The Fine Line of Parenting
One of the hardest things to do as a parent is to love your child without making it about you.
Healthy parental love mimics God’s love. It’s unidirectional. It’s, "I give to you, for your sake, and you do not have to do anything for me.” In a healthy parent-child dynamic, the child isn’t held responsible for meeting the needs of the parent. This is the ideal. And as imperfect parents, we don’t always live up to the ideal.
The classic example of this is the parent who tries to live vicariously through his or her child, making their success his success and their failure her failure. It’s the father screaming at his son at a little league game for striking out or a mother pushing her daughter to dance without ever asking if she loves it.
Another example of this is the parent who refuses to say “no” or discipline their child. The parent convinces themselves that a refusal to say no or discipline is for the good of the child, but it isn’t. It’s often because the parent has some unresolved emotional baggage related to saying “no”. Even if all of the data shows the importance and value of discipline to the long term health and strength of children, they simply cannot do it. They hide behind new trends like “gentle parenting” to justify an unconscious decision to make discipline, or the lack there of, more about their need to avoid conflict or being disliked than the need of the child to actually be parented.
There is, an even more subtle, rarely discussed and popular parenting approach that can be just as damaging as the others. And that’s unconscious emotional manipulation.
A few weeks ago, I was in a small group listening to a seasoned mom (with adult children) coaching a younger mom (with a pre-teen kiddo) on how to get her increasingly quiet daughter to open up.
The seasoned mom offered her “most successful tactic” in getting teens talking. She said, “Just tell your daughter, ‘You’re making me really upset by staying quiet. And I don’t want to keep feeling this way so can you please start talking?’”
Around the room, heads nodded, as parents understood the frustration of being unable to access the inner world of a child and the overwhelming desire to do anything to get them talking.
The seasoned mom’s approach is, no doubt, an effective one. If your child has a single empathetic bone in his or her body and if your child cares about you even a little bit, this comment will get them to open up most of the time.
So, if it’s effective, what’s the problem, right?
Well, it’s one of those things that trades a short term gain for a long term problem.
While her intentions were good (on the surface at least), the seasoned mom was advocating for an approach that manipulates the emotions of a child to force her to share something she didn’t want to share, robbing her of her freedom of choice, and, worst of all, communicates that the burden of the emotional state of her mom is her responsibility. Another way of saying what she said would be, “I feel sad, it’s your fault, and if you care about me at all, you will make it your responsibility to fix.”
This has at least one of three effects on a child as they age:
It breeds unconscious resentment that only proves to grow over time. This is the natural consequence that occurs when a person’s freedom is limited or compromised by someone who says they love them.
It teaches a child to believe that the love of a parent is conditional upon the child doing whatever makes the parent happy. This will result in the child pursuing the life the parent wants and not the life the child is called to live by God. Which, if realized, will also produce resentment. But is most likely to simply produce a deep sense of dissatisfaction and a constant feeling of inadequacy.
It turns a child into a poor decision maker. If the child complies with the parental request often enough, the child will unconsciously associate good decisions with making the person in authority happy. In other words, the child will become a people pleaser and, absent of an authority figure to make proud, will have no idea how to make decisions.
Let me offer a tangible example of this that I see repeated over and over again in my work of accompaniment.
Clara has always been really close with her son Donny. For a boy, Donny is naturally affectionate and emotionally attuned. Clara was able to connect with Donny on an emotional level she never could with her husband. Whenever Clara, really needed something, she could count on Donny to come through. She had the best of intentions in raising her son, but when push came to shove, if she needed to, she could guilt him into doing what she needed.
Then, Donny got married. Naturally, his mom became secondary to his wife. So Donny started calling less. He visited home less often. And Clara became less and less a part of his daily life.
Appropriately, this growing distance was really painful for Clara. It was a loss that deserved to be mourned and healed. But Clara refused to let go. She wanted to preserve the relationship for exactly as it was. At first, unconsciously, she tried to guilt Donny by telling him how much she missed him, how much she needed him, how hurtful it is that he doesn’t seem to care as much about her and how she longs to be more of a daily part of his life.
But when that didn’t work, she started demonizing Donny’s wife, trying to find examples where she didn’t take as good of care of him as he deserved (like her) or making up reasons to be hurt by Donny’s wife, forcing him to choose a side. This dynamic tore Donny apart. He didn’t want to hurt his mom, but he was also inclined to be protective over his wife. Donny started dreading phone calls or visits with his mom (resentment), he started to feel like a bad son because he could no longer make his mom happy, and he was constantly flip flopping on decisions, trying to cater to what would make everyone happy instead of asking God was he was called to do.
On one level, all of this is understandable. Who wants to let go of a relationship and a level of closeness with someone they deeply love? But it’s a parents job to go through that mourning process with someone other than the child, it’s the parents job to get their own emotional needs met elsewhere. And it’s the parents job to love their child based on what the child needs and not what they need.
Clara placed an unjust and heavy burden on her son. She made the relationship about the fulfillment of her needs instead of adapting her motherhood to the needs of her adult son. And she set the stage for the slow and steady erosion of her relationship with Donny.
Clara isn’t alone though. For many mom’s, one of the hardest things about all this is how unconscious guilt-tripping can be. Many of the moms I walk with are blind to the reality of what they’re doing by the perceived purity of their intentions. Because they just want to have a relationship with their child or they just want to connect or they just want to make sure the child is ok, they think they can say whatever is on their heart. But they can’t. At least not without consequences. Intentions are not the only thing that matters. How the child receives it is important too. And so is whose needs are actually being met by forcing a particular outcome.
The equivalent of this for Dad’s is the need to be followed as a wisdom figure. The modern Dad, too often, equates having his directives or advice followed as a sign of love and respect. While that was true when the child was young, it begins to have the same effect as Mom’s guilt trips the moment a child begins individuating as a teenager. It can be incredibly painful for Dads, who really care about their children, to sit back and watch as their child makes potentially bad decisions. So the Dad will intervene, pressure, push, and demand his way into forcing the outcome he thinks is best for the child. This too, however, breeds resentment, a sense of conditional love, and difficulty making decisions.
So, what is a parent to do? You’re not a robot, right? Your children will annoy you, frustrate you, and seemingly push you to near insanity on their way to making terrible decisions. Isn’t it worth it if you help them to make the right decision?
Well, each parent has to make their own decision on that one. But, let me offer five suggestions to the parent who wants to walk the fine line of influencing their child without manipulating them.
You’re not going to be perfect. Sometimes you’re exhausted, you’re frustrated, and your child pushes you beyond your limits and you just need five minutes of peace. Or you just need your teen to be kind to their sibling. Or you desperately want to prevent them from doing something stupid and you can’t think of anything else. So you make something about you. That’s ok, just use that as a moment to reinforce the truth. Apologize and resolve to do better. Remind your child that they aren’t responsible for your feelings. And share the heart behind the approach.
Find someone to work through your own emotions with. If your needs aren’t being met, do your best to seek the support and love you need from someone who isn’t your child. This can be a mentor, your own parent, your spouse and/or God.
Avoid extremes. Yes, you don’t want to make something about you. But that doesn’t mean you have to bottle up your feelings and pretend like you don’t have any. Sometimes your kids do something and it makes you happy. As a natural consequence, there’s nothing wrong with that. When you ask your child to clean their room, and they do it straight away, it will make you happy. And that’s great. The point is to make cleaning the room primarily about how good it is for the child to maintain a clean room. The message is, this is good for you and it just happens to make me happy. Making it about the child is what matters. If it brings you happiness, great!
If you need to express your feelings to a child (which you will at various points because, again, you’re not a robot) try to utilize subjective reinforcement communication. Subjective reinforcement is an attempt to articulate your emotions without attaching responsibility to it. For example, you ask your child to clean his room and he doesn’t do it. You’re obviously frustrated. You can’t hide it. You want your child to clean his room but you don’t want it to be about making you happy. So you can say something like, “Johnny, I am feeling really frustrated. I asked you to clean your room several times and you haven’t done it. Cleaning your room is your responsibility and it is essential for your life that you take responsibility for your things. So, if you don’t clean your room, (consequence) is going to occur. I don’t want to do that but learning to be responsible is more important than how I feel.”
Surrender outcomes to God. No matter how hard we try as parents, we cannot force our children into good lives. It is incredibly difficult to do but as our children individuate, taking on more responsibility, and grow up, we have to entrust their lives more and more to God.
In other words, parenting is hard. When we do it right, God pushes us to grow in deep and difficult ways. So make sure you have an outlet to work through those challenges, a guide to help call you out when you cross a line, and a place to release and process your own negative emotions.
