LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Chapter 3: The Parenting Game
Page 8
BY ARLENE HARDER, MA, MFT
Continuation of Chapter 3 of Letting Go of Our Adult Children, which explores the Parenting Game in which all parents are enrolled.
The Child's Physical and Mental Attributes, Temperament, and Choices
When we agonize over an adult child's situation, we rarely pay sufficient attention to the factors that nature, and our child's own temperament and choices, help determine. Nature may not be destiny, but it can surely steer the game in one direction rather than another.
Consider the following:
Gender
As millions of parents have discovered, the sex of a child is outside our control without scientific assistance from modern medicine. Yet gender greatly influences how that baby will experience much of life — experiences which encourage or discourage the achievement of equality in the future. Take school as one example. Studies indicate that boys get more attention from their teachers than do girls at all grade levels, be it praise, criticism, acceptance, or remediation. Curricula often ignore females or reinforce stereotypes. For example, a review of books that have won the Caldecott Medal (the "Pulitzer" of children's books) found ten boys depicted for every girl.
Physical attributes
Children considered good-looking tend to be the most popular. Tall children are assumed to be more intelligent. Rising above stereotypes that attribute advantages to those more favored by nature is possible, of course, and the process may even develop greater character. But it's not easy. Children born with disfiguring birthmarks or physical handicaps have limitations and challenges other children do not.
Mental characteristics
Today there is a great deal more hope for children with Downs syndrome than there was twenty years ago because we have learned how to take fuller advantage of the child's potential for greater mental achievement. Yet a child with Downs is not going to be a brain surgeon no matter how much intellectual stimulation parents and schools provide.
On the other hand, consider the case of five-year-old film (yes, five!) director Gregory Scott, who already has four films under his belt, a new five-year contract, and appearances on "Arsenio" and "Entertainment Tonight." He didn't reach this point in his short life because his mother pushed him. Gregory started talking at four months! At twelve months, when he was speaking in "big sentences," he saw his first movie, "The Aristocats," and left the theater singing one of the songs. By three-and-a-half he'd decided on film-making as a career.
Temperament
Every parent with more than one child knows that each baby responds to the world differently from the day he or she is born. What makes the child different, in large part, is the temperament or character traits that vary from person to person and seem to be a natural, inborn style of behavior, a style parents may work with or against but that is unlikely to change significantly. The following are a few words both satisfied and disappointed parents I interviewed used to describe traits of their children that were consistent from earliest childhood through adulthood: calm, self-assured, assertive, stubborn, self-reliant, competitive, very dominant, tenacious, independent, sweet and gentle, shy, rolls with the punches, bubbly and outgoing, introverted, moody.
Choices
Certainly the physical and mental characteristics of our child help determine how he is shaped by his environment. But something else comes into play. It is what I've coined the "child-environment feedback loop." The environment may act upon the child, but the child, through temperament and an inclination to respond in an idiosyncratic way, helps determine whether one environmental factor will be more influential than another. In other words, the mindset out of which our child's past choices were made will influence his current mindset and his future choices. The effect of his choices in shaping his world, and in what he therefore gets from the world, are not inconsequential. His own choices help determine how he will turn out.
Outlook on life
Finally, when we consider the way in which our child contributes to his own destiny, we observe something that goes beyond temperament and choice and yet is part of both of them. That is the basic outlook each person brings to life. We all know people who reach out and make the best of tough circumstances. They may be struck down by illness and catastrophe, assailed by grief and failure, treated unfairly or betrayed. They not only survive, they confront their stresses and sorrows in ways that deepen their lives. Happiness for them does not depend on outward circumstances.
If people have grace, distinction, and courage only because their parents taught them those qualities, how is it that many families have both defeatists and opportunists? Much seems to depend upon a special quality, or lack of quality, within each child.
A Combination of the Environment Outside the Home and Circumstance
When parents consider the issue of genetics versus environment, they tend to focus on the environment inside the home and not the environment outside, in the wider world. They fail to remember that the beliefs, values, and attitudes of parents are not created independently of the culture and times in which they live. The complex, ever-changing world outside the home has a complex, ever-changing influence on our children.
A few of the experiences our child has when he leaves our house can expand our appreciation for the many factors that impinge on our child's development. For instance:
The indulged, narcissistic, and persistently adolescent baby boomer generation, fed by advertising and a prosperous economic climate, placed an inordinate emphasis on materialism, physical beauty, and fashion. This climate has exerted a strong influence on people's behavior and attitudes, just as the climate of the Great Depression and World War II affected parents in other ways.
While World War II was followed by unprecedented prosperity, young adults today face a much more adverse economic climate created by a changing world market, excessive government debt, failed S&Ls, bankruptcies, and other factors far outside the control of parents.
The average child spends over twelve thousand hours watching television before he is eighteen! He is given a distorted picture of life, served up by cop shows and family sitcoms in which every problem is easily solved in thirty minutes. These shows can all too readily be taken at face value by impressionable minds.
Although disparate ethnic and racial groups may eventually meld into a rich and harmonious society, our very imperfect society today provides different children with different social experiences and opportunities.
Relatives, peers, and neighbors offer experiences beyond what the immediate family can provide. My children, for example, did not have the advantage of an extended family nearby. However, they traveled through many states and have cruised Georgian Bay in Canada with their grandparents, opportunities most of their friends did not have.
Inequalities in medical care create a society in which only some children have access to the best treatment. Most significantly, prenatal care is unavailable to one-fourth of America's pregnant women. Since babies born with health risks resulting from their mother's lack of medical attention have several strikes against them, they have been "influenced" by society long before they must challenge life in the world outside the womb.
Our public education financing system allows one school in a Chicago suburb to draw upon $340,000 worth of taxable property for each child, while a school in the middle of Chicago must rely on property wealth worth one-fifth that amount.
There are hundreds of other ways our children are influenced by the environment outside the home, from gang violence to churches and civic groups working for change; from easy availability of alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and crack to amazing scientific breakthroughs; from an educational system that may fail to teach children how to locate Europe on a map to stimulating and informative documentaries.
To understand this one-third influence on our child's life, we need to look carefully at a significant factor and an intrinsic part of it: circumstance. Whether we believe that what happens to us is dictated by divine intervention (acts of God) or by happenstance (luck), circumstance is a decisive factor in determining how events shape our lives for good or ill.
Consider our first circumstance. Birth. The order in which we appear in our family has an intriguing ability to affect our personality. Only children, for instance, tend to be independent and achievement-oriented, with high self-esteem. Firstborns often are considerably more apprehensive and anxious. Yet their self-critical perfectionist traits can contribute to success: Half of our presidents have been either firstborns or firstborn sons and of the first twenty-three astronauts in space, twenty-one were firstborns. On the other hand, a middle child who usually learns from a relatively early age how to share and get along with others, is likely to be more easygoing and friendly. The youngest in birth order are more likely to be fun-loving than are older siblings.
Clearly the interactions of siblings, can greatly influence how each child develops. Consider the case of Tonia, born with a hip problem, who had a splint that prevented her from walking for two years. When she threw toys out of her playpen, her older siblings obligingly retrieved them. Her parents suspect that the availability of an audience (the consequence of Tonia's position as third child rather than firstborn) contributed to the fact that she has a "performer personality" and loves an audience.
Family events that affect everyone in the family do not affect all the children in the same way. Much will depend upon their ages and needs at the time a particular circumstance happens. A two-year-old boy will experience his parents' divorce differently from his older brothers, eight and twelve. A girl who might have become an Olympic gymnastic champion must give up that dream if her father loses his job and there is no free program for gymnastic lessons. Yet her sister who loves school and reading can still shine as a scholar and take advantage of free library books.
Circumstances within the environment, both inside and outside the home, definitely play a major role in the outcome of a person's life!
Parents with More than One-third Influence
Although the majority of parents can be said to contribute approximately a one-third influence toward how their children will turn out as adults, there is much greater effect upon a child when parents (1) abuse their children or knowingly tolerate the abuse of their children by others, (2) are alcohol or drug abusers, (3) stifle and suffocate their children in the name of love and protection, or (4) have serious mental illness.
Abusive Parents
It is fairly easy to recognize the characteristics of abuse when parents use children for sexual gratification (with or without penetration) or when corporal punishment is excessive (even when parents claim it is done "for the sake of not spoiling the child"). These offenses are not only harmful to children, they are criminal acts, although parents are seldom prosecuted because the privacy of a home provides protection against incriminating evidence and corroborating witnesses.
It is less clear as to what constitutes other kinds of abuse, especially physical abuse. A parent is obviously, and criminally, negligent if he locks a child in the shed in the backyard or deliberately starves his child. One can convincingly argue that a pregnant woman abuses her unborn child if she uses crack. And the daily newspaper all too frequently provides examples of real and frightening physical abuse.
Other examples can be trickier to evaluate. For example, is a father "abusive" if he smokes cigarettes and his child develops asthma? Or, to take a more extreme example, what if a mother frequently takes her children to McDonald's and they develop clogged arteries after years of eating fatty foods?
Accusations of emotional abuse, which underlie many confrontations parents find difficult to accept, are even more elusive. Yet we can draw a fairly clear distinction between the parent who firmly challenges his child in a supportive environment and a parent who has no regard for the child's growing sense of self nor her need for nurturance. The emotionally abusive parent responds to misbehavior with punishment that may not hurt physically but is clearly out of proportion to what the child did and far beyond anything needed in order for the child to learn a lesson.
In defining "abuse," the dictionary uses the words "wrong," "misuse," "mistreat," "excessive," and "insulting." In the narrowest use of the term, a mother who yells insults at her children after a hard day ("how could you be so stupid as to forget your homework?") abuses them by belittling their sense of self. If she later apologizes or rarely engages in such behavior, her children aren't going to suffer long-term damage. However, cruel, belittling insults delivered day in and day out are emotionally abusive and can damage the child's sense of self for the rest of his life.
Alcoholics and Chemically Abusing Parents
It is easy to see the difference between someone who can stop at one drink and another who always gets blasted. However, it's not easy to evaluate our behavior when the drinking is in the range of what might be moderate, slightly more than moderate, or sliding over into the characteristics of true abuse. For example, there is a fine line between using a little more alcohol than might be good for us (in which case we may periodically have a hangover) and drinking a bit more than that (in which case we may end up losing our license because we've driven under the influence). The same difficulty exists in evaluating the effect of mind-altering drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and Valium. However, some parents who abuse alcohol and/or drugs can sometimes effectively hide their abuse from their family, and their children will not show any significant effects from growing up in such homes.
So it is possible that even if you were an abuser of alcohol or drugs, your children may not have been affected to a great degree. However, it is more often the case that when one or both parents drink excessively or abuse a wide range of mind-altering chemicals, the environment in the home becomes unstable and chaotic. While such parents might not be prosecuted for abuse (alcoholism and drug abuse by themselves are not considered crimes), children in these families must develop coping mechanisms to survive in such an atmosphere. Based on their experience, they view chaos as normal. This skewed perspective frequently causes problems when they later attempt to form families of their own.
Controlling and Excessively Demanding Parents
Increasing attention is being given to families in which parents prevent their children from acting independently when they become adults because they never allow their children to function as separate individuals in the family. These parents find it incomprehensible to believe that their actions could have been damaging. They merely wanted the "best" for their offspring. They are seldom able to understand, when their child does find the courage to act independently and confront them, that children need breathing room in order to learn to make their own decisions. Skills in reasoning and self-confidence cannot grow when parents control, or try to control, every movement and decision of their children.
Mentally III Parents
Mental illness refers to certain thought patterns and behaviors that are significantly outside the norm of human behavior. We may think that any parent who is mentally ill would surely affect her child's life dramatically. Yet mental illness does not automatically prevent some people from being relatively good parents; in fact, many of them are as effective in parenting as those of us who would not be considered mentally ill. Nonetheless, I include mental illness as a possible condition in which parents can influence their child more than the average parent. As a twenty-seven-year-old client of mine will attest, while living with a schizophrenic mother is not necessarily an "abusive" situation, life is decidedly more difficult when a small child must be the intelligent, functioning member of the family; the effect her mother's illness has had on her life is significant.
If you fit the description of any of the parents described above, you have had more influence on your child than the average parent. How great that influence has been will depend upon many factors, and I would not venture to give a percentage. However, I can tell you that coming to terms with your role in your child's life is possible, even though it will require courage.
Acknowledging that you may have harmed your child through mistakes you had not intended is essential. It places you in a good position to achieve genuine healing in your relationship with an adult child with whom you may be alienated or in whom you are somehow disappointed. You are far ahead of parents who have hurt their children and are unwilling to acknowledge that fact. Although you cannot change the past, it is not too late to develop a better relationship with your child in the future.
Please note: Just because you may have had a greater-than-average influence on your child's life, an influence that was not nearly as positive as you would have liked it to be, does not mean that your child must forever function under the weight of that experience. People can change; they can heal, as the next chapter points out.
Next Chapter
© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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