Much of the adult we are today has its roots in the child we were yesterday. Thus, the education of our parents has shaped us even in the way of educating our own children. Very often, we reproduce their good educational practices, but also their mistakes. How not to perpetuate the parental model?
The day before, we “hated” them. One fine morning, we wake up… and we end up looking like them. Sort of like a sort of remake of the movie”freaky friday”, but which takes place for real and over the long term. These individuals, those with whom love sometimes turns into hate, are our parents ; those who loved us, those who raised us, and whose educational vestiges remain in us to build the foundations of our life as adults and parents. Today, we love as they loved us, we raise as they raised us.
When we were younger, as a teenager, we still remember how we screamed that we would never become like mom or dad… It is clear that superior psychological forces act secretly without our consent, without our being aware of it. In the jargon, they are called “parental role models” or “parenting styles”. These lead us to reproduce, on our own children, the educational errors that our parents made us undergo. “All our reactions from our childhood sabotage our future educational choices”writes Cécile David-Weill in her book Parents under influence. Are we really doomed to reproduce the parental pattern that we have suffered? Is there a way to escape it? And if yes, how ?
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Become aware of the wounds of your childhood
According to their way of loving us, raising us, accompanying us, our parents gave us gifts but also “psychological burdens”, which carry us or weigh us down in our relational life. These “burdens” take the form of traumas and wounds from the past, which in turn unconsciously govern the way we interact, socialize and educate our own children.
These wounds from the past, highlighted by Lise Bourbeau, lead to unbalanced and destructive educational behaviors for the toddler concerned: we talk about wounds of rejection, abandonment, betrayal, injustice, and humiliation. For example, in the context of the wound of abandonment, the parent is emotionally dependent on those around him; child included. This injury pushes him to constantly seek attention, and to victimize himself to reacquire it when it disappears.
He will tend to make the child feel guilty without doing it on purpose, so that the latter never abandons him: responsible for the emotions of his parent, he can then switch to parentification. At the same time, the person suffering from this injury is prone to anxiety : she is therefore likely to become a helicopter parent… In this sense, identifying the wounds of the past makes it possible to better understand why we adopt such behavior in such a situation, why we choose to educate our children in such a way, and to work on it to limit the damage.
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Do not do the opposite of your parents just for the fun of contradicting them
If in his Terrible Two, the individual takes malicious pleasure in saying “no” to everything, remnants of this opposition can pursue him into adulthood, even into his parenthood. And this time, the opposition is not an end in itself: it serves rather the non-reproduction of the parental model in the education of children.
So, to do better than their own parents and not repeat the mistakes made by them, some parental figures may be tempted to do the opposite (literally). For example, if the grandparents had an authoritarian style, then the parents will adopt an overly permissive style. However, it is not because we consider that the parental model that we have experienced is bad, that its opposite extreme has more benefits: the other “side” is not necessarily healthier than the first on the development of the child. We end up reproducing errors that are not necessarily identical to those of our parents, but still governed by them.
Rather than totally adhering to an opposite parenting style just to block that of their parents (as one would do in Politics), psychologists therefore explain that the latter must draw from several educational styles to create their own: an educational model that deploys values, educational techniques, parenting styles in which they deeply believe and which they consider really good for the development of the child.
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Agree to judge your parents… while forgiving them
In some cases, the family bond causes us to be excessively loyal to our parents. To not scratch their image, we don’t dare to criticize them, we don’t want to see the harm they have caused, we don’t want to recognize the existence of their shortcomings: in short, we delight in “idealizing” them. Specialists explain that this denial is bad for our own parenting.
By denying their faults, it is as if we condone, legitimize and justify all bad educational choices they did and that made us suffer. And as much to tell you that it is a breeding ground for the reproduction of the mistakes made by our parents on our own children. It is therefore necessary to leave the possibility of judging his father and / or his mother, to note their errors. Here, the process is more symbolic than anything else: you can do it alone, without necessarily discussing it with the main stakeholders.
But accepting to judge one’s parents does not mean that one should blame them or overwhelm them excessively. In this process, the goal is to be objectiveto take a step back, to learn from the past so as not to reproduce them on his own children. To avoid reactivating the wounds mentioned earlier, those that are likely to misguide us in our educational choices, it is therefore very important to forgive early attachment figures who are our parents.
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Identify behavioral automatisms
Some educational practices are so natural that they act like automatisms, reflexes. These are the ones that will have to be analyzed in particular: their automatic nature indicates that they were assimilated a long time ago, during childhood, and that they are potentially inherited from the education we received from our parents. Therefore, it is necessary to take the time to evaluate them to see if they are really beneficial to the brats, if they respect their limits and their free will.
Do not repeat your experience through that of your child
Most parents make educational choices for their children based on “bad” things that have happened to them in the past. Without knowing it, they actually want to take revenge on their childhood, through the experience of their offspring. They project onto him their own painful episodes that they suffered as a result of their parents’ choices.
Example: refusing that the offspring go to study abroad because our own parents refused us. Unconsciously, it is possible that the parent concerned does not give him permission because he feels that his child does not deserve it more than he does. sentences like “I’m doing this for your own good” should tweak you.