Parenting when your own childhood was challenging in some ways

[OMGTTC]

Hi all, as the name suggests, DH and I are TTC our first DC. Overall, we’re really excited about this next step, but I’m also really worried about how to support DCs’ emotional development.

For some context, my own DM was at best emotionally immature and, if I were to be less generous, actually emotionally abusive. Over the years, we were threatened with being given away to Barnardo’s, given days and days of the silent treatment, subjected to her rages, given zero privacy (bedroom and bathroom door always open, she’d go through my things and leave ‘embarrassing’ stuff on my bed so I’d know that she knew, if that makes sense).

When our nan got cancer, it was hidden from us until Nan said our mum had to tell us or it might get to the stage where we’d see her with no hair because of chemo with no explanation. So DM’s way of telling us was when she arrived back from the supermarket, she dumped the bags on the floor in the kitchen and just said ‘Nan’s got cancer.’ No conversation, no kind of putting it in a caring, sensitive way.

It got worse as I got older, and I was accused of deliberately failing a uni interview when I didn’t get in to Cambridge, was met with absolute rage when aged 17 I wanted to go on the contraceptive pill, etc. Unsurprisingly, I learnt not to open up to her about anything.

Then when I left uni, she decided we should be close as mother and daughter. By this time, I’d tried to put in some boundaries, and she railed against them, raging at me, bombarding me with messages, telling me I was a cold, unfeeling daughter, which felt unfair as I’d tried very hard to see her side of things and was not doing anything unusual in terms of staying in my uni town for work after graduation.

As a result of all this, I’ve found it very very hard to recognise and trust my emotions. I had zero self awareness and am still going through the work of getting to know myself at the age of 30 - what do I actually like, what are my values?

I feel like my sense of self was crushed at such a young age, or maybe never existed in the first place, and I had no support or nurturing with the emotional side of things. I was fed and clothed, we had presents and holidays and materially were given a huge amount of things, but it feels like everything emotional was missing.

I’ve had a lot of counselling over the years, but now I’m coming to it from a parenting perspective specifically - how can I make sure not to do what was done to me? How can I nurture future DCs’ emotional wellbeing and help them to be confident, secure and self aware?

Thank you for reading if you’ve got this far! 💐

@Flockameanie I’m just reading the preview/first chapter of Good Inside - this is just the sort of thing I’ve been looking for, thank you so much for the recommendation! I think that this along with Philippa Perry’s TBYWYPHRAYCWBGTYD (got to love an acronym 😊) are going to be my bibles while I try to soak all of this in and process it.

@Winchester100 thank you so much for sharing your experience 💐 that means a lot. It sounds like you’ve done a brilliant job, but I can see how it can also be exhausting. I can sympathise with the high standards - although we don’t have children yet, hence the thread, DH says I have high standards for the dog 😳 e.g. we do training classes/scent classes twice a week, and my brain is always full of ‘her’, if that makes sense, because I’m so focused on her development and contentment. So being a bit more relaxed would probably be helpful, but being relaxed about things doesn’t always come naturally to me!

I do sometimes envy people who grew up with emotionally secure parents/childhoods, but it’s all a learning process, isn’t it?

DH says I have high standards for the dog 😳 e.g. we do training classes/scent classes twice a week, and my brain is always full of ‘her’, if that makes sense, because I’m so focused on her development and contentment

I would keep an eye on this impulse! When my DC were babies I think I looked at them as problems to be 'solved'. Be that breastfeeding not going right, or not sleeping well. As a general rule, I managed to fix these 'issues'. As they got older, and developed feelings of their own and internal lives that I couldn't (as we never can) access, then it became harder. It's been hard for me to learn to meet them where they are, emotionally, and to not look to 'fix' their feelings, but instead let them feel them and not shut them down. This is hard for me because I wasn't allowed to express any strong emotions as a child (or they were dismissed) - therefore my children displaying big feelings is extremely triggering for me. It sets off a 'fight or flight' response in me.

Not that I'm suggesting you're saying this, but you won't be able to 'train' your children, especially as they get older. It's very hard for me to accept that I can't magically make them happy and, indeed, that I'm not responsible for their emotional response to things (other than if I've prompted it directly).

@Flockameanie

I feel a little bit like you're misunderstanding OP. I don't think she's suggesting that she or anyone train their child like a dog. I think she's just saying that she relates in the only way she currently can which is with her dog.

@OrangeTabbyCat If you actually read my post you'll see that I said "Not that I'm suggesting you're saying this, but you won't be able to 'train' your children"

Hi both @Flockameanie @OrangeTabbyCat yes, sorry, I just meant that the only thing I have at the moment that’s in any way comparable, even if only in a very small way, is looking after DDog.

I think you’re right that it’s worth keeping an eye on my tendency to put absolutely all of my brain capacity into doing something ‘right’ - it’s not that I’d ever want to train DC, it’s more of a very strong desire for me to learn how to do something ‘properly’ or correctly. I’m sure that stems from my childhood somewhere as well. When I was growing up, I was the ‘good’ child (even though from DM’s behaviour towards me, you’d never know it), but I always always played by the rules, my school uniform was perfect, I never answered back, etc.

Something that actually made me 😮 very recently was when my parents were taking the mick out of me still abiding by rules/social norms/conventions - and they actually said to me ‘rules are there to be broken’! And they could not understand why my response to this was outright shock. Because good god, if we broke any of DM’s ‘rules’ when we were children or young adults, there was absolute hell to pay. And quite often, you wouldn’t know what the rule was until it was too late.

On another note, I listened to a brilliant podcast with Becky Kennedy last night, from when she was a guest on We Can Do Hard Things. She spoke about how a parent’s job is essentially three key things - boundaries, validation, and empathy. Interestingly, she touched on what a PP mentioned above about not going too far the other way and giving a child everything they want and creating problems that way - she said about how she validates her child’s feelings and empathises with them but crucially maintains the boundary. Really interesting, thank you for the recommendation. 🙂

You have done exactly the right thing and spared yourself work later down the line. My mother in her mid-eighties is still dealing with the (justifed) anger and self harm behaviours of my 58 year old brother. She did her best but we were not her priority and it comes back to bite you later in life. So you may be tired, but it could be a whole lot worse.

You also sound like a fantastic mother @Winchester100