In an increasingly divisive world, bringing up kids is more challenging than ever — striking the right balance is critical to ensuring your kids will grow up into well-rounded adults who also care significantly about the world.
New challenges for parents in a global yet disconnected world
Parenting with all the current national and global issues is particularly challenging — there are more issues that can divide a family than at any other time in history. In addition to the normal challenges of devoting your life to your kids, parenting has become much more of a complex marathon now than it used to be. So then, what can today’s parents do to develop healthier, long-lasting parent-child relationships?
In the past several decades, many families have needed to move away from where most of their loved ones live — whether for work, search for a different life, etc. That has left many parents more responsible for caring for their kids without support from extended family members and kids without as much guidance. This change hasn’t allowed for the same degree of grandparent-grandkid interaction (and relief/benefit for the parents). Similarly, kids are now growing up without spending much time playing with their cousins or around their relatives. For those who cannot afford childcare or come from a lower-income background, this lack of external family bonding has created major new demands within parenting.
When it comes to adult children and parents, there has been a steadily growing amount of relocation — where either the kids or the parents relocate after the child goes for higher education or to work. This sets up a different degree of intimacy potential and contact and makes it more likely that their kids will pick partners from different backgrounds, cultures, belief systems, etc., which can further impact understanding and intimacy within the family.
The growing divisive nature of the familial unit
In the last ten years, there have been additional stressors due to the major political conflicts that have divided children from their parents (or vice versa). Moreover, if the kids marry someone whose family has completely different political views and differences regarding global, religious, and national issues, it causes further stress and, most often, creates greater separation.
In recent memory, one of the most common situations presented to therapists by families has been the significant differences in best practices regarding COVID-19 — masks vs. no masks, vaccines vs. no vaccines, etc. Similarly, the way people view global warming/climate change and its impact (or lack thereof for them) is a huge cause for alienation.
These potentially dangerous divisions can be enormously stressful for families with adult children and younger children. These younger kids can be especially confused when they see so much conflict between what their parents say and feel, what their school advocates, what their friends are saying/doing (who are, of course, influenced by their parents), and oftentimes even between individual parents, grandparents, or extended relatives.
Another recent challenge in today’s parent-child relationship, especially in the US, is the surge of school shootings. Children and teenagers are continually reading about or hearing about school shootings — how can parents address this fear sensitively while also navigating their own fear about sending their kids to school in such unsafe times? This added level of insecurity on both sides of the dynamic can be immensely stressful. Sometimes, parents might make decisions to move school districts or homeschool their kids in a bid to ensure more safety, but the children might not be receptive to this as they risk losing their friends and feeling lonely.
Similarly, hearing about difficult and stressful world events, such as the Russia-Ukraine war, can be scary for children. They might turn to their parents to understand or to seek comfort, and this brings a unique challenge of sharing just enough information with your children before they hear about it elsewhere. With misinformation rampant, most people consider it easier to share updates within their family circles first before turning outward.
Parenting and living in a family today requires a new kind of depth, maturity, and wisdom to handle a host of new potholes. In my time as a therapist for over 50 years, I’ve very rarely found that many parents would say parenting is an easy job. It has always required the best inside us, and it is only a matter of how many areas we can truly provide the physical, emotional, and purposeful parenting that could prepare our kids for this age of division and threat to our country and planet. This new responsibility and capacity to love have been one that has humbled the best of us.
Let me illuminate some of the challenges and options that are needed to provide the sense of well-being, security, and balance that almost all parents view as their central priority and devotion in their familial lives through two examples:
Putting your child’s needs before yours
I was raised in a family where the spoken and unspoken ground rules were to get good grades, be polite, well-mannered, and disciplined, and set yourself up to be self-sufficient. My mother was particularly nervous about my brother and me being responsible, honest, and focused on achieving. She came from a family with various dysfunctions, including bankruptcies, gambling, and narcissism. She compensated by being strict, skeptical, and always on the lookout for any sign of behavior or attitudes that weren’t wholesome. In addition to being a devoted mother, this led to anxiety inside her and made her wary, irritable, and distrusting. At the same time, it also lessened her ability to be warm and tender.
Coming from this background, I was clear that I wouldn’t make those same mistakes, so I overcompensated to some extent by not guiding or teaching my son to be considerate with people he wasn’t drawn toward. Like my mother, my wife also overcompensated by prioritizing putting more energy into loving my son. She also didn’t pressure him to reach out beyond his comfort level. We were both hesitant to expose him to situations that he would be uncomfortable with. Amidst all this, even as he grew older, I didn’t expose him to virtually any of my needs. Neither did my wife, who probably deserved more love and appreciation than she got from the extended family and our son. This was a subtle and minor version compared to either of our childhoods. Nonetheless didn’t prepare him to see the strong necessity to reach out much beyond his ease.
Dominantly, our love was always the major element in our earlier years, even now. However, a key reason my son is amongst the most mature person I know with a strong sense of well-being is the love he did receive from both of us, even though he wasn’t made very aware of our needs. Sometime in his early adulthood, he said he didn’t think I had any significant needs and was fine with almost everything. Over the last 25 years, I’ve balanced that out as much as possible by making it clear that I, too, had and have needs. This has led to a continuous gradual increased empathy and a reaching out beyond himself. He was already doing this as a therapist, but relating to his extended family and beyond is continuing growth in the caring direction.
From the time he was 17, I realized this area of inadequacy in my parenting. I have worked to change this — in small ways, like asking him to reach out to people I was close with, including our extended family, and in bigger ways, like when I had my kidney transplant. This was a significant change from when I didn’t consider myself as much as would have been more natural and balanced (throughout the earlier years of my grandchildren). These were reflections of his upbringing and our shortcomings as parents, but even with the later efforts, they created their share of pain. I took responsibility inside for the first years and then shared it with him for the last several years in some repeated conversations.
We each need to look so carefully at how we were raised and watch out for whether we are duplicating areas of either neglect or overprotection. It would also be helpful to examine if we’re repeating our conditions or are in an equally frequent pattern of going to the other extreme.
It is an important time to see how this applies to you, as I don’t know virtually anyone who made it through without some degree of overprotection or at least, benign neglect.
The dangers of over-validation and excessive affirmations
Leah, a client of mine, came from a family where her parents were critical and rejecting throughout her childhood. She was compared with her brother and told he was the handsome one while she only had a good personality. She was never going to be pretty. The truth was that she was a beautiful woman and intelligent as well, but she had to battle a substantial lack of self-worth and low self-esteem.
She was a classic example of overcompensation who was loved throughout her school years by her peers and became the head cheerleader and most popular child at her high school. Being immensely popular came naturally to her as she was likely to be the nicest person in her class. You wouldn’t know that she had this background as she was almost impossible not to like.
The difficulty is that she had abandoned her own needs and was an empath to those around her. She was a best friend to so many classmates that had continued to contact her for 35 years. She came to me after having done some good therapy work on herself and started to recognize and balance some of her patterns. However, she was having the major heartbreak of her life with her two children. This was a matter that didn’t seem conceivable, especially because she was in her first great relationship and was the happiest she had ever been in her life.
Leah had been married twice and had one child with each of them. Like many of us, she picked partners who reflected her parents’ attitudes, and they took advantage of her excessive ‘niceness.’ It would be more accurate to say that she enabled (and, from a psychological point of view, unquestionably unconsciously picked) both of her husbands to unwittingly repeat her childhood wounds. One of the men was an alcoholic and left the childrearing totally up to her; the other was unfaithful and neglectful with verbal abuse. She left both of them before I met her and gave all the best parts of herself to the kids.
That might sound like a good thing, which to some extent it was, but I pointed out to her that she had done an extreme version of what I had with my child. What Leah thought of as love included excessive over-validation and not teaching them to care for others’ needs in mutual ways. She wasn’t going to have any part in invalidating her beloved children like what had happened to her.
There was almost nothing they could do wrong, and she expressed how wonderful they were even when she noticed that one of them was significantly isolating and excessively quiet. The other was very smart, but her heart was largely buried and dominated by her intelligence, and she was quite self-centered. She didn’t give them an accurate reflection of what she saw or guide them to look at their own limitations and shortcomings. As a result, they were left with an excessive belief in their own instincts, thoughts, and actions, which was imbalanced.
Leah’s good nature extended beyond her kids and led her to start and run a thriving foundation that was reaching out to foster children. She taught them life lessons and how to develop integrity and generosity. She also led them on fundraisers and walks that raised money for foster kids. Both fortunately and unfortunately, her goodness and compensation for her childhood extended beyond how she raised her kids. Despite her great work, she had the same tendency to be both loving and over-validating to the kids at her foundation.
The issue that Leah brought to me was that she had finally found the genuine love of her life after suffering from this split of having two nightmare marriages. She had met a man who was also running a foundation and loved communication as she did. She was by far the happiest of her life in this way.
However, when she asked her son to meet her partner during Easter, he told her, “I’m not interested in having another father. I’ve had enough of those. I can’t believe that you want to bring another man into my life.”
This was bewildering to Leah as she thought her kids would be thrilled to finally meet someone who had been making her happy for almost a year. It was the same story with her daughter. She said that she was very busy with work and would try to meet the next time he visited. She also wasn’t interested in meeting him on a video call — she had plenty of rationalizations for her refusal. After this pattern continued with both of them for more than a year, Leah was utterly distraught.
We started to unwind the mystery together. She continued to deepen her understanding of her excessive validation. She realized, in terms used repeatedly throughout psychology and AA, that she had been an enabler for her kids and her husbands.
Leah was in deep grief and anger at her kids. She was smart enough not to act it out for long but told her kids that she needed them to face what was happening honestly with some self-reflection. She was battling with herself, vacillating between grief and anger.
I empathized with her deeply and said, “Of course you’re feeling the grief and anger as they are rejecting both you and the love of your life. It is important to feel those feelings, but not to let them dominate you.” I couldn’t have gone beyond that if she hadn’t taken the initiative to work on herself.
I asked her to tell me what she thought was happening, and she came back with a number of insights over a couple of months, along with my input.
She thought she needed to tell them directly how sad and angry she was. At the same time, she also wanted to hold herself clearly accountable for how she hadn’t ever really expressed her needs. She recognized that she needed to share some of the responsibility. She did this for the first couple of months and made no headway, as the response she got back was a denial from both her kids. The kids were responding to her from their childhood-conditioned feelings, and so was Leah.
The next part I shared with her is something that I have shared with many parents who have gone through many parallel challenges with their kids., I hope you’ll benefit from the distinction made and take the insight in whatever way it might relate to you as a parent.
It is natural that you feel hurt and angry as those feelings you felt your whole childhood. however, I don’t believe these are your dominant feelings as a mother. You also know your kids love and trust you as a mom. Continuing to hold the confidence of what is balanced is what is needed for your kids to be relating as adults.
The dominant feelings you have as a mom — you are profoundly concerned that they will remain stuck in their patterns, each blaming you in their way. Your concern is the wiser, more mature side of your mothering, as you see that your daughter is angry and your son is unaware and simply withdrawn. You also see all kinds of ways they are acting out similar patterns with their spouses. You’re going to need to find a way to share this and how they can free themselves from these feelings dominating them.”
Leah immediately recognized that this concern was very deep, and she could easily understand why they were each angry and withdrawn. She also could see that her anger and hurt were a repeat of her childhood wounds. As she looked at an overview of their lives, she prepared herself for a series of communications to share insight about her childhood, the effects of over-validating them, and how she knew they were sincere in not wanting to meet her new life partner because of past trauma and a lack of consideration of her.
Her only hope (as she had realized) was to be the adult in her dynamic with her children. She would fare better when she revealed her concern that her son would continue to be somewhat withdrawn, and her daughter might remain wary and blindly distrusting of her mom’s capacity to have a wholesome relationship. Over the next year, Leah could focus centrally on this concern and work on the need for all three of them to respond from their wiser, more mature selves. She did this with empathy and with a question, “What do you have to lose?”.
All three of them ended up doing family therapy with me. In a way that so many families need, they were able to see their patterns due to Leah’s depth of accountability for her role and ability to stay with the concern of being a good parent to her kids. This led the way for the kids to open their hearts— this led to a great beginning of a relationship with their mom’s new partner and a deepened respect for their mother. As is the case with many parents, the love is and has always been there, and highlighting her mistakes opened the door for them to be receptive.
This might sound like a typical story, but it is primarily a deep revelation of what seldom happens because it is so hard to look at our own ego sensitively and communicate in a way that creates closeness, not distance. It requires all of us to truly ask and respond to the question,
How am I defending against being loving and honest? What do I need to do and how do I need to be to make the changes to move toward balance and a deeper love connection?
Essential parenting guidance — striking the right balance
In my experience of dealing with many families, this key of both accountability and dominantly expressing adult emotions and honesty while admitting childhood feelings is the master key to giving every family the best chance to transform.
Now that we’ve seen two versions of the parent-child dynamic at play, it’s important you take a good look at your own patterns. Hopefully, you have the humility, courage, and insight to see what your background was and how we were wounded or limited by it and see if we have repeated it or overcompensated. It is so unusual for any of us not to do one or the other.
Hopefully, this will be a major encouragement to be honest with yourself without judging as you realize virtually all of us have versions of imbalance as parents, and a dominant part of the world that has done the same thing. So I ask you to join me in asking as I have done many times and then pause:
“What way was I raised that wasn’t balanced, and was my tendency to repeat or to overcompensate for the way I was raised?”.
Then ask and hopefully continue well beyond this article, “What specific communications, actions, and attitudes do I need to balance to move toward the love I most want to foster with my children who are the people I love most to me in the world?”
Sometimes, some of us do both by a bit of over-validating and a similar amount of neglect. This imbalance is a key factor in why our world is divided. The tendency is to be overly trusting of our country and judge others as inferior or to withdraw and isolate. It is so hard to find a way to be a balanced, loving influence that extends from our families and from the world.
This kind of ‘love,’ with over-validation and extreme approval, can sound like a wonderful thing on the surface. But we don’t understand that excessive validation is as dangerous as excessive rejection. One leads to narcissistic tendencies or more, and the other leads at least to feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness.
Our culture validates confidence and being special or withdraws when we feel inadequate to hide from being seen. As parents, we need to seek the balance of treating our kids with love that is connected to the world that leaves a dominant sense of being an important part of the world and not be led into either superiority or inferiority.
A middle ground or the middle way (as the Buddhists would say) is balanced and brings optimal health — both in parent-child relations and in the wider world.