when I committed to Lu’s Taekwon-Do. I was greeted by Ms. Seely who said, “we’ll take care of you” and they did.
Taekwon-Do was so much more than a martial art. Of course, it helped with my anger management. There’s nothing like legally hitting and punching someone as well as taking their shots too. It gave me a break from my children, taught me control, mentally challenged me with all I had to know, I learnt some Korean and Japanese, by the time I got my black belt I was in the best shape of my life, and I made a new family with somewhere to call my own.
Taekwon-Do took care of me and likely saved my children’s lives. Being raised by parents with bad tempers didn’t help with the example they set but I nipped that in the bud. Similar to anger issues my parents had power issues and I had to fix mine.
I’ve got the power
Never in my life have I felt so much power than when I became a parent. It was humbling and overwhelming when I realized how much impact I’d have being the center of my children’s world. It was God-like having the power to make or break this tiny fragile being.
Knowing I had all that power made me look back on my own parents. They were young starting a family while I was pushing 30 years old and had a few advantages they didn’t, maturity and a self-awareness.
It’s hard to keep your children in line while allowing them power and picking my battles was the answer. My children learnt from a young age the only things they had no power over were health, safety, morals, and values. Being consistent on these taught them safe limits and gave them confidence for other things.
Sure, sometimes I forgot this, like when my daughter wrote a rant letter, see above picture, to Santa Claus because we wouldn’t let her buy another Build-A-Bear. How could we refuse after that? My daughter was right, it was her money and this didn’t impact health, safety, morals, and values.
As a parent all you can do is hope you get it right.
I got it right!
One day while chatting with my son about parenting I mentioned my parenting style, kind of a firm and loving Mary Poppins. He disagreed. He saw me as fair, giving him lots of choices and freedom to choose, and because of this, he didn’t need to rebel.
Picking my battles kept me sane. It taught my children about important limits while giving them confidence to present a good argument to change my mind when I said “no”.
Consistent decisions based on what’s healthy, dangerous, right and wrong are easy to make. Not sure about something? Go back to your feelings, if it doesn’t feel right then odds are it isn’t. Being pressured into a quick decision? A firm “no” answer was my default.
These are great guides, but going back to being pressured, if your children are too confident that’s a problem too.
don’t give everything
It’s natural for parents to give to their children and it’s natural for children to take. From the moment children are conceived they’re like a parasite taking what they need to survive. What I’m referring to in this section isn’t survival, it’s two scenarios: when parents give too much keeping their children reliant and when parents end up tapped with nothing left to give.
parents who keep their child reliant
If you have the urge to do and give everything to your children, think about why you’re doing it. This could make the difference between raising a fully functional or needy adult child.
There are many reasons parents give too much. Working parents may give everything making up for the long days children spend in daycare; single parents may be making up for the missing parent; and families with one child may be compensating for missing siblings.
All those scenarios have one thing in common, the parent wishes for something better for their family. Not a terrible thing if the parent is in control and isn’t doing everything to boost their ego.
How does this fit in to keeping children reliant? Parents who thrive on giving everything to earn boasting rights for all they do and how much their children need them is a problem. This is a toxic co-dependent relationship that prevents success for both sides. Children need to gradually do things for themselves and not have everything handed to them to grow and have their own successes.
when parents have nothing left to give
Giving too much isn’t just a problem for raising healthy children, it can also be a problem for the parent. Hold a little something back for yourself so you don’t end up drained with nothing left to give when your child needs you the most.
My thing was Taekwon-Do, what do you need to keep happy and sane? A bit of time for yourself, a hobby, creating your own private space in your home, or having some spending money just for you. Whatever it is you need, do it, and don’t apologize. By saving something for yourself you don’t end up empty with nothing left to give. This also sets a great example for your children to do the same. Then, you can truly say you did your best.
do your best…
Doing your best as a parent is all you can do. I didn’t always make the best decisions or set the best example but I did the best I could at the time. With the foundation of being committed, keeping my children healthy and safe, and being guided by values and morals, everything else fell into place.
When I did make mistakes, I used this as an opportunity to teach my children. Through my mistakes they learnt about saying sorry, and more important, meaning it. I’d explain what happened at their level and how I’d fix the problem. One time I made the mistake of asking them what my punishment should be…another what was I thinking moment?
The point is, as much as you love your children you won’t always make the right decision. That’s okay, as long as you’re doing your best and make the best decision at the time.
Everything you do as a parent is an opportunity to raise the most amazing person your child can be no matter what their age. And, next thing you know your children are having children. Then it’s your turn to teach your adult child to do their best and begin to…
…fix yourself first to be a great parent
If you already have the tools I’ve covered then count yourself lucky. If you’ve tried to make change in the past and it didn’t work out, don’t be hard on yourself. Change is hard.
Want change? Use your parenting instinct to increase your motivation to fix yourself first to be a great parent. Blogs of what I did are 10 steps to a better you, your emotions are telling you something, and pregnancy, my parenting bootcamp.
The fix yourself first to be a great parent journey can begin at any time: teenager, young adult, pregnancy, preparing to have a child, or maybe you’re already in the throws of parenthood.
No one needs the perfect parenting manual, my life coach training taught me your own experience is all you need. To increase your child’s chance for success want change, tackle a fix-me list, use emotions as your guide, share and grow, take advantage of your pregnancy – my parenting boot-camp, recognize you’ve got the power, don’t give everything, and do your best. That’s what worked for me!
By sharing my experiences I’m hoping to save others the growing pains I went through. Is there anything you need to work on? If you’re in the throws of parenthood, what’s working for you and what isn’t? If you found this blog helpful or know someone who would, I hope you’ll share this post.
For more topics like this visit my all posts page and follow me on my social media to get updates on future posts. I look forward to hearing your comments, challenges, and lessons there too.
Cheers,
Vickie Girolami
April 26, 2026
#middleagedteen #vickiegirolami #anger #buildabear #challenges #guilt #lifecoach #mentalhealth #newyearsresolution #parent #parenting #regret #resolution #self-help #self-improvement #thesecret
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latest posts
Below are the middleagedteen recent posts; for more go to all posts.
- fix yourself first to be a great parent
- your emotions are telling you something
- 10 steps to a better you
- pregnancy, my parenting bootcamp
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