Compassionate Child-Rearing - An In-Depth Approach to Optimal Parenting

CHAPTER 1

Overview

Only if we become sensitive to the fine and subtle ways in which a child may suffer humiliation can we hope to develop the respect for him that a child needs from the very first day of his life onward, if he is to develop emotionally.

Alice Miller (1979/1981), Prisoners of Childhood (p. 76)

This is a true story about how young people are damaged, inadvertently, by those who consciously wish them the best—their parents. I am writing about every person whose life has been fractured by the perpetuation of the myths of family and society. We can think of human experience as a series of feelings that flow through us; sensations, perceptions, and thoughts impact on our unique personal attributes and predispositions, leading to an individual style of coping with environmental conditions. If any aspect of our experience is damaged—if, for example, we repress feeling for ourselves and others—we lose much of what is most alive and human. Parents who have themselves suffered emotional deprivation and rejection, and who have shut down on themselves, cannot but pass on this damage to their offspring. This form of destruction is the daily fare of most children, despite their parents' good intentions and efforts to love and nurture them.

In this book, I will show how parents' fundamental ambivalence toward their children—both their desire to love and nurture them on the one hand, and on the other, their unconscious hatred of and resentment toward them—profoundly affects the child's development. It is not my premise that parents have no love for their children or that they merely imagine that they do. Quite the contrary: in my experience, most mothers and fathers love their children and are fond of them, and wish them the best. My concern has always been with understanding why, despite the love and fondness parents have for their children, they so often behave in ways that are not sensitive, loving, or even friendly. Why, despite their wishes to instill a sense of independence and self-reliance in their offspring, do parents demand conformity and submission? And why, despite their desire to foster spontaneity and vitality in their children, do they actually create deadness and dullness in them?

PARENTAL AMBIVALENCE TOWARD CHILDREN

My observations of family interactions, as well as my clinical findings, indicate a core ambivalence in parental reactions. Parents' feelings toward their children are both benevolent and malevolent. These conflicting attitudes coexist within all of us. Many mothers and fathers honestly believe that they love their children even when an outside observer would view their parenting patterns as indifferent, neglectful, or even abusive. They mistake an imaginary connection and anxious attachment to their children, which is a destructive dependency or fantasy bond,1 for genuine love, affection, and regard for the child's well-being. To be effective, any child-rearing approach must take into account the fundamental ambivalence of parents and its sources. However, negative, hostile feelings toward children are generally unacceptable socially. Parents show strong resistance to recognizing such negative and hostile feelings. They tend to deny aggression toward their children, whether it be covert or overt.

Covert Aggression in Parental Reactions

Understandably, parents have considerable resistance to recognizing how divided they are and how aggressive and hostile they may be toward their children as well. This resistance parallels strong conflicting attitudes they have toward themselves. In both cases, they unconsciously fear that if they become aware of these negative feelings, they will be more likely to act on them. They anticipate terrible consequences from acknowledging these "unacceptable" emotional responses. They are afraid that they will become more guilty or even more punishing to their children if they openly admit their hostility.

On the contrary, I have discovered that this recognition actually has positive effects. Far from feeling more guilty, parents generally have benefited from sharing these reactions with other parents who expose similar feelings. Catharsis not only reduces their guilt but also helps them to gain control over acting out hostility in family interactions. I believe that it is necessary, even vital, to uncover these unconscious feelings of resentment and hostility toward children, because only then can parents master and overcome these tendencies.

Behaviors in Children That Arouse Parental Aggression

Although many parents feel guilty about their anger toward children and make every effort to maintain control over hateful, punishing thoughts and feelings, certain characteristics and behaviors in the child can trigger intense feelings of rage and angry outbursts. Incompetence, messiness, whining, crying, helplessness, or a look of vulnerability in a child frequently bring out punishing rebukes from parents. In these instances, generally the child is seen to be at fault and is perceived to be the cause of his parents' anger and irritability. If parents act on their anger toward the child, they will attempt to justify their actions, claiming it was the child who was "out of line" or was "driving them crazy." Once this pattern is established, the child may well become annoying and is no longer the "innocent, pure" child he once was. He tends to display passive-aggressive behavior in relating to his parents, thereby preserving an image of the "bad child" formed during earlier stages in his development.

Even when parents refrain from blaming or attacking the child and attempt to do the "right" thing, their children intuitively sense their underlying tenseness and irritability and become confused by their attempts to disguise this underlying anger. To compound the problem, many child-rearing books teach parents to "act" proper roles and say the "right" words in relating to their children, thereby contributing to a subtle form of damage—a distortion of the child's reality—that can be even more insidious than outright rejection or anger (E. J. Anthony, 1972; Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weakland, 1956/1972; Satir, 1983; Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967; Wynne, 1970/1972).

Manifestations of Love and Hostility in Family Interactions

Very often, parental behavior contradicts any generally acceptable definition of love. Consequently, we must consider the observable actions of parents when attempting to present criteria for loving responses to children. Our criteria include genuine expressions of warmth—a smile or a friendly look that communicates empathy and good humor; physical affection; respectful, considerate treatment; tenderness; sensitivity to children's wants and needs; companionship; and a willingness to be a real person with the child rather than simply act the role of "mother" or "father." Much of what we see around us does not fit these criteria. When we observe family interactions in everyday situations, we see parents behave in ways that are largely detrimental to their offspring. These abuses range in intensity from minor irritability and disrespect to sadism and brutality. For example, we witness scenes like this:

As she prepared to leave the plane, my associate watched as a couple roughly woke up their four-year-old girl, yelling at her to "Get up now!. Or we're going to leave you here!" In the rush of people leaving the plane, the little girl awoke in a panic and burst into tears; the terrified expression on her face showed that she believed her parents' threat of abandonment.*

Apparently, these parents were more sensitive to their fellow passengers' than to their daughter's feelings—a not uncommon practice. Parents often speak for their children in a way that is insensitive and disrespectful, acting as though the child were mindless, mute, or invisible. The child in that situation feels like a nonperson. Some people even believe that children, and especially infants, have no feelings. Children suffer from being overly defined and categorized. They are classified as "the smart one," "the angry one," or "the sensitive one" in a way that restricts their personal identity or conception of themselves.

Frequently, children are teased unmercifully, despite their protests, by parents who are aware of their sensitive areas. For example, a woman recalled that when she was 5 years old, her father took great delight in bursting balloons close to her face just so he could hear her scream. All of us have seen parents reacting with annoyance, literally dragging children through shopping centers, while loudly reprimanding them for lagging behind.

These incidents are not unusual. Manifestations of disturbed parenting can affect every aspect of child-rearing. A baby may be handled roughly in being dressed or bathed; he may be fed insensitively—the food may be literally shoveled into his mouth by an indifferent mother preoccupied with other concerns. Older children may be spoken to with nastiness, sarcasm, and ridiculed by fathers and mothers who are unaware of their tone of voice or their choice of words. Many of these behaviors, verbal and nonverbal, exist on the periphery of parents' consciousness. Consequently, parents themselves do not have a true picture of their child's experience in the family. In each of these interactions, behaviors that clearly contradict generally acceptable definitions of love are being expressed by people who believe they love their children.

Of course, parents vary in their responses to their children and express both aspects of conflicting attitudes toward them. Sometimes they...