Her Honest Space

The relationships our children witness can shape them too. A reflection on the love, friendship, family and connection we hope to model as they grow.

In my last post, The Relationships We Witness Growing Up, I wrote about how the relationships around us can shape the way we understand love, friendship, family and connection long before we are old enough to really understand any of it.

We watch the people around us. We notice how they speak to each other, how they show affection, how they disagree, how they support one another and how they navigate the moments when relationships become difficult. We may not realise we are taking any of it in at the time, but pieces of what we witness can stay with us as we grow.

Becoming a parent has made me think about that from the other side. Because now, I’m one of the people being watched.

It’s easy to immediately think about the relationship between my partner and me when I think about what our son is witnessing, and of course that is a huge part of it. He sees us every day. He sees the affection, the laughter and the ordinary conversations, but he also sees the tired days, the disagreements and the moments when one of us might be frustrated with the other.

I don’t necessarily want to hide all of those imperfect parts from him.

I don’t want him growing up believing a healthy relationship is one where two people never disagree or always get it right. I would rather he sees that you can disagree with someone you love and still respect them. That you can say sorry. That you can listen. That you can acknowledge when you’ve hurt someone and try to make things right. That relationships can go through harder seasons without that automatically meaning the love has disappeared.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised my relationship with his dad isn’t the only relationship teaching him something.

He is also watching the way I am with my mum, my sisters, my friends and the other people in our lives.

He is learning about friendship when he sees me make time for people I care about. He is learning about family through the relationships we have with our own families. He is learning that you can love people deeply while still having different personalities, opinions and ways of doing things.

And hopefully, over time, he will also learn that having a relationship with someone doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything they say or do.

There can be boundaries and still be love. There can be difficult conversations and still be respect. Relationships can change as we move through different stages of life, and sometimes being there for someone looks different than it once did.

I think that’s something I understand much more now than I did when I was younger.

As adults, our relationships become complicated by life. People get married, have children, move away, build careers and carry responsibilities we don’t always see. Friendships that once involved seeing each other every weekend might become a message checking in or finally finding a day when everyone’s schedules align. Family relationships change too as we grow from being someone’s child or sibling into adults with families and responsibilities of our own.

Maybe our children are learning from those changes as well. They’re watching whether we still show up.

They’re watching how we speak about people when they’re not in the room. They’re watching how we treat the people closest to us and how we treat people we barely know. They’re watching whether we can admit when we’re wrong, whether we forgive, whether we have boundaries and whether the people we love feel loved when they’re around us.

Of course, I know we won’t always get that right.

There will be disagreements our son witnesses that we probably wish he hadn’t. There will be times I don’t handle something as well as I could have. There will be friendships that change, family dynamics that aren’t always simple and moments where the example I’m setting isn’t necessarily the example I would have chosen.

But maybe modelling healthy relationships isn’t about giving our children a perfectly curated version of them. Maybe it’s about letting them see that relationships require care.

That love can look like affection between their parents, but it can also look like calling a friend to check they’re okay. Showing up for family. Saying sorry. Celebrating someone else’s happiness. Respecting a boundary. Making time when life is busy. Sitting beside someone when there isn’t anything you can do to fix what they’re going through.

Our children are going to build so many different relationships of their own one day. Romantic relationships may be part of that, but so will friendships, family, colleagues and perhaps eventually families of their own.

I can’t choose what every one of those relationships will look like for my son. But I can think about what he sees in mine.

Because just as the relationships I witnessed growing up became part of my understanding of connection, the relationships surrounding him now are quietly becoming part of his.

And maybe the best thing we can model isn’t what a perfect relationship looks like.

It’s what it looks like to value the people we choose to have in our lives.