How to Stop Passing Your Emotional Baggage to Your Kids

About this episode

The episode discusses how parents can stop passing their emotional baggage to their children by recognizing and breaking harmful patterns.

Parents carry their past into their parenting, often without realizing it. In this episode, I sit down with relationship therapist and author Eli Harwood to talk about how emotional baggage forms, how it quietly shows up in the way we respond to our kids, and what it actually looks like to break those patterns in real time. We get honest about triggers, shame, defensiveness, and the parts of ourselves we learned to tuck away long before we ever had children. Eli breaks down how emotional inheritance works, why our bodies react before our brains catch up, and how to shift from reactive parenting to connected parenting. This isn’t about perfection or never getting activated. It’s about noticing, pausing, and choosing something different so our kids don’t have to carry what we never had support for. If you’ve ever wondered, “Am I passing this on?”, this conversation will help you see the patterns with compassion and give you tools to change the story. What we talk about: Why emotional baggage forms and how it shows up in parenting How your childhood coping strategies become adult triggers The difference between reacting and responding Why kids activate the parts of us we haven’t…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Mona Amin

Guest: Eli Harwood

Topics covered

• emotional baggage
• parenting
• mental health
• child development
• reactive parenting
• connected parenting

Keywords

• emotional inheritance
• parenting triggers
• shame
• reactive vs responsive parenting
• childhood coping strategies
• parenting tools

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