Most Parenting Theories Are Speculation

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Most parenting theories are speculation

Source: ezhikezhik.ru

Now parents, on the one hand, have begun to pay more attention to their relationship with the child, try to stop yelling and get annoyed, become more attentive, and on the other hand, they constantly feel guilty for every breakdown, disapproval and past mistakes. Here's what to do about it? How to get rid of this guilt?

Yes, this is the scourge of modern times, I use the term "parental neurosis" for this. Parents are very anxious and emotionally worried all the time about everything related to their children. There are understandable situations - the child is sick or something serious has happened, but they are worried mainly about things that do not pose a threat - behavior at school, I spend a lot or little time with the child, and so on. As if we all have a basic insecurity about our right to be parents. It seems to me that this has many factors: there are generational factors, because now people are becoming young parents, whose parents, in turn, were often deprived of attention in childhood. These current grandparents once, having become parents, acted with aggression, blackmail, humiliation, because they themselves were not quite adults.

Today, young mothers do not want that, but they don’t know how else to do it. They often have many claims to their parents and exactly the same number of claims to themselves, because as soon as you raise the bar too high, it starts hitting you in the head. And if a parent suffers greatly because of resentment towards their parents or feelings of guilt towards their children, then it would be nice for him to undergo personal therapy. But in general, it seems to me, here you just need to understand that all our ideas about how to raise children are relative. 20 years ago they thought differently, and in 20 years they will count differently. And there are a bunch of countries and cultures where children are brought up in a completely different way from us, and children grow up there, and everything is fine. And we look at them and think - oh my God, these children never eat soup, those have a toilet on the street, but these children are already working from the age of 3. Someone would look at us and think - crazy, up to 12 years old children are not allowed out into the street, they are fed with something incomprehensible, parents are allowed to cheat. This is all pretty relative.

Soup is understandable, but the goal of any parent is to raise a happy person. And when you are happy, it doesn't matter if you have a toilet on the street or you live in a three-story house, you are comfortable with yourself

Oh, well, this is also a trap of the modern parent: it is necessary to make the child grow up happy. How can you even lay on this? Imagine that someone has spent all their resources to make you happy, and you have an autumn blues or unhappy love. And you feel guilty about being unhappy at the moment. That is, not only is it bad for you now - you also turn out to be a bastard, let your loved ones down. How can you even lay on the fact that the child was happy? He may have teenage depression, parting with a loved one, a friend died, a personal crisis, but you never know what!

But what about the concept of containment? It is precisely in order to teach the child to experience as less traumatic as possible, conventionally, unhappy love and other misfortunes

No, containment is not about worrying less. It's not for the child to turn out to be such a positive jerk - haha, everyone died, but I don't care, because my mother loved me as a child. The essence of containment is not not to not get upset, but to ensure that at the moment of tragedy, realizing that he is not able to cope with his feelings, he would go for help not to a bottle of vodka, but to other people and receive from them support. It is clear that an adult has a large reserve of self-containment, but if the situation is really serious, a healthy person goes to living people who can sympathize with him, and not to surrogates such as shopping, money, vodka. Containment is needed just in order to experience more deeply and fully, and not hide from feelings, not drown them out, fearing that you will not be able to cope.

Well, if we return to the modern advice of “correct” parenting: now almost all popular psychologists advise giving the child as much choice as possible, not forcing him to learn, giving him the opportunity to feel interest. Can you somehow go overboard with this freedom?

I don't think there is a common recipe for everyone. And to force and not to force - everything has a price. If you force, then, firstly, it is tiring, takes time and effort, and secondly, you deprive the child of the opportunity to make independent choices, and, in addition, spoil your relationship with him. If you do not force, the choice can be overwhelming for the child, causing him anxiety. There is a risk that problems will accumulate, and the child will then make claims to you, why, they say, he was not forced to finish his studies and he did not receive a better education. The child is a developing subjectivity, he is not yet completely subjective and is no longer completely subjective. With infants, we do not ask questions of choice - it is clear that such a baby is not yet subjective, and the maximum freedom that we can give him is to feed not by the hour, but on demand. But we want the child to become completely subjective by the age of 18 - he could make decisions, choose a profession, a spouse, a way to live. That is, all the time between infancy and 18 years should be spent on the formation of subjectivity. But the child does not have a sensor on his forehead that would indicate the state of his readiness to make decisions - today he is 37 percent ready, but now he is already 62 percent. Therefore, the task of parents is always to understand how the child can make decisions now.

It's complicated. The criteria are unclear here and we are constantly making mistakes. One thinks that the child is smaller than he really is, they control and take care of where it is not necessary. Others give him too much freedom and responsibility - and make mistakes in the other direction, while the child feels anxious and abandoned. There is no way to calculate this readiness for decisions on a particular child. Here you need constant involvement and the possibility of flexible maneuver - if you see that you abandoned the child and he somehow sagged very much, fell behind in school, got confused, then you need to add a little presence, and temporarily limit the freedom of choice. If you see that your control has already gotten him and he can cope on his own - retreat, give more freedom. Make mistakes all the time and, if possible, correct mistakes - there is no other way.

How can one live here without guilt, when the parent has such a gigantic responsibility? He gave freedom - the child became anxious, irritated - an adult daughter suffers from insecurity, forced her to study - ruined the relationship. Here wherever you turn - everywhere there is continuous harm from parents

The world has gone through this long ago and has already relaxed. In the West, it was a trick of the 70s - there everything in the world was explained by upbringing, from autism to hyperactivity and asthma. The Delight of Neophytes in Developmental Psychology. Such explanatory schemes are very powerful, because in this way you can explain anything to the general public. Any manifestation of a person can definitely be explained by maternal education. In any relationship, someone is always crushing, not always responsive or something else. Since every parent always has something to reproach himself for, then any mistakes of the child can be explained by the fact that you have not done well or have gone too far. And these schemes have incredible magic, they are always easy to believe in. But how it works for sure - no one knows.

For such statements to be reliable, research is needed that is simply impossible. We cannot take the same child and make him first live his whole life with his mother, who was annoyed and yelled, and then return him to infancy and give him another mother. It is also impossible to compare him with another child, whose life was exactly the same, only his mother did not scream. These should be samples of hundreds of thousands. And also go and separate: Mom yelled at this and therefore, for example, he was hyperactive, or he was hyperactive, and therefore Mom was exhausted and screamed.

It is important to remember that most of what is said about the influence of parents on children, including what I say, is speculation and generalization. We have no reliable research. They will probably appear someday, because, for example, now more and more studies are connected with direct observation of brain activity. Perhaps, as soon as it becomes possible to track a person's reactions directly, we will know more and understand more about cause-and-effect relationships in upbringing. But so far, most parenting and developmental theories are speculation. This does not mean that it is useless and does not work - it means that the attitude of parents towards books on parenting should be strictly consumerist. If I am reading this book and I want to go hug and kiss my child, I want to change, then it suits me. If after this book I feel guilty and terrible and want to hang myself, it does not suit me. Because, in my opinion, everything that makes the parent guilty and unhappy is also harmful to the child. Anything that makes the parent more calm and confident is good for the child. After reading a book on education, it is important to feel warmth and tenderness for the child, and not anxiety in the genre "how to prevent him from loosening his girdle" or "how not to make him neurotic."

By the way, it's true - it happens that completely different children grow up in the same family. For example, one learns, while the other sits at the computer all day. It turns out that not everything is due to the behavior of the parents.

For example, yes, the children grew up in the same family, but when the first was born, the parents were calm and happy, and when the second appeared, there were problems with money. There is always a different context. And the same event always affects different children in different ways. Plus, children in the same family can often unconsciously distribute functions among themselves: I will be mother's joy, and I will be pride, and I will do so that the parents do not relax. Even twins can behave very differently - not everything depends on their parents. We are living people, we have free will, personal characteristics, we are not robots in which one and the same specific algorithm can be laid.

Okay, but is there some kind of minimum program that a “good parent” should follow? It is clear that hitting a child is unacceptable. And something not so obvious?

All that is required of a parent is to live their own life and be considerate of their child. This does not mean that you need to do whatever he wants and always be with him. You just need to keep the communication channel open at all times. If you see that your child needs your help, you need to be ready to drop everything and be with him. But you need to turn on this mode in really serious moments. Imagine what would happen if we satisfied absolutely all the needs of our child, making sure that he never suffered? Remember, in the cartoon "Wall-E": the spaceship-sanatorium, on which people were settled, this is such an ideal mother, protecting them from the slightest trouble. As a result, people there turned into fat bladders, unable to even walk and chew food on their own. This is hardly what we would like. In general, the main thing is to always remember that children are not given to us for hard labor, but for joy - this is the whole point.