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Loving Our Inner Child

February 23, 2026

There are moments in parenting when you react to something small in a way that feels much bigger than it should. Your child looks at you, confused. And somewhere inside, you know the response came from somewhere older than right now.

There is a part of each of us still holding what it needed and did not always receive. When parenting gets hard, when someone cuts the line or your child pushes back one more time, that younger, unresolved part of us is often the one responding.

In this episode, Robert Beeson, Founder & CEO of Solo Parent, and Elizabeth Cole, single parent, sit down with Michelle Chalfant, licensed therapist, holistic life coach, and author of The Adult Chair. Michelle’s model combines simple psychology with grounded spirituality to help people break free from old patterns. Her inner child work has resonated with over a million people through her meditations and podcast, The Michelle Chalfant Show. Together, they explore what the inner child actually is, why triggers are not your enemy, and how solo parents can begin the meaningful work of reparenting themselves alongside their children.

So much of this healing work feels abstract until you are in the middle of a reaction you did not see coming. Old patterns and harsh self-talk keep surfacing even when you want something different. Pet peeves follow you from one season of life to the next. You want more self-compassion but cannot seem to locate it in the hard moments. Underneath it all, one question quietly repeats: why do I keep responding from a place that does not feel like the adult I want to be?

Key Insights from This Episode:

  • The inner child is not a concept. It is a part of you. Formed between birth and age six, your inner child is still influencing your emotions, beliefs, and reactions today.
  • Triggers are gifts in disguise. They are not attacks from the outside. They are invitations to see what beliefs are still living inside you, waiting to be healed.
  • Reparenting your inner child does not take hours. Even a two-minute check-in can begin to repair old wounds and update the roadmap you have been living from.

The Inner Child Is Not a Concept. It Is a Part of You.

Michelle opened the conversation by grounding something that many people have heard about but never fully understood. The inner child is the part of us that existed from birth through about age six. It is the seat of our emotions, our deepest needs, our capacity for play, creativity, passion, and vulnerability. And it does not disappear when we grow up. It settles inside us and keeps quietly shaping the adults we become.

What gets formed in those first six years is not just memory. It is a roadmap. When a child cries and gets told to stop being a baby, the roadmap gets a new instruction: do not show emotion. When a child feels overlooked or unseen, the roadmap records a belief: I do not matter. These programs run in the background for decades, so familiar that most of us do not even realize they are there.

Michelle described our inner programming as being similar to a cell phone that has never been updated. The operating system still runs, it still governs everything, but it was written for a version of life we no longer live. The beautiful thing, she explained, is that it can be updated. That is exactly what inner child work is: going back to those original programs with compassion and truth, and slowly rewriting what no longer serves.

Many people resist this kind of work because they cannot remember being young. Michelle addressed that directly. You do not need clear memories to do this healing. Your current triggers are doing the remembering for you.

Triggers Are Gifts in Disguise.

One of the most reframing ideas in this conversation came when Michelle explained what is actually happening when we are triggered. Most of us think being triggered means something outside of us has caused a bad feeling. Someone said something. Someone did something. They made us feel that way.

Michelle offered a different truth: no one can make us feel something we are not already carrying inside.

When we get triggered, a belief that was formed in early childhood is being activated. It rises to the surface and puts itself right in front of us. That moment of discomfort is actually an extraordinary opportunity, if we are willing to get curious instead of reactive.

She walked through a process she teaches, one available in depth in her book, that begins with a simple pause. Become aware that you are triggered. Allow the energy of the emotion to move through the body, because emotions are energy and they are designed to move. Then get curious. Instead of asking why is this happening to me, ask what is this happening for me. What is being brought up within me? What is underneath this feeling?

The image she used was a well. You start at the top with the surface emotion, maybe anger or frustration, and you climb down the ladder asking one question at a time: what is under this? What is under that? Eventually you reach the bottom, and what you find there is usually a belief about yourself that is old, familiar, and ready to be transformed. Something like I do not matter. I am not worthy. I am unlovable. Once you find it, you feel it in your body, you acknowledge it, and then you begin the climb back up, this time with new, truthful perspectives replacing the old ones.

Elizabeth walked through this process live during the conversation, starting with a simple pet peeve about people being inconsiderate. What surfaced under it, quickly and honestly, was I do not matter. And underneath that, I am not worthy of being here, of taking up space. That belief connected to a specific memory: the year Elizabeth turned six, her birthday fell on a Saturday for the first time. A real party, finally on her actual birthday. Her mother went into labor that day. Her sister was born. The party was canceled. That moment quietly wrote itself onto Elizabeth’s roadmap as a belief that other people’s needs matter more, that she does not get to take up space. Michelle helped her see the direct line from that little girl to the adult who bristles when people are thoughtless in a checkout line. The trigger had been doing the remembering all along.

By the time you reach the top of the well, Michelle said, the trigger has been neutralized. The belief has been updated. That is the power of the work.

Reparenting Your Inner Child Does Not Take Hours.

The conversation turned toward what this work actually looks like in daily life, and what emerged was one of the most encouraging reframes in the episode.

Robert shared something he had noticed in himself: before he ever did any inner child work, he was already giving his daughters the things he had never received. Presence. Affection. The certainty that he would always show up. He had been parenting from his own unmet needs without even realizing it.

Michelle affirmed that this is one of the most common and beautiful things she sees. Parents often instinctively give their children what they themselves most needed. But there is an even more intentional version of this, and it begins when we turn that same care inward. When we start tending to our own inner child with the same attentiveness we offer our children, something shifts. The reactivity softens. The triggers begin to lose their grip. The space between stimulus and response gets a little wider.

Michelle reminded parents that this work does not require perfection or hours of dedicated time each day. A two-minute check-in while folding laundry. A quiet question on a morning walk: how are you feeling today, little one? What do you need? The consistency matters more than the duration. And every time you show up for that younger version of yourself, you are updating the program, planting new seeds, and slowly becoming the regulated, present, compassionate parent you are already trying so hard to be.

She also offered something important for parents who carry guilt about the early years. You did not ruin your children. The roadmap they received from you is not set in stone, for them or for you. What matters most is what you do next. You take responsibility. You apologize when needed. You model honesty, self-awareness, and repair, and that becomes one of the greatest gifts you can pass to your children. Getting it right thirty percent of the time is enough. The goal is not perfection. The goal is presence, intention, and the willingness to keep showing up.

If somewhere in your chest something tightened while reading this, if a memory surfaced or a familiar feeling rose up, that is not a coincidence. That is your inner child, letting you know she is still there, still waiting, still hoping you will come back for her.

Solo parenting is one of the most demanding things a human being can do. You are carrying what was designed for two. You are holding the emotional weight of your household, the logistics, the future, the grief, the growth, often all at once and often in silence.

And still, you are here. You are doing the work.

The healing you are reaching for is not a destination. It is a direction. And every small turn toward your own inner child, every moment of gentleness you extend to the younger version of yourself, changes something. It changes the atmosphere of your home. It changes the patterns you pass on. It changes you.

You deserve a birthday party too. And it is never too late to have one.

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