Parents who reflect …
“I don’t get it”, said my client Tammy, slumping back in her chair. “I don’t understand how my sister could treat her kids like that when it’s just like our mum treated us”.
Tammy’s mother, Nora, drank a lot when she was raising Tammy and her sister and neglected her children in many ways. They were sexually abused for years by Nora’s boyfriend. She apparently knew about the ongoing abuse but did nothing. It was an awful childhood.
Tammy is now fiercely protective of her own children, tells them she loves them every day, and goes to enormous lengths to provide them with the life filled with love and security that she missed out on.
However she’s now watching her younger sister Lou repeating much of the same parenting behaviour as their mother. Lou has drug problems, moves around a lot, changes partners frequently, leaves her toddler daughter alone for long periods, and exposes her to lots of risks. Tammy can’t believe that Lou would treat her daughter like this. Didn’t she learn anything from her own childhood? Wouldn’t she want things to be different for her own daughter?
Why is it that some people seem to repeat the same awful parenting that was inflicted on them?
It’s a 60-million-dollar question, really. But we do have some answers. It’s complicated, but what we know gives us some hope.
Firstly, kids who grow up in traumatic households are sometimes so affected by the trauma that they often just can’t manage their own emotions well enough to parent differently. Tammy is clearly an exception to this rule – while she’s certainly had some hiccups, and she struggles with depression, she’s doing pretty well.
Secondly, we know, from repeated research that parents who’ve made sense of a difficult childhood will usually manage to parent differently, and manage to raise kids who are OK. By “making sense of”, I mean that those parents are able to reflect on what happened to them and have a sense of why that was a good or a bad thing. The scientific boffins call this ability high “Reflective Function”.
Can we escape our pasts and parent differently?
In a very interesting study into Reflective Function in the ‘90s, they looked at 4 groups of mothers: half came from “socially disadvantaged” backgrounds (e.g. had poor education, histories of trauma and low incomes); the other half were middle-class, well-educated (“socially advantaged”). They tested them and then split those 2 groups again into those with high Reflective Function and low Reflective Function. The scientists were interested in knowing how the children of these 4 groups were doing. They were looking at the children’s Attachment Security, which they’re able to measure and is basically a gold standard for kids who are doing well.
As you might expect, the children of the disadvantaged mums who had low Reflective Function weren’t doing so well, they weren’t likely to have Secure Attachment status. But surprisingly, the group that had the highest rates of Secure Attachment were the children of the mums who were disadvantaged and had high Reflective Function. They were doing better even than the children of the advantaged mums.
Maybe when you’ve developed the ability to reflect and understand your child, having a background of disadvantage actually makes you stronger and more resilient, a better parent. I don’t know, and I don’t think the boffins have decided why yet, either. But it means that having a difficult childhood doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a “bad” parent. It gives me hope.
What it all tells us:
- The parenting and childhood experiences we had have a very powerful influence on our own parenting. However …
- We are able to deal with it and rise above it
How can we parent our kids differently to how we were parented?
- We need to keep challenging and questioning our parenting.
- We need to keep wondering (reflecting) about our kids – what are the feelings and thoughts behind their behaviour?
- Last but not least, we need to reflect on our own childhood experiences and the impact they’ve had on us.
Understanding ourselves helps us to understand our children. And when we exercise that understanding with love and empathy, we’ll get closer to being a really good parent.
Explore posts in the same categories: Attachment, Children, Emotional Intelligence, Families, Mindfulness, Parenting, Psychology, Reflective Parenting, Relationships
