To hate the term "Toxic parents"?

[morningpaper]

I really think it's horrible.

You know that there will be a time when your children will mutter this about you?

How does it HELP? If you have issues about your parents, seek professional counselling. Don't just give them a "wicked" label to shift the blame onto them. How does it help you to resolve your problems?

Some people are good at parenting, and some are shit at it, and some are downright abusive. We all fall somewhere on that spectrum.

Simplifying the problem like this is a hindrance to accepting the past and resolving issues IMO. I think this is a very unhelpful term which fosters a "victim" mentality. The only way to resolve these sort of issues is to have professional help - not to spend hours autopsying the past with strangers on the internet.

AIBU?

MissCheif - you put that very well.

I think there is a misconception that severe abuse must be physical or sexual. It is very difficult to assess how bad emotional abuse or neglect must be to be to rightfully be considered such. My parents vented their frustrations on me, so I was regularly kicked around and left with some permanent physical reminders; but it was the emotional abuse, constant attacking and undermining, and most of all the complete lack of love, that did the more serious damage. The sister mentioned earlier is much younger and was never battered - but I think she has been left more damaged than I have.

If people feel that their parents are toxic, I would never presume to second guess them. There may be more to the story than they are willing to tell (only DH and my siblings know how bad my parents were). Of course it might be just a blame-shifting exercise but it is not easy to tell. You might as well complain about people using the words "flu" or "migraine" or "depression" wrongly when they mean "cold" or "headache" or "unhappy" but you can't objectively assess how somebody else has suffered.

LittleBella - I have to say that I find your post very insensitive towards those who have suffered abuse from their parents. Blaming the parents is to blame where the fault lies.

LB, it does happen. Abusive parents often have the defence that they were abused themselves as children. I have a friend who blames his depression on the fact that he was adopted as a baby.

How many times have you heard people commenting on children "He gets that from his mother/father?"

This is a 'blame' society, it's everyone else's fault but your own.

Who cares if you hate it? How people who have been abused refer to their parents is not really any of your business. If you don't like it don't read the "toxic parent" threads.

Good post Rhubarb.

I find it hard to deal with because it is such a perjorative and cruel term to apply to a human being. And until I posted my thread about it yesterday I had the impression that sometimes it was applied to parents who simply don't do as well as they might have. Who made wrong choices, or failed to do the best thing for the child for various reasons, not always their fault. But from the responses I had it seems it's not just ill-judged or sometimed wayward parenting, but parenting influenced by a fundamental long-term lack of love or care. In which case I guess it's reasonable. Toxins make you sick, and they can remain in the system for a long long time unless you find a way to purge them. So it makes sense.

cupsoftea

"Blaming the parents is to blame where the fault lies."

And I find that offensive nonsense, we all have free will and once we reach adulthood we are responsible for our own choices. No doubt, many abusive people come from loving families and many people who have been abused would never be abusive themselves.

Upwind - How can you find what I write offensive????

(I missed your thread Ormian: can you link? Thanks)

Because LB is right - parents are not responsible for choices made by their adult offspring. Though obviously they will have influenced the attitudes those grown up children have.

IME it is rare to find abusive adults who came from warm and happy families. Far more common to find decent people who live with the shit inflicted on them by their parents. Accepting responsibility for your own behaviour does not exclude placing responsibility or 'blaming' parents for theirs.

cupsoftea I don't really know why you think my post would be offensive to people who have been abused. I think it's perfectly right to blame parents for being abusive, but I don't think you can always blame parents for specific choices you make when you are an adult.

I think it's perfectly valid to point to the psychological and emotional position you were in when you made those choices however, and if some of that was caused by the way you were parented, then that does walk that line between taking responsibility for your own behaviour and blaming your parents for everything amd it is quite a difficult line to draw I guess.

Rhubarb, good post and yes I agree with those examples.

Yes I also disagree that abusive people come from happy homes.

On the whole, they don't. People who were raised in happy homes with the knowledge that they were loved and valued, don't generally go on to become abusers.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, but I don't know of any. (Cue hundreds of posts with examples.

Upwind perhaps it is a question of word use or I'm having a different converstion then the rest here?

If we're talking about the horrific child abuse then the people that do the horrific crimes are fully accountable for their actions.

If we're talking about emotional and physical abuse then yes I do think the parents can be responsible for the grown up childrens choices - you don't just become free when you reach 18.

I don't use the term "Toxic" never felt the need to when there are perfectly useful terms like selfish shit/arse/git.

If you think that all parenting is just somewhere on the sepctrum of normal and that someday I will be accused by my DS of being as shitty to him as my dear fther has been to me (and my DS) I can assure you MP that you are wrong.

No problem with using the term "useless git" though if it makes you feel better.

don't blame my father for any of my decisions as an adult though. Why is that relevant to his being a toxic parent selfish arse?

Here mp

I wanted to know because I was finding the term hard to understand and rather cruel.

cupsoftea - if the fault lies with the parents for a grown up's behaviour it implies some lack of free will and self-determination. Are my parents to blame for my miserable childhood and angst-ridden late teens? Of course they are. If I were to replicate their parenting techniques however, I would be to blame because it would be down to choices I had made as an adult. I could never hold them accountable for any emotional or physical abuse I were to inflict on my DC. The notion that they would be responsible for that suggests that I am doomed as a parent because I did not come from a loving family. That is offensive.

Being fully responsible for our own decisions means we are in control of our own destiny.

and if you don't think your parents were toxic damaging, why would you care what I call mine?

I'mn it comfortable with the term personally (I've got the book) - I think the situation is usually more complicated than that label implies. But I think it's entirely up to the adult child how they use the term. Some of the adults here have had very abusive parenting by any standards.

But there is such a gradation and complexity to these situations. I think some of the things some of my parents did were abusive and damaging (some would now be criminal offences). But it's not the whole picture. I agree that as adults we are responsible for our own behaviour - but it's not really quite that simple. The adult who was abused as a child is not entering adulthood with the same hand of cards (the same expectations, the same sense of self, the same resilience, the same sense of empowerment) as the adult who had a more average, goodish overall experience.

I have had counselling. Heaps of it. In early life, from the NHS, then later privately (and much more productively). It has helped a great deal. Some times it's also reassuring and cathartic to talk to others with similar experiences.

I've noticed irl that some people just can't grasp the nature of the kind of parenting most people are referring to as 'toxic' or 'abusive'. I'm not sure what the problem is - a failure of imagination or empathy? It's certianly not about occaisional lack of interest or ironing.

MP - the other day I was at a Parents' Association meeting at DD's school and one of the mothers raised the issue of some violent behaviour by 8 year olds.

Another parent protested that "We mustn't talk about violent children before they reach secondary age".

Why is "toxic parent" a taboo for you? "Violent child" was taboo for the parent at that meeting. All taboos do is sweep real problems under the carpet for reasons of prudery/political correctness. This is not helpful to either perpetrator or victim.

"Violent child" or "bad child" is not used by lots of people because it is describing the child, rather than the behaviour. If the child is inherently bad, then they are pretty unredeemable, non?

Likewise describing a parent as "toxic" is describing them as inherently poisonous, rather than describing their behaviour and the effects of it.

And yet that is how we use adjectives all the time. We don't qualify them. We don't say 'Mildred's behaviour is quiet' or Ambrose tends to behave meanly'. We say Mildred is quiet and Ambrose is mean. This is how we actually use the language and I think it's unhelpful and IMO pointless to overrule that with this PC format.

I would disagree with you there. I think language is very important. I would never describe a child as 'mean' or 'bad'.

There you go being unhelpfully PC again MP .

"Violent child" is a clear, correct description of an 8 year old child who bites, kicks, hits etc to hurt others with intention at the slightest frustration. Normal 8 year olds know that this is completely unacceptable behaviour.

And why should a "violent child" be irredeemably bad? Not so.