Free Your Children from You
Perhaps the key measure of successful parenting, despite whatever mistakes we have made, is whether our children really understand that we love them as they are, not as we wish them to be. This rather simple test is much harder to meet than it first appears. To be able to pull back our expectations of them — that they make us proud of ourselves, that they ratify our religious, political, and cultural values — first requires that we are really addressing the task of our own individuation and not imposing our unfinished business on them. Jung’s observation that the greatest burden the child must carry is the unlived lives of the parents is chilling, frankly, for it puts all the responsibility for growing up back on me. In order to be a good parent, apparently I have to be a more evolved person in the first place.
The Little League father who screams at his son to play better ruins his son’s potential love for the game. No matter how much he grows or achieves in life, that child will remember those moments when he failed to please his father. I have seen many a man recall remarks, criticisms, expectations from decades ago, and carry those shaming moments into much that he does or fails to do today. Those shaming moments show up in aversion to legitimate risk, overcompensation through risky behaviors, or pain-numbing addictions. The stage door mother who pushes her daughter to ballet lessons, or the piano, or cheerleading, in a vain effort to redeem her own sagging sense of self has the same impact. Even the death of the parent does not erase this feeling or reporting to a presence that can grant or withhold praise and acceptance. Whatever the intent, whatever the rationalization, such parents load their children’s journey, perilous as it already is, with guilt, shame, failure, unbidden criticism, and a obsessive-compulsive drive to compensate elsewhere.
Most parents, even to this day, wish their children to grow up in the same religion, even when that religious confession is seldom practiced in daily life. We all know that most people espouse a personal religion based on the fortuity of their geographic and tribal births and not from genuine religious encounter or authentic personal election. Apparent security is promised in numbers and group identification and is narcissistically promoted when dictating one’s children follow a path similar to one’s own. Putting it bluntly: I am a good parent, a successful parent, if my child follows my path, reaches similar choices and lifestyle as I, thereby ratifying the rightness of my exemplum to them. What is the basis of that thought, common to most parents, other than personal insecurity? And how can insecurity be a firm basis for a parent-child relationship — not to mention genuine religious or values discernment?
Virtually every client with whom I have worked over the last four decades has had to struggle mightily to find a personal path, a journey that is right for him or her. They all find their journeys impeded by parental limitations, pressures, and models. And just as they struggle to find the permission, the sources of insight, and the guidance to chart their own course, so it may be readily imagined that their children will want the same freedom. In short, how can we grasp our possibilities, live our own authentic lives, if we do not model and grant overt permission for our children to live the separate journeys sought by their destiny?
I wrote in The Eden Project of what I call the heroic summons — namely, to lift off the intimate other the unfinished business of my own life. This I call heroic because it asks me to assume a burden much larger than feels comfortable. It asks that we outgrow the dependent part that is covertly eager to have someone take care of us. So we seek, unconsciously, to convert our partners into the good parent, the one who takes the task of self-esteem, of personal accountability, the responsibility for meeting most of our own needs, off our shoulders. Similarly, a far more unconscious, far more insidious but equally heroic task remains for parents — namely, to lift off our children’s shoulders the unfinished business of our own lives. The more we do so, the more we free them to be.
Those parents who phone their adult children several times a week are sending a message: you can’t live your own life, because you can’t do it without my advice and counsel and because you always have to live with your eyes looking backward worrying about me. All of this leaves the child/adult guilt ridden, insecure, angry, and constantly diverting energy from the necessary tasks of their own life. Such persons are sabotaging their children, sending them disempowering messages, and making them nervously read the parent’s whims for instructions, admonitions, and expectations. And could we ever call that good parenting, as such needy parents so often profess?
I recall one daughter who explained how she dreaded calling her mother. “How are you, Mom?” “Well, all right, I guess.” The tone of course said to her daughter: drop everything you’re doing in your life, and take care of me, daughter! On the other hand, there was the middle-aged man who came out to his parents, fearing the greatest wound gay persons ever have to suffer — the rejection of who they are by their parents. After he made his announcement, his father said, “Oh, thank goodness, and here I thought you were going to tell us you had become a Republican!” They all dissolved in laughter, and he knew that his mother and father loved him and that they were all going to move forward together.
I truly believe that the history of the world would change if we could just imagine parents healthy enough, wise enough, mature enough, evolved enough to say to their growing children something like the following: “Who you are is terrific. You are here to become yourself as fully as you can. Always weigh the costs and consequences of your choices as they affect others, but you are here to live your journey, not someone else’s and certainly not mine. I am living my journey so you won’t have to worry about me. You have within you a powerful source — call it your instinct, your intuition, your gut wisdom — which will always tell you what is right for you. Serve that, respect that. Be generous to yourself and others, but always live what is right for you. Life is really rather simple: if you do what is right for you, it is right for you and others. If you do what is wrong for you, it will be wrong for you and others. Know that we may not always agree on things, and that is fine, because we are different people, not clones. Always know that I will respect you and value you no matter your choices, and you will always find here people who love you and care for you.”
I believe that this message, however worded, would change the world because we would not have so many damaged people making their own babies in order to pass on their pathology. We would not have so many people turned violent because of the rage of their own troubled souls. We would not have so many self-defeating, avoidant, drug-addled, and unlived lives if people were not so estranged from their own souls. We would not have so many mindless folks who drift to politicians and preachers who offer them simplistic solutions to life’s problems, give them people to blame rather than holding themselves accountable, and who give them ideologies to embrace rather than the legitimate risk and reward that living their own journey provides.
If we are ever going to free our children, as we wished to be freed from the web our parents may have spun for us, we have to generate our own lives. And if we really do love our children, as we profess, then we have to free them of our expectations that they live like us. Why should they? Is not our doing that sufficient? Why would they have to replicate our lives unless it was not about what it seems to be about, parental concern, but rather about our insecurity and what we have lacked the courage to face in our own lives?
Where I am stuck, my children will be stuck or will be diverting a significant amount of energy to compensate to get unstuck. Where I am bound by fear, by lack of permission, they will be bound. Where I am looking to others to help me evade growing up, either they will replicate my immaturity or become unduly burdened by responsibilities. As parents, mentors, leaders of one kind or another, we are called to grow up, take care of business, gain our own authentic journeys, and thus lift this terrible distraction to the soul off those whom fate has brought into our care. That is how we are healed, our children healed, and their possibilities liberated.