Reply to Things your parents say or do which you wouldn't say or do to your adult children

Forum Index » Adult Children

Reply to "Things your parents say or do which you wouldn't say or do to your adult children"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Let's share those so we can have better relationships with our adult children.[/quote]

This is grossly unfair because our lives today are light years away from our parents.   There are so many choices available to parents today that ours did not have.  It's apples and footballs!

Nobody is a perfect parent but most are doing their very best with the resources available to them.  Parents, in many ways, actually have it harder today than even 20 years ago and we don't know what we might do in any given circumstances. [/quote]

Honestly, the best things I did for my kids that my parents didn't do for me was (1) wait to have kids until I was old enough and had dealt with my own childhood traumas and issues, and (2) limit the number of kids I had to a number we could reasonably afford instead of continuing to have children.

I do think it's harder to be a parent now than it was 40 years ago when I was a kid -- so much more is asked of parents. But I also feel significantly more prepared for those challenges than my parents were for even the much lower parenting standards of the 70s and 80s, because I didn't get pregnant at 19 and have 4 kids before 30 like they did.

I don't really blame my parents for this -- they did what they thought was expected of them and di don't feel they had a lot of choice. However, I can say that and also recognize all the stuff they did that was really detrimental to me (and how it stemmed from both their immaturity and their own bad childhoods) and seek not to repeat those patterns. You can criticize your parents without indicting them. I think this is actually essential if you had an abusive or neglectful childhood (as I did) and don't want to repeat those patterns with your own children. You have to be able to have empathy but recognize and articulate what went wrong.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics