Giving Your Kids Better, Part 1: Parenting When You Did Not Receive Good Enough Parenting
Throughout a child’s life, most parents reflect on what type of parents they want to be and what they hope to provide for their kids. Often included in their calculus is how they were parented, what their parents did well, and what they want to do differently in that role. Inevitably, even adults who had great relationships with their parents growing up will find some things they want to do differently. Yet for some, the list of “things I’d like to do differently” is a long one that greatly outweighs the things they would want to repeat.
For folks who fall into this second category, they face some additional challenges in the parenting realm. It can be easy to have a clear sense of what you want your kids to have but it can be hard, in practice, to have a clear sense of how to give something that you yourself did not receive. Additionally, having a child can raise a lot about how you were parented and can cause people who experienced abuse and neglect to face old feelings and experiences.
In my Manhattan therapy practice, I treat many adults who work tremendously hard to be good parents but have not had their own experience of good enough parenting. In this three-part piece, I will lay out some challenges that these folks have and what helps them on their journey of healing themselves and reaching their full potential as parents.
Good Enough Parenting
It feels important to start by defining what we are aiming for as parents to create healthy, well-adjusted kids. One of my favorite therapists and theorists, D.W. Winnicott did some beautiful work with children and families throughout his long career. He found that for children to grow into healthy, autonomous adults they simply needed their parents to be “good enough” when it came to providing empathy and attunement to their needs. Included in that is less attunement, or more precisely, less sheltering as a child grows older so the child can be exposed more and more to the realities of the world and learn resiliency.
The thing that I love about this framework is it leaves room for there to be innumerable ways to be a “good” parent. There is no objective “right” and many different parents and families can produce healthy, happy enough adults irregardless of parenting style and personality. It also allows room for the inevitable missteps and hard moments that happen throughout a child’s upbringing.
This concept additionally helps to define further the types of parents that I think of as I write this piece. Many of the adults that I describe above did not get to experience a parent who was attuned to their needs and instead had misattunement (in the experience of a child who is abused or who had a parent with a serious mental health issue) or a lack of parental presence (in the case of neglect).
Parenting Without A Model
Even when it is very clear what kind of experience you want your child to have (or not have), there can be challenges in actually knowing what that should look like in the day to day if you did not have it yourself. In my therapy practice, I have found that parents who themselves did not have “good enough parents” tend to engage in a lot of harsh self analysis and are underconfident about their parenting skills.
For adults who experienced abuse or neglect from their own parents growing up, seeing similarities between themselves and their parents can be downright terrifying. Many parents tell me that their worst fear is to be like their own parents and for their children to experience even a drop of what they experienced growing up.
In some cases, “normal” feelings can cause anxiety and can make a parent question their parenting skills. For example, a parent who feels anger towards their child fears that they will turn into their mother, whose anger was sharp, mean, and uncontained. Everyone in the world feels anger and every parent will feel angry at their child. It’s important for that parent to learn how to differentiate between a healthy anger and an anger that is more malignant and harmful.
Just like any other fear, the thing to do is to move towards the fear and explore it with curiosity and openness so we can understand what is at play. In the aforementioned example, as a therapist, I don’t just want to reassure my patient, oh, I’m sure your anger wasn’t that bad! In addition to exploring the feelings and associations that arose, we want to actually walk through, blow by blow, what happened so we can arrive together at some understanding of the objective reality.
You Are Destined to Be At Least a Little Bit Like Your Parents...Because They are Your Parents
Additionally, it’s important to acknowledge that of course there will be some semblance of similarity between you and the people who raised you because that is simply how people work. They are your parents! As humans our greatest influences are nature and nurture. Attempting to split off or eradicate those parts only keeps you scared and keeps you from examining those parts. Chances are, the similarities are more exaggerated in your own mind than in reality. Socialize them. Bring them to your therapist and to trusted friends to look at with you in order to reality test and get perspective.
One may find that there are some real, not insignificant similarities between them and their parents, similarities that proved to be damaging to you as a child. This is an upsetting discovery. However, it is good to be concerned about that. It takes a tremendous amount of bravery and ego strength to acknowledge and examine a part of yourself that has the capacity to be hurtful. This is an imperative first step in addressing what is causing that behavior and learning how to do something different. There is no shame in needing help and struggling.
Next time: Giving Your Kids Better, Part 2: Normalizing “Mistakes” and Self-Compassion
In my next piece, I will write about how inherent trial and error and “mistakes” are to the parenting experience and how this can provide some unique challenges for some parents.
