Mom Shares The One Thought Good Parents Always Keep At The Back Of Their Mind When Raising Their Kids
Once they're grown, your kids will see you as a human being, not as a parent.
PeopleImages.com - Yuri A | Shutterstock Parenting is an important job and the huge number of potential mistakes to be made can make it feel all the more overwhelming. But after hearing another parent's approach, one mom wondered if it might all boil down to a single piece of advice.
The mom shared the one thought that good parents always keep at the back of their mind when raising their kids.
Ask pretty much any therapist, let alone tons of adult kids and their parents, and they'll tell you that we're in something of a golden age of parent-child estrangement. Exact statistics are hard to come by, but the most recent studies indicate that about 1 in 10 people are estranged from a parent, a proportion mental health professionals say seems to be growing.
Part of this, experts say, is that the definition of what constitutes trauma or abuse has significantly expanded in recent decades — being screamed at or hit as a child used to be considered standard childhood fodder, after all. And as pretty much any estranged adult child will tell you, efforts toward repairing these traumas are often met with belligerent defensiveness from parents.
This brings us to a piece of sage advice mom and TikToker @jasmintheunique1 recently offered. She said in a video on the subject that the insightful piece of guidance immediately stuck in her mind because of the way it shifts the parenting paradigm.
The advice was simple: 'I have 18 years to convince my children I'm worthy of a relationship with them.'
If you have a difficult relationship with your parents or adult child, that likely took the breath out of your lungs for a moment just like it did for Jasmine. Because yes: That is pretty much the crux of it from an adult child's perspective.
To any parents dealing with estrangement, I say this as a person who is estranged from one parent (at her behest) and has a challenging relationship with the other. For most estranged kids, it's not the things you did that are the reason for the break, it's the way you respond when you're asked to discuss and own up to them so the relationship can be repaired.
Most estranged kids share the same experience — when they tried to engage their parents in a conversation about these issues, they were met with either defensiveness, rage, tears, manipulation, coldness, or maybe a combination of all of the above.
Those are understandable human responses to being confronted with something of that magnitude. But here is the hard truth: That does not erase the profound betrayal of trust that such a response to your child's pain and trauma constitutes.
Whoever gave Jasmine this advice is right — you do, in essence, reveal yourself to be the type of person your child is not willing to maintain a relationship with. And if you're honest with yourself, you wouldn't want to either if the tables were turned.
Jasmine put a finer point on the issue: Adult kids end up in a relationship with a person, not a 'mom' or 'dad.'
"Our children are growing up every single day," Jasmine went on to say. "And eventually they will be grown and they will no longer see us as mommy and daddy. They will see us as the people that we truly are."
Again, speaking from experience, it can be an absolutely shocking event to discover that the parent who created you is more invested in protecting their own feelings than hearing their child out and repairing the relationship.
Parents who do this certainly have their reasons, and again, those are normal human responses to being confronted with anything, let alone something as painful as having hurt your child. This is something adult children could frankly stand to have a bit more grace for, in my opinion.
Be that as it may, standing ten toes down in that defensiveness and offense while refusing to own up and repair is a choice, and your status as their parent does not lessen its devastating blow — nor does it require your child to simply swallow their pain and put up with it.
As Jasmine put it, "[our kids] will get to decide, do I want a relationship not with 'mommy' and 'daddy' — do I want a relationship with this human being? With this person?"
That's perhaps the most important parenting advice there is, whether you're just starting out raising your kids or you're the mom or dad of a full-grown adult. The ultimate parenting skill is having the courage to work on yourself, no matter how difficult or painful. And everyone reaps the benefits.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.