The Mistake Even Good Parents Make That Can Make Kids Shame Spiral & Sabotage Their Future
When trying to set kids up for success, we may actually achieve the opposite.
GroundPictures via Shutterstock As parents, you will always do your absolute best to uplift your kids. You want to see them succeed and flourish and be happy. But it's easy to take this too far, and even the best of parents can make serious, but well-intentioned mistakes.
In the Open Relationships: Transforming Together podcast, host Andrea Miller sits down with Vienna Pharaon, the most sought-after marriage and family therapist in New York and author of the bestselling book The Origins Of You, shared one way in which parents may think they're helping their kids — but end up teaching them to spiral into shame and self-destruction.
How even great parents accidentally infuse their kids with shame & low self-esteem
Expecting your kids to be pitch-perfect is a disaster waiting to happen — for many reasons. Whether it was your intention or not, you now created a people-pleaser who only feels worthy of love and acceptance when they are achieving and making other people happy.
We may be trying to teach kids to be successful, to work hard, but instead, this helps create a person who is afraid of truly living and won't take risks. Every misstep is to subconscious proof that they are unlovable or unworthy of feeling pride or a sense of worth.
Pharaon explains, "what you probably learned as a kid) is that in order to get love, connection, presence, attention, validation, calm, peace in your family, in your home, you had to get the straight A's, dress a certain way or [do] a hat trick on the field."
"Basically," injects Miller, a self-proclaimed achievement junkie, "to be a 'good girl'."
We teach kids that love and acceptance are conditional
"The conditions of our family," Pharaon explains, "and the conditions of our relationship don't have a lot of wiggle room in them."
We begin to feel pressured. Pharaon explains, "Then we have so much shame, where we believe that love is lost, or we believe our [family members] are going to hate us."
How perfectionism almost sabotaged Vienna Pharaon's relationship
She says that she and her then-boyfriend (now husband) at the time conflicted. And during this conflict, she couldn't stop trying to prove a point.
Pharaon describes it as an "out of body experience" in which she couldn't control the words coming out of her mouth. Truthfully, she was just spiraling. "And I'm like, Vienna, shut up. You know, like, don't keep going."
"And I'm like, oh, this is so gross," she thought. The words, "He's not going to want to be with you," just kept cycling through her mind. Fortunately, compassion from her boyfriend helped her learn to have compassion for herself.
"And just a little bit of context," Pharoan adds, "I grew up, my parents went through a nine-year divorce process, very high conflict, a lot of gaslighting, manipulation, paranoia."
She continues, "And it wasn't something that was directed at me, but it was something that I observed frequently. And I remember as a kid deciding that being right — which my dad could always do because he was masterful with his words — meant safety. And being wrong — which my mom [often seemed to be, because she] would often just stumble over the facts and the details — was a lack of safety."
What parents can do differently to empower kids
What can parents truly learn from this? That "obedience" is not necessarily a desirable trait in a child. Yes, you want a child to show you respect, but that respect should be mutual. You want a child to make good, safe choices, but our children need to know that our love for them is unconditional. They don't need to be "high-achievers" on the outside in order to be successful in life. And they can make mistakes, even big ones, and still find love and connection at home.
Pharaon suggests parents pause and look at where our biggest insecurities lie and work through them so we don't pass them onto our children. Because if we want to heal and move forward we need to understand the parts of ourselves that hold us back, and healing ourselves is an incredible lesson for our children in self-love.
Marielisa Reyes is a writer with a bachelor's in psychology who covers self-help, relationships, career, family, and astrology topics.