Do We Need to Better Understand the Pivotal Role of Parenting to Evolve?

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With all the parenting advice I’ve read and heard, which has a wealth of information about understanding the different developments stages and what is needed at each, and how to manage my kids undesirable behaviour, there seems to be one huge piece missing and that is about how to manage myself.

No one forewarned me that, as Lisa Marchiano puts it “You’re going to project your stuff on your kids. There is no way that you are going to get through any amount of time with your children and not meet those parts of yourself you cut off and sent backstage (the aspects of yourself that are unconscious but we see in others, our blind spots)”. It just brings up so much discomfort and pain.

The inherited patterns of behaviour in parents that children react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to, are essential for survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life; and will certainly get passed on unless the cycle is broken.

The best description I’ve seen of these is in James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, he describes four archetypes (on a scale of aggressive to passive) that are “control strategies we each develop in order to stop others’ draining our energy”. I summarised these more in Normal Is Dysfunctional - That Is the Growth Opportunity.

The thing is, normal developmental trauma arises from normal parenting and remains largely unseen precisely because it is deemed normal. Yet it creates power struggles and destruction; it creates disease, chronic pain and illness; and it stunts individual and collective abilities to address systemic issues within relationships and society.

That is the ultimate challenge of parenthood, the ultimate responsibility, to recognise and break the cycles of dysfunction that are still very much alive.

Amy McCready of Positive Parenting Solutions says “Children have two major needs: attention and power. And if they are not getting positive attention and positive opportunities to make their own choices they will settle for negative attention and ways to gain a feeling of personal power”.

Not only that, the lack of positive attention or opportunity to express personal needs and desires is precisely what leads to the kind of dysfunction that is prevalent in society today.

Yet we live in a society of distraction – parents distracted by devices and responsibilities. Not to mention the pass-the-parcel of before/after school care, split families/housing.  Men and women, whether parents or not, really struggle in relationships today with break ups rates higher than ever before. Where in all of that, I wonder, are we allowing for and compelling attention on our kids’ development?

Relationship expert Terry Real says that the traditional walls for men and women in a patriarchal culture are changing, but are far from changed – and those traditional walls preclude intimacy.  As Raine Eisler said “It’s an old fashioned word, but patriarchy really means dominion (power over) instead of power with.”

I was sent one of Constance Hall’s blog post’s this week that demonstrates how patriarchy is still very active and it really resonated for me. Her main point was that every consenting partnership should consist of two adults whose working hours are equal regardless of whether they are paid or unpaid work.

The original has a sort of angry rant feel to it, yet she makes some really good points, so here is a version with the emotional charge toned down a bit:

“The thing about not doing your share of house work or child rearing is that is more insidious than a simple “I can’t be bothered”; domestic responsibilities do not disappear.

Children do not raise themselves. Housework doesn’t do itself.
 
Every time you sit on the toilet, eat food from a clean plate, watch on with pride while your fed, educated children smile, it’s because someone has put in effort for you to receive that privilege. And if it wasn’t you, it was someone doing your share.

Remember that expecting someone else to do your workload is oppressive. It’s saying “you can have equal rights only when you’ve met the basic needs of others”.

Support each other because domestic duties are about so much more than clean sheets, it’s about respect and showing your kids what is and what isn’t a healthy way to care for themselves.”

I think that is a great message, but there is another side to it, which is the person who allows that to happen. I know because I am one of those people who has too often taken more than my fair share of responsibility and felt overwhelmed and overburdened and then resented the heck out of it.

This represents a typical narcissistic/codependent relationship, which is also typical of the type of normal dysfunction I refer to earlier in the piece. Trauma expert Pete Walker describes this as the most common relational hybrid. Terry Real describes the same blueprint as grandiosity versus inferiority/shame-based and is the most prevalent pattern he sees in relationships also.

“While women can show up as narcissistic”, he says “it is more common for men to be this way”.

Terry’s view is that we don’t value relational skills in a patriarchal culture. He goes on to say “We code relationship as feminine and we do to intimacy what we do to many things feminine: we idealise it in principle and we devalue it in fact”.

I know this reality well. Having worked since I was fifteen, first through school and university and then in a corporate career, I know what working long hours and having high levels of responsibility looks like.  What I didn’t know was what motherhood looked like.

At first I saw my corporate career as a welcome temporary escape from the monotony of those early childrearing years, but then it became clear that regardless of how I felt (which with a baby and toddler was starting to look more like burnout), my children needed me at home.

There was a piece I wrote describing a typical night after getting home from work, and one day I will publish it, because it heralded the start of this journey to me, but for now I’ll just share my concluding thoughts that night:

I know it’s too much. I know my child is telling me this. Yes, as exhausted as I am, as distracted by work, the long arduous and unfulfilling hours of work, it’s time. Time to uncover what the heart and soul desire, for all of us.

Six months on from that I published my first blog and have done so ever week since, recording the deliberate journey to a more authentic me, which included balking and rallying against this idea of my own feminine nature and role as a mother.

I was raised in an era where I was brought up to believe that women can do anything men do. But as a friend of mine said beautifully “that overlooks the essence of the feminine, the need to find her own rhythm and inner desires in her own time and in her own reflection”.

We had been having a discussion about the government’s financial support for parents with low income. I find it infuriating that - on one hand - our law (through Property Relationship law) recognizes that a stay-at-home parent is equal to a full time job, yet the government will not support a stay at home parent of school age kids unless they are at least in part time work.

When I recently tracked how many hours of my week are dedicated to childcare and domestic duties, it was seventy hours on a typical school week and ninety on a non school week. Bear in mind school weeks typically only represent 180 days (allowing for ten days where at least one child is sick), how many employers are happy with employees only working half the year?

Recognising that encouragement of women into the workforce was an attempt to stop the judgements of not only solo mothers but women in jobs, it was however done in the context of patriarchal structures.

Quite aside of keeping the toilets clean and putting food on the table, the job as taxi driver, chief attention giver, boundary holder and referee, the role and responsibility of a parent can be all consuming.

One night when my kids’ father and I were talking, our youngest daughter came into the room and asked for my help with something. I thought then that this is precisely what being a mum looks like, constantly being interrupted and on duty. And those interruptions can range from an innocuous “how do I spell...?” through to world-war-three erupting in the lounge.

In fact, I find distraction my biggest challenge in parenting. If I am distracted, there is no connection, and the constant pull on my attention triggers responses that are less than optimal for my kids.

As the primary caregiver, my attention being on the kids is just a part of the job when they are around, from the minute they wake up to the minute they go to sleep. Adapting that attention as they grow to help them towards independence is also part of the job, but that’s on a continuum; in development terms though kids are in their teens before they can healthily handle longer periods of more independence.

So while going to work as soon as kids are in school is encouraged, to me it’s not okay to be required to work on top of the typical seventy hours of attention required on the home and kids in order to receive financial help. 

Before the world of COVID19 restrictions we had been on a family holiday in Hawaii. In conversation with the retail assistants, hotel staff and restaurant workers, it became clear that working two jobs to support their families was necessary, and this was women who had partners who also worked.

What kind of quality parenting can people give in these scenarios?

Terry Real is quick to point out that both men and women are knocked out of real intimacy and connection with themselves and others from childhood. Citing the work of Jean Baker Miller and Carol Gilligan at the Stone Centre, he says:

• “Young women are knocked out of real, honest connection at the edge of womanhood. They stop telling the truth and instead they move into – as Carol Gilligan puts it - “the tyranny of the nice and kind”; they lose their voice. It’s changing but it still needs a lot of work”. And
• “Boys are knocked out of authentic connection much younger, by the time they enter kindergarten they’ve already internalised the code to be invulnerable. What research tells us is they are no less emotional or sensitive than girls at that age but they’re less expressive. They’ve learned to keep their mouths shut, to wall it off”.

The problem is, as author, research professor and social expert Brené Brown has taught us, we connect through vulnerability. Terry believes that “While Millennial’s (thankfully) are different, the rest of us are still suffering under the old codes. Leading men and women into real intimacy is synonymous with leading men out of patriarchy.”

In Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race I quote Teal Swan as saying “The restoration of balance within the human race is not about decreasing masculine power while increasing feminine power...it is about both rising to power simultaneously”.

I particularly like the short article from psychologist Shari Derkson that explains the aspects of masculine and feminine and what integrating them within ourselves might look like.

She says “There is a movement towards inviting more feminine aspects into our lives, states of being, rather than doing; such as through stillness, meditation and tapping into our intuition and creative processes. Equally, it is important for both male and females to develop the more masculine qualities of rational and logical ability, clear non-attached thought and problem solving etc.”

James French, who works with rescue animals and cultivated The Trust Technique, demonstrates through his work how lack of connection in humans (and propensity towards dominion or power over instead of power with) shows up just the same in animals as it does in children.  

James says "Any animal displaying fear, aggression, anxiety etc is a sign of an over-thinking state, but when brought into a peaceful state you can connect through more positive imagining/feeling states instead”.  

What I love is his observation that sensitivity in animals or people doesn’t change, it just transforms from positive sensitivity (the feelings of connection, joy, love) to negative sensitivity (the feelings of fear, shame, guilt). This could equally be applied to children.

“As a child”, as Dr Gabor Maté explains, “we are born feeling our connection to our parents and we are reliant on them for survival. Being rejected by them in any way, big or small, is devastating. So when we are rejected, we have a choice, to reject them or reject ourselves (or more likely parts of ourselves). But we can’t reject them as our survival depends upon them.”

Luckily the skills needed for connection with children, and with each other, are skills that can be learned. Terry Real makes the point “There’s skills in learning to connect to yourself and others. There’s skill in learning to love yourself. There’s a skill in learning good boundaries. And there are skills in learning how to stand up for yourself with love and respond with generosity instead of defensiveness.”

Changing the way we see parenting is pivotal, but that requires first a change in who we are as individuals. To begin to recognise our dysfunctional stances and structures and perhaps to look at them through more integrated eyes that include more of the aspects of our true nature without the walls we have erected around us in response to our own childhoods.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, How Dead Does the Horse Need to Be to Want to Get Off?,  Womanhood: A Story of Our Time and Embracing the Feminine within All of Us. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.