I'm not sure how the legalities of this work, but this is an excerpt from Everyday Blessings - The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting by Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn. It was as if I was supposed to read this chapter this week--it really spoke to me.
Who's the Parent, Who's the Child?
The demands of the age we live in, its time pressures, economic pressures, and social pressures, all coalesce to rob our children of some of the most precious qualities of childhood. There is a dreaminess to childhood, a moving slowly from one thing to another, that gets torn away under the pressure of time. children now are prematurely pushed to be independent because the parents need them to be. They are growing up more and more in a physical and emotional vacuum, raised by TV and their peers rather than with the guidance and support of adult men and women.
There is certainly enough anguish in the circumstances that befall families, through age and through disease or accident, not to compound it by creating unnecessary emotional burdens and prisons for those we love out of the automatic habits of a lifetime, and to fulfill our own unmet emotional needs. To bring this domain into greater focus, we might ask ourselves what the unwritten and unspoken emotional rules were in our family of origin.
A friend once described only being visible to her father when she spoke with him about his work, which was in science. Only when she failed her pre-med courses did she realize that she was on a path that wasn't hers, and began to focus full time on her art work, incurring the strong disapproval of her father. The tacit rule was, "I am happy to approve of you as long as you do what I want."
These tacit understandings are different in different families. In some, the parents' emotional needs dominate; in others, emotional needs are ignored completely. Unspoken patterns are set up for the benefit of the people with the most power, usually one or both parents. Appeals based on guilt, shame, devotion, duty, responsibility can all be used to manipulate and coerce children to maintain such tacit patterns, leaving little room for the child to have and express his or her own feelings and needs.
Some parents only know how to feel close and connected through their wounds and their pain. they unconsciously want their children to feel their pain with them and, sometimes, to carry it for them. A subtle entraining may take place between parent and child--wholly beneath the conscious awareness and intention of the parent--in which the child learns to tune in to the emotional needs of the parent, often without anything being said. Rather than the parent being empathic and compassionate, the child takes on that role and is expected to empathize with the parent's feelings, troubles, and stresses. The child becomes predominantly "other-oriented," acting as the parent's confidant, a sympathetic ear. The child's own feelings, needs desires get buried. The son may become a "good boy," the daughter and "good girl," at the expense of their own feelings, their own inner selves. The only other choice they may feel they have in order to hold on to who they are is to do something extreme, such as reject their parents completely, get into self-destructive behaviors, run away, or become isolated and remote.
Children have to develop their own sense of self before they can be aware of other in a balanced and healthy way. They need to know how they feel, what they need, what they want. They also need to learn how to communicate appropriately in this domain, and to feel a sympathetic emotional responsiveness from those around them. As we have seen, this is a major responsibility of parents: to actually behave as adults, and respond to and meet the needs of their children.
When this happens, over time children naturally learn to be more aware of other people. They begin to experience what it means to engage in dialogue and have a sense of "the other." They speak, the other listens; the other speaks, they listen. Hopefully, they begin to have direct experiences of reciprocity. Through having their feelings and needs listened to, responded to, and by being able to put their trust in others, they develop the skills needed to have full, reciprocal relationships of their own. In general, this takes some time to develop. For some children, it may be a process, unfolding over many years. For others, it may happen at an early age.
When children feel the latitude and safety to say how they really feel and how they really see things, it is only natural that they will challenge their parents a lot. One of the most frustrating things for us in our family has been our children's skill and certain ages in turning any situation around and making us into the bad guys--making it our fault--making us wrong. being able to acknowledge their own involvement and responsibility takes children a long time, and a lot of patience on the part of parents.
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