THE EFFECTS OF CRITICAL PARENTS
When I counsel a person with depression sooner or later they will talk about their childhood and critical parents. As children, no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t please their parents. And even in old age, with the parents long since dead and buried they’re still trying to please their critical parents.
WHY DO PARENTS CRITICIZE THEIR CHILDREN?
Critical parents often had critical parents themselves, this is how they were taught to parent. To a child parents are God-like, all knowing and whatever they speak is the truth. Constant criticism leaves a mark on the child’s self-esteem.The child then enters adulthood with low self-esteem and a lack of confidence to try anything new, including a lack of confidence in how to love unconditionally.
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE
A person’s most important emotional need is for unconditional love. Knowing what unconditional love is like enables us, in turn, to love unconditionally. Children need the security of knowing they are loved even when their behavior is not so great. Unconditional love means never having to feel a threat of love being withdrawn. Giving unconditional love to ‘bratty’ children can be difficult, especially if you never received it while growing up yourself. In fact if your children are being ‘bratty’ focus on the behavior you don’t approve of rather than criticizing the character of the child.
The belief that has been instilled in the child that has been brought up with constant criticism is that nothing they ever do is good enough, so why try, when you’re just going to fail.
But then their own children arrive on the scene…
And they certainly don’t want their own children to have this same sense of inadequacy. Being unfamiliar with unconditional love these parents do to their own children what their parents did to them. They criticize them in an attempt to improve them. And so the cycle passes down from one generation to the next.
SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?
If this seems to sum up how you’re feeling it’s time to take stock of your life.
- Try to figure out why your parents were so critical – look to their own upbringing.
- The reality of parents is that they are not God. They make mistakes and have feelings of inadequacies, despite how they might come across. Forgive them for being imperfect.
- Try to work out what faulty believes you are carrying around with you making your life miserable.
- Assess if these beliefs are worth holding onto – you can let them go.
- Any good story has a consistent beginning, middle and end. Your life story also needs to make sense. The good news is that you can re-script the rest of your life and discard the unwanted baggage that you took on when you were an innocent child.
Click here to read more about how parenting can be a factor in children developing depression later in life.
Nicola says
I read that babies who do not have their needs for love, warmth, food and safety met by age 1 have an emotional foundation of mistrust. So unconditional love is very important. all else comes next.
karin says
Thanks for this very relevant comment Nicola. Definitely more to raising children than we might realize.