Is that the reason our children don’t mind?
by Jef Gazley, M.S., LMFT
Tips and advice to learn effective parenting skills

It certainly is a cliché that parenting is a tremendously hard job, but it is also true.  There are so many different aspects and roles that have to be undertaken. Parents are taxi-cab drivers, doctors, teachers, and caregivers.  The amount of care that one has to give is essentially a 24-hour job.  There’s absolutely no way that a person can be there with a child fully, to interact with them, to teach them and value them while maintaining a balanced life of their own.  It simply is an overwhelming job.  A parent has to do the best that they can. The most difficult part is that one has to be a whole, independent person if they are going to be a good parent.  A good parent really cares about themselves, really wants to be a parent and has enough emotional and financial resources to be a good parent.  That is often a rarity. 

The chances of most parents being individuated and of having had healthy models for their own parenting are extremely slim.  It’s a job that people don’t get training for. There are very few classes for it and most people only take classes after they’ve already gotten into trouble with parenting and are ordered to do so by the courts.  Or they take the classes if they get divorced. They are required in some states, by law, to make sure that they take parenting classes to help with the children.  What would be much more effective, of course, is if parenting were offered in the schools, like other important subjects.  It would also be helpful if parents had parents who were loving and giving and truly available for them, because if a parent has infantile, childhood needs that have not been met, they very simply cannot be there for their child to the degree the child will need them.    

Many parents don’t really know how children think.  In some ways, children are very different, and in some ways, they’re very similar to adults.  Time for a child is extremely different than time for an adult.  For a child, a minute feels like an hour, so when they hear, “just a moment,” they’re going to interrupt a person in about twenty seconds, if they’re lucky.  Five seconds is more likely.  The child is not misbehaving.  They have waited the right amount of time given the time sense of a child. But oftentimes parents feel that the child is being willful or inconsiderate.  In other words, they attach adult thinking and adult reality to the child.  If they believe it is misbehavior they’re going to want to punish it.  If they knew that it was just a mistake in perception they would view the problem more as an educational opportunity.  They would understand, detach, and teach. Educating a child is the most difficult part of a parent’s job.

It is imperative that parents teach their children the difference between personhood and behavior.  Up until the age of 12, children are unable to see grey.  Children are concrete thinkers and are congenitally only able to think in black and white until the age of 12.  Therefore, if they do poorly on a test, they will take that moment in time, or that particular subject they are studying, and will generalize and decide that they are incredibly stupid.  That feeling is about personhood, and personhood has to do with shame.  If a person views himself or herself as a failure, they believe that their core being is insufficient.  They lose heart in their own basic worth as a human being.

One of the parents’ most important jobs is to teach the child that poor behavior should elicit guilt and not shame.  In this view behavior is something that is changeable.  Behavior is flexible.  For example, if a person is a good golfer, most days he or she will play a decent game.  But for any particular game he or she would be totally capable of playing a horrible game, or playing much better than usual.  Adults, for the most part, know that the only way to really assess a particular level of expertise is over a 20-year span and 80 per cent of the time.  That’ll give a rough idea of how skilled that person is in golf or any other activity, and one might, at that point, be able to talk about a general characteristic.  But the day-to-day fluctuations are simply about behavior.  In our society, unfortunately, we mix up the words guilt and shame.  Guilt is used in place of shame.  Guilt is actually a good thing.  Guilt is felt when a mistake is viewed as behavior.  Mistakes are viewed as normal in this schema and do not define the individual.  The mistake should be taken seriously, apologized for and changed, but shame is something that never goes away.  If a person feels defective in some way, they will never be able to overcome it, but the tendency will be to try.  The way people try is to become shameless, god-like, and perfect.  That leads to heartache and failure. 

A corollary of this problem is there’s no real sense of history for a child.  Up until the age of twelve, now means everything.  So if a parent takes a child to a movie, the child is going to come out of the movie and be very grateful. However, if they want some ice cream and the parent tells them they can’t have it right now, that they need to go home and eat, and maybe have a dessert later, what they’ll often hear from the child is, “I hate you.  You never do anything for me.”  It is a very black/white statement, an all-inclusive statement, and very often it confuses the parent completely. They often view the child as being spoiled or misbehaving. 

The rules of our society are very black and white themselves.  We’ve had a long history of children parenting children and parents really wanting subconsciously to be parented by the kids.  I’m not going to go over the dysfunctional family rules in extensive detail because they have been discussed fully in the dysfunctional family section, but I am going to talk about the first three, that I think happen a lot.  The first one is to always be perfect.  This is totally impossible, and most people would deny intellectually that anyone can be perfect.  They would think that a person must be crazy to suggest it.  But in reality, what one often sees is a child spilling a glass of milk, and the parent saying, “What did you do that for?”  The situation is absurd. It is as if the parent really believes the child is thinking, “Well, I just thought it would be a good day to be yelled at so I decided I’d throw my milk down.”  In reality, we act as if things should be perfect.  We know better, but day to day, we don’t often show it. 

The second rule in dysfunctional families is to always be in control, and not only of ourselves, but of other people as well.  It’s totally impossible to be in control of other people.  It’s almost impossible to be in control of ourselves a good amount of the time.  The third rule is that if a person does make a mistake, somebody needs to be blamed in a very shame-bound way.  What that leads to is the belief that everyone else is fine, and that somehow the family member is greatly disturbed.  If a person feels that way, he or she will tend to keep those thoughts to himself or herself.  This creates a wall where one person is inside, the other person is outside, and the person on the outside is probably feeling exactly the same way but no one knows it.  So everyone walks around believing that everyone else is more capable or more valuable than they are themselves.  It perpetuates grandiose thinking and behavior; that somehow people can be more than just human.  In order to be an effective parent, it is essential to understand how children see things.  When a parent has taken care of their own needs, they will tend to see things in a more realistic fashion. To be a good parent it is essential to reject these crazy rules.

It’s also important to realize that children need to belong, that the first desire that human beings have is to belong and to be a part of humanity. Therefore, if a child is allowed to be included, even with work, they will usually jump at the chance.  This might sound strange to parents of a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old, but remember how kids were when they were three or four, and how much they were getting underfoot trying to help with the dishes, trying to copy what dad was doing with the hammer; attempting to pick up things to give them to the parent, or to wipe off the table. 

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