The concept of the "inner child" typically refers to the part of ourselves that felt unloved and unimportant during childhood. This inner child embodies trauma, pain, and a desire for love and appreciation.

As children, we yearned to feel loved and connected to our caregivers. We sought their approval and often tried hard to please them to earn their love. When we didn't feel important or loved by them, we carried that sense of neglect into adulthood, where we continue seeking love and acceptance.

Even as adults, we continue to pursue love and significance, seeking the nurturing and validation that we lacked as children from our loved ones. This desire to feel loved and treated as we wished to be treated in childhood can complicate our roles as parents. Without realizing it, we may want our children to fulfill our unmet emotional needs. We hope they will obey us and succeed in validating our importance to them. Consequently, when they engage in behaviors we disapprove of, we may interpret these actions as a sign of a lack of love for us.

In this podcast, we aim to raise awareness among parents about the importance of giving rather than receiving. We need to examine our relationship with our children to ensure we aren't expecting them to please us to feel loved. Additionally, we should refrain from punishing them as a means of expressing our feelings of unworthiness or lack of importance.

We discuss the significance of compassion for our well-being and the value of maintaining good relationships with others. Being unkind to ourselves contributes to unhappiness and reduces our productivity. Blaming ourselves or forcing ourselves to meet expectations drains the energy we need for the things we genuinely want to do.

Additionally, we examine how childhood experiences influence our self-care in adulthood. If we were treated harshly by our caregivers, we may struggle with self-kindness as adults, which can also affect how we interact with our loved ones.

In this podcast, we explore how childhood influences our sense of worth. Not feeling loved and connected to our caregivers during childhood makes us think we must perform to be accepted. This causes many people to work hard to achieve their goal of being loved and accepted. Unfortunately, this never happens, and they continue pursuing this goal their entire lives.