Your child is the progression of your consciousness. A child's consciousness comes into life as the culmination of the consciousness accrued at that time of both its mother and father. This is one way that consciousness expands in our universe. The purpose of children is not just the expansion of universal consciousness; it is also the expansion of our consciousness as parents. We are prevented from expanding when we are emotionally stuck in our own childhood. All adults still have an inner child. If we have not re-parented our inner child yet, we are at the mercy of our childhood needs and impulses. Our emotional selves never grow up.

Having a child give us the opportunity to parent the child within ourselves externally through our child. Love becomes distorted if we do not address out own pain. For this reason, we need to be willing to address our own childhood wounds. We need to be willing to integrate our emotional body in order to ask ourselves the question "what did I need from my parents that I did not get?" Keeping this in mind, Teal gives us some more crucial tips about how to parent our children.