When Parents Fail Their Own Children

It talks about how children disappoint their parents. However, when parents fail their own children, willingly or not, a more invisible veil is drawn. Thus, aspects such as lack of respect, support, care or protection are silent sequels that often accompany us into adulthood in the form of wounds and deficiencies.

We know that neither the upbringing nor the education of a child are not easy tasks. The courses are few and the challenges are many; neither awards are given to the best parents nor are the worst punished. The failures, like the successes, are silently imprinted in the lives of their own children and in the secrecy of the family fabric. Later, those little ones will grow up and mature, dealing better or worse with everything they have experienced.

On the other hand, and as a curious fact, it should be said that on average many parents tend to underestimate the influence they have on their children. Thus, as a study carried out in the department of psychology at Stanford University explains, the impact that certain behaviors, the type of language used, or even the way in which a certain behavior may have, is often neglected. father or mother treats other people outside the family environment.

Raising a child is about more than providing sustenance. A child also feeds on what he sees, what he hears and what he feels. Nothing is left to chance in upbringing and education, everything is processed and integrated into one’s being in the form of a brand or a positive growth impulse …

When parents fail their own children

Love is not always enough when it comes to making a family: you have to know how to love. Sometimes, excessive affection leads to overprotection that hinders their emotional and personal development. Other times, that love that always seeks the best for the boy or the girl, shapes an upbringing marked by strict guidelines, inflexible mandates and an authoritarian education.

Parents fail their own children in many ways, often unconsciously,  for a very simple reason: they have a distorted and unpedagogical view of what affection is. Thus, the intelligent love of parents for their children is one that promotes growth in all senses, especially emotional, psychological: that which fosters autonomy and forms a safe and happy identity.

Now, despite the fact that on many occasions these parents do the best they can, it is not enough. And they do not succeed for many different reasons. Let’s see some of them.

Immature parents

There are couples, men and women with clearly immature personalities that make them unable to  properly raise their children. Irresponsibility, incoherence in educational guidelines, lack of habits and pedagogical strategies undoubtedly generate very complicated situations with serious consequences.

Parents with traumatic pasts

There are mothers and fathers who face parenting with the weight of a very obvious traumatic past. Sometimes, with the still tortuous memory of mistreatment, adversity or unresolved wounds and still open. All of this usually affects the quality of raising a child. It is clear that not all cases are the same, but in these situations very extreme behaviors tend to occur.

There are parents who cannot digest the weight of their own traumatic childhood and project that disaffection onto their own children. Others, on the other hand, still obsessed with that shadow of yesterday, tend to overprotect in excess.

Parents who are projected onto their children

Failed dreams, unfulfilled projects, unfulfilled ideals, unconquered goals … All that residue of frustration sometimes stored inside a father finds its hope with the arrival of a son. It is then when they begin to lay the foundations of their best project: to get that boy or that girl achieve what the father or mother could not in their day.

This educational dynamic completely denies the needs of the little ones, restricts their wishes and even childhood and adolescence. It’s another way that parents fail their own children.

Parents who do not know how to respond to the needs of their children

Just as we cannot choose our parents, neither can they choose us. Children arrive with their own nuances, their own personalities, peculiarities and needs. Knowing how to respond to them in the best possible way is undoubtedly the greatest obligation of every father and every mother.

On the contrary, neglecting those needs or even vetoing them is an attack on the integrity of that little one. Thus, sometimes, after a rebellious, rebellious or defiant behavior of a child, there are usually many unattended deficiencies, unfulfilled gaps and gaps that the upbringing of these parents has not been able to fill and resolve effectively.

All of this undoubtedly makes up another way in which parents fail their own children.

To conclude, we know that disappointments are marks that we all carry on our back in some way. Sometimes they weigh and oppress us excessively, there is no doubt. However, those conscious or unconscious mistakes made by our parents do not have to veto or limit the quality of our life.

It is in our power to forgive them or not, but knowing how to put aside the weight of yesterday to move through the present in the best possible way is undoubtedly a primary obligation that we have ahead of us. Another (and no less important) is to avoid that those mistakes made by our parents do not affect the upbringing of our own children. It is within our reach to make learning from the past that helps us build the best of the future.