Parenting our kids to death…

Parenting our kids to death…

Parenting our kids to death…

Comments Off on Parenting our kids to death…

Via: The Atlantic

Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids-yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

Ten years ago or so, I started seeing a phenomenon. A constant stream of clients began to come into the office who really did have perfect parents and had gone through perfect childhoods with that they described as, “Perfect Self Esteem,” – whatever this week’s definition of that is…

And, they had just ditched their second wife or husband.

What the linked article – well worth the really long read it is btw – misses is that there is a second tier of issue happening here that goes way beyond just the person’s ability to deal with stress, it has to do with foundational skills in relationships.

You see, while said perfect parents are running around and making sure that junior has a perfect life, they are not focused on each other, not locking their kids out of their room and making mad passionate love that properly disgusts their children, they are not making out in the living room until their teens want them to get a room, they never go out on dates alone and (GOD FORBID!!!) leave the children with a sitter, they never chase the kids out of the room to have a private, deeply emotional and intimate conversation (that the child overhears from around the corner anyway) and they have never demonstrated to the child the struggle it takes to make a real marriage work.

No, they are too busy raising the perfect child…

Enter stage left another perfectly parented child with perfect delusions from Hollywood about relationships and marriage happens. And neither of them have any clue about even making a real marriage work – much less the romantic ideal. And, it blows sky high. And, we wonder why…

Then, in retirement acres down somewhere where the sun always shines, the two elderly perfect parents sit across the patio from each other wondering why they can’t even talk enough with each other anymore to discuss why junior and juniorette can’t seem to stay married. Some of them also wonder if that inability to talk has anything to do with why, lately, they seem to be pushing happy hour up to lunchtime…

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