Lead
"Am I going to parent the way I was parented?"
Many people ask this question for the first time the moment they become a parent. Whether the memories of your own upbringing are mostly warm or carry real wounds, those memories have a way of surfacing at unexpected moments — the late-night feed, the moment you lose your patience, the first time your child's cry sounds accusatory. Why do people so often reproduce, without consciously choosing to, the patterns in which they were raised? And can that pattern be interrupted?
This is not merely a psychoanalytic intuition. Since the 1980s it has been the subject of sustained empirical investigation.