What Openness Means When You Become a Parent
Openness as a new parent is not about being easygoing or adaptable, though you will need both. It's the ability to stay present with who you are becoming without collapsing into who you think you should be. You wake up at 3 a.m. with a crying infant and realize you're someone different now, and the disorientation of that is real. Openness means not forcing yourself into a predetermined version of motherhood or fatherhood while also not pretending the shift didn't happen.
What happens in those early months is not just logistical. Your identity fractures. The person you were before is still there, but the life that person had is gone. You can't spontaneously drive four hours to see a friend. You can't read for three hours uninterrupted. You can't make decisions based only on what you want. The specific pain of new parenthood is not the lack of sleep or the endless tasks. It's the feeling that you've disappeared, and you're not sure if you're supposed to come back.
Openness is what prevents you from making this permanent. It's the capacity to be honest about what you've lost and what you've gained without choosing one and denying the other. Some new parents resolve this by deciding motherhood or fatherhood is now their entire identity, pushing everything else down. Others insist they're exactly the same person they were before, treating parenthood as an external role they perform. Neither is openness. Both are contractions dressed up as solutions.
Why Your Values Shift, and Why That Matters
Your values do not change when you have a child. What changes is your clarity about which ones actually matter. Before parenthood, you might have believed you valued independence, career growth, and spontaneity with equal weight. Now you're living with constraints that force the hierarchy to become visible. You still value independence, but you value your child's security more. That's not compromise. That's information.
The problem is that the shift happens too fast to integrate consciously. You're making split-second decisions about sleep, work, money, time, and presence, and each one is pulling from a different place in you. You say yes to childcare help because you're exhausted, but your childhood taught you that asking for help means you're failing. You cut back on work because you don't want to miss milestones, but you're also terrified of becoming invisible in your field. You value both freedom and devotion, and right now they seem incompatible.
This is where most new parents get stuck. They interpret the conflict as a sign they're doing something wrong. If I really loved my children, they think, I wouldn't resent the loss of my old life. If I really loved my work, I wouldn't leave early to get home. The values are real. The conflict is real. But the interpretation is false. You're not failing. You're holding two true things at once while you figure out what that actually looks like in practice.
The Cost of Staying Closed
Openness requires you to stay in the conversation with yourself, even when the conversation is uncomfortable. This is harder than it sounds. It's easier to decide you're the type of parent who gets it done, no complaining, asking for nothing. It's easier to decide you're the type who fights for their career and treats parenting as an interrupt. It's easier to collapse into what you think you're supposed to be because at least then you have a script.
But when you close down, the values you're not acknowledging don't disappear. They go underground. You start resenting your child for taking your time. You start feeling guilty every time you think about work. You perform contentment while something in you is slowly fracturing. You find yourself snapping at your partner, or making passive-aggressive comments, or simply checking out. The pattern keeps running because the actual conflict has never been named.
Openness is not the same as resolving the conflict. It's being willing to see it clearly. When you can name what you actually value, not what you're supposed to value, you can start making real decisions instead of pretending decisions are being made for you. You can choose what to protect. You can choose what to let go of. You can choose which parts of your old life are worth fighting for and which ones were never as important as you thought.
What to Notice Right Now
Pay attention to the moments when you feel divided. Not the moments when you're tired or frustrated. The moments when you want two things that seem to pull in opposite directions, and you feel like you have to choose. Write down what those things are. Don't interpret them. Don't explain them. Just notice them.
Also notice what you've already had to give up, and whether you've let yourself feel the loss. Some new parents skip this step entirely, moving straight to gratitude. Gratitude is real and important, but it can become a way of not grieving what changed. You can be deeply grateful for your children and also genuinely sad that you can't do the things you used to do on a Tuesday night. Both are true.
The next step is clarity. Take the core values assessment to see which values are actually guiding your life right now, not the ones you think should be, and where you're living them and where you're not. When you can see yourself clearly, you can start making choices instead of just reacting to the moment.
Does being an open parent mean being permissive with your kids?
No. Openness is about your internal relationship to the role, not about parenting philosophy. You can be completely open to your own complexity while having clear boundaries with your children. In fact, openness usually leads to more consistent parenting because you're not acting from hidden resentment or unexamined guilt.
How do you stay open to yourself when you have no time alone?
You don't need hours of introspection. You notice patterns in the moments you have: what makes you feel split, what you resent, what you actually want. Even five minutes of honest attention to these things is more useful than days of thinking about who you're supposed to be. The My Values assessment is designed to surface this clarity quickly, without requiring extensive self-examination you don't have time for.
What if you realize you don't actually want to be a parent?
Openness includes that possibility. Some people discover that parenthood genuinely conflicts with their core values in a way that can't be resolved by better time management or different expectations. That discovery is clarifying. It's not something to feel ashamed of, and it's not something you can arrive at until you stop performing contentment long enough to be honest.
Does openness mean you have to do everything, feel everything, be everything?
No. It means being honest about what you can and cannot hold, and what you're choosing to prioritize. You cannot be fully present in your career and fully present in early parenthood at the same time. You can be honest about that instead of trying to prove you can do both and failing at both.