Parent Guidance

Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger….. We must love them for themselves, and not for the best of ourselves in them, and that is a great deal harder to do.  ~ Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree

 

Andrew Solomon in his book Far From the Tree asserts: “Our children are not us….and yet we are our children….”  Since a family inevitably exists as a unit, internally as well as in appearance, all its members’ fates are linked.

Solomon suggests we all have both vertical (biogenetic) identities and horizontal (group member) identities. Furthermore, he recommends that we have to embrace both, even though they often take us in conflicting directions.

My experiences with my patients, with research, and with my family, have taught me the following principles, meant to help parents enjoy the complexity of their children’s, their own, and their family’s unique identities:

• Although we all tend to think that children are who they are because of how they are raised by their parents, research now tells us that we are who we are by virtue of how our children shape us!

• When we perceive our children as being different from ourselves – either because they are, or because we don’t want to see how similar to us they are – we can feel a lot of shame. The reasons we don’t feel more proud at times probably has to do with what we don’t know, or haven’t yet accepted, about our own histories.

• Some children are harder to raise than others. In these cases, parents must work hard to “team.”  Yet the difficulties can make blaming and mutual recriminations more common – and escalate dysfunction in the family.

• Psychotherapy and support groups can be useful.