Jennifer Beall
According to an article in USA Today,[i] a woman named Heidi Bruce was walking through Target one day when she had the sudden urge to dance to a song that was playing. Not surprisingly, she was worried about what would happen if she gave in to the urge. What would people think of her? What might they do?
She decided not to worry about what might happen. She chose to dance. And then she started posting videos on TikTok of herself dancing in Target wearing colorful, mismatched outfits, often with capes and/or crowns.
In the videos, she tells her inner child that it’s ok to dance, that she’s safe, that there are no rules against dancing in Target. She’s not going to get in trouble. She started doing other videos, too, in which she talked to and reassured her inner child.
She had been an anxious child. As a teenager and a young adult, she experienced depression. She started reading books to try to help herself to feel better. One that particularly helped her was No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, by Dr. Richard Schwartz.
She started “reparenting” herself, which is not only related to Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, but also a major focus of the 12-step group Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families (ACA or ACoA).
We all have inner children, and most of them need reparenting, to one degree or another. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we were abused when we were growing up. Often, our inner children need to be reparented because no parent can be perfect. And, too, many parents never really grew up themselves, which is why the term “adult children” is so accurate. Parents who never really grew up have a hard time giving their own children what they need to thrive.
One of the challenges of reparenting yourself is that it’s harder to remember to parent a child who isn’t physically separate from you. As much as you might want to be there for that part of yourself on a daily basis, it’s easy to forget.
One thing that I’ve found helpful is to add a childhood photo of yourself to the gallery of photos on your phone’s lock screen. This works because the photo shows up at random times, which makes it more likely that you’ll actually see it. If a photo is always in front of you, chances are that you’ll stop seeing it after a while.
The USA Today article mentions that it’s important to treat inner children like “outer” children in the sense that you can’t just go along with everything they want to do or say. As I’ve often told clients, love and cherish your inner five-year-old, but don’t give them the car keys!
Seeing the outfits Heidi Bruce wears in her videos, I can’t help but think of the outfits young children proudly put together for themselves. Do you remember dressing yourself as a little kid? If you put together an outfit like hers, how would your parents have reacted? If you have kids, how would/did you react if they wanted to dress like she does in her videos?
As I’ve been writing this post, my husband and daughter and I have been texting about some of the projects she’s done this semester at Moore College of Art and Design, where she’s a second-year graphic design major/illustration minor. She has sent us photos of some of them, and she has told us she’s looking forward to showing us others when she comes home for the summer.
All of this reminds me that reparenting our inner children has the added benefit of helping us to better parent our own children. Parents who showed genuine interest in their five-year-old’s artwork are more likely to have their college-aged kids volunteer to show them their much more sophisticated artwork!
I don’t know about you, but I’m highly unlikely to dress like Heidi Bruce and start dancing in the aisles of Target. I do pay attention to my inner child on a daily basis, though, and I have done a lot of reparenting work myself. If you’d like to learn more about how you can reparent yourself, fill out the contact form, book a consultation, or call or text me at 410-888-0590.
[i] https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2026/04/28/reparenting-target-dancing-viral/89826185007/