As a developmental psychologist, I spend my days analyzing the theoretical frameworks of human growth, but when I walk through my front door, those theories collide with a messy, beautiful reality. Currently, I am parenting a 5-year-old and a 17-year-old. In many ways, living with this age gap feels like living in a time machine; I am simultaneously experiencing the intense, physically demanding days of early childhood and the emotional, psychologically complex days of early adulthood. This duality has given me a front-row seat to a phenomenon we rarely discuss in clinical terms: the fracturing and reconstruction of the parent’s own identity.

We often look at child development as a ladder the child climbs, but we forget that the parent is climbing a parallel ladder. Erik Erikson, the pioneer of psychosocial development, argued that the primary task of adulthood is "Generativity vs.........

© Psychology Today