“Please, please, never judge someone’s infertility journey by how long they’ve been married”
I was really disturbed by the letter in which a reader wrote that “we’re not doing kids a favor by telling them to respond to an occasional rant by mom in the same way they should respond to actual abuse,” and that in relation to their parents, her contemporaries, second-generation Holocaust survivors, “…didn’t assess their parenting skills. We didn’t blame our life’s challenges, in adulthood, on our perception of their inadequacies.” That letter was in response to another reader’s letter in which she said she learned to be happy even though growing up, her mother’s parenting style hurt her very much.
In my years in practice as a social worker, and in my years as a human, I’ve seen that children overwhelmingly want to perceive their parents’ hurtful actions as normal human behavior. It’s not instinctive to think of parents as “disordered.” That usually comes later, when trying to make sense of what happened.
As the letter writers says, often a parent’s angry behavior IS normal. After all, mothers are human, and often overwhelmed. It’s really when there’s no space for the child’s experience of that behavior that there is damage. For example, does the parent apologize? Lashing out and being nasty is unacceptable, even if human. Is it safe for the child to say they don’t like being yelled at?
We can believe the original letter writer when she says her mother’s behavior was troubling. This isn’t to say that her mother deliberately set out to hurt her — she most likely didn’t. But there was what to recover from. Nobody told her to respond to normal behavior as if it was real trauma. It was simply her experience.
Create a free account to keep reading.
