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When you’re pregnant, you can’t help having expectations about your child.
Imagining – in detail – what he or she will be like is part of the
preparation for parenthood. Yet our fantasies are projections of our own
hopes. So it’s inevitable that the reality of the individual who is born
will collide with and possibly shatter those fantasies. “I’m not sure most
parents start off willing to accept the child they get,” says Jason Holder,
EdD, director of Adventurelore Counseling in Danville, New Hampshire.
Parents treasure their dreams – “My child will be a lawyer, ballerina, movie
star.”
Sometimes the discrepancies between imagination and reality are minor. A
woman who always longed for a little girl with soft golden curls has a
daughter with unruly brown hair. A man who expected to coach Little League
has a son or daughter who doesn’t care for team sports.
Other times the gap between expectation and actuality is more dramatic. When
my own daughter was six months old, we learned she was profoundly deaf. In
the weeks that followed her diagnosis, I realized I was grieving less for
her – it became clear that there were plenty of happy, successful deaf
people in the world – and more for the fantasy child I had lost. I wept
because I couldn’t introduce her to Bach and Raffi, wouldn’t be able to
teach her to recognize birds by their song. It didn’t take long to see that
if my daughter was to grow up emotionally healthy, my image of who she was
supposed to be would have to change to match who she really is.
As it turns out, I had a crash course in something every parent must learn.
A child’s distinctive nature slowly unfolds like the petals of a wildflower.
We can accept and affirm that reality or make her feel inadequate and sad
because she turned out to be a fragile columbine when we were expecting a
tough trillium – or vice versa. “As parents we’re called upon to love
children as they are, not as they fit preconceived notions of what’s good
and acceptable,” says Joan Borysenko, PhD, author of Guilt Is the Teacher,
Love is the Lesson (Warner Books). “Our job is to allow the unique potential
of the child to flower even as we admit we do not know what the unique
potential is.”
The Effects of Nonacceptance
That level of acceptance may sound easy – nearly every parent plans to give
her child unconditional love. Yet the psychology racks of bookstores are
peppered with books for adults about how to get the love parents didn’t
provide. “We all have a profound need to feel accepted,” says Robin
Casarjian, author of Forgiveness: A Bold Choice for a Peaceful Heart
(Bantam). “And when it isn’t met, there’s a deep emptiness inside.” People
suffer not only from gross forms of parental rejection like neglect and
abuse, but also from subtle messages given even by well-meaning parents.
One father, for example, assumed that his son would have a lean and athletic
physique like his. When the youngster turned out to be a stocky kid who
preferred books to balls, the father started taking him to specialists for
his “weight problem.” Although this appeared to be the loving action of a
concerned parent, the child got the message that he needed to be fixed
because he wasn’t OK the way he was.
Even well-intentioned parents can give their kids the enduring feeling that
they are, at the core, unacceptable. This is very different from telling a
child that his behavior is unacceptable. Behavior, after all, can be
changed. But the child can’t alter his essential nature by an act of will.
His physical shape, his talents, his temperament are all there from the
beginning. “Kids are born with personality,” says Borysenko, “and the way
parents respond to the essential nature of their children determines the
assumptions they will form about themselves.”
When parents give a child unconditional love, they respect, appreciate and
enjoy him for who he is. As a result, he grows up assuming that he deserves
respect, appreciation and love. When parents are dissatisfied and critical,
the youngster has two choices. On the one hand, he can protect his true self
by learning not to care. He develops a veneer of insensitivity so he won’t
suffer from his parents’ disappointment and judgment. At the other extreme,
he becomes so eager to please his parents that he loses touch with his true
feelings. He is like a chameleon, trying to mirror the desires of those
around him without ever coming to terms with what he wants for himself.
Self-Awareness Is Key
You may recognize those patterns in people around you or even in yourself.
And you may be able to draw the connection between your own adult feelings
of unworthiness and a parent who was critical or controlling. Yet for most
of us, it’s much harder to see how we might be communicating similar
feelings of unacceptability. Our blindness may result from the fact that we
have never become conscious of our expectations, so we have not come to
terms with our disappointment. A parent who can say out loud “I always
figured my daughter would be graceful and as passionate about dance as I am”
can finally understand that whatever problems she has with her daughter’s
preference for field hockey come from her own expectations and not from her
daughter. By facing and then letting go of her assumptions, this mother can
begin to take pleasure in her daughter’s stamina and fearlessness.
In other words, acknowledging that you expected something different and even
that you may be disappointed about not getting it frees you to appreciate
what you have. This notion is expressed most eloquently in an anonymous
article by the mother of a disabled child: “When you’re going to have a
baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a
bunch of guidebooks and make your wonderful plans. Then the plane lands in
Holland. ‘Holland?’ you say. ‘What do you mean, Holland? I signed up for
Italy! All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy…’ But if you spend the
trip mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free
to enjoy the very special, very lovely things about Holland.”
Learning to love Holland – or Indonesia or Zimbabwe – may not be easy. It
takes great selflessness to appreciate our children not as extensions of our
own ambitions, hopes and assumptions but as unique and separate individuals.
This is particularly true when a child is dramatically different from a
parent. That’s because our sense of what is good or even right is often
based on what has worked for us. When a child is different, those
fundamental assumptions may be irrelevant or even damaging to him. For
instance, a mother who is very sociable may assume that the source of human
happiness is having many friends. Based on her own experience, she may push
an introspective child to go to birthday parties before he’s ready or insist
that he invite friends to play on the weekend when he needs to be alone
after the rigors of the school week.
Helping Children Become Themselves
“A parent’s true role is to help children discover who they are rather than
impose her own ideas of who they should be,” says Robin Casarjian. “All kids
have capabilities, and we need to help them find our what those capabilities
are.”
It sounds obvious, but it’s not. Learning to love a child unconditionally
requires though. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Accept yourself. One wise father makes the same New Year’s
resolution every January: To become more accepting of myself as a person.
“Everybody else makes resolutions about changing themselves,” he explains,
“but the more I make peace with who I am, the more I am able to accept
others – including my children – as they are.” Parents who accept
imperfections in themselves have less need for their children to perfect,
and those who have come to terms with disappointment are less likely to try
to live through their children.
2. Recognize that your child is an individual. Part of the challenge
and privilege of living intimately with others is coming to understand that
they are not just like you. “ I always thought that if I could explain
things well enough, my son would see them the way I do,” says one mom. “But
gradually, I’ve come to realize that his experience of the world is
genuinely unlike mine. He wasn’t just saying he didn’t like Beauty and the
Beast to annoy me – he really didn’t like it!”
This is especially challenging when a son or daughter seems on the surface
to be very much like one parent or the other. “Often a favorite child is the
one most like yourself, even when those similar traits aren’t admirable,”
says Casarjian. “It’s a way of loving yourself and expressing acceptance to
yourself.” Of course the child isn’t a carbon copy of the adult, so when he
or she inevitably makes a decision different from what the parent would
make, it feels a lot like rejection. A parent can try to persuade and even
insist on a trial run (“I want you to take piano for six months”), but then
she must defer to the child’s nature (“If you aren’t enjoying it after that,
we’ll look for something you like better”).
3. Learn to describe without judging. Accepting a child doesn’t mean
parents should never evaluate his performance. Yet there is a way to do it
that doesn’t call into question the child’s fundamental worth, says
Casarjian. Let’s say, for instance, that your daughter can’t hit the ball
during a softball game. You can decide that she’s just not must of a hitter”
or you can describe what she does – “She stands eighteen inches from the
plate. She pays attention to the ball. She holds the bat very tight. She
swings a second too late.” The latter approach gives you a sense of what
she’s already doing well in addition to information that can help her
improve her performance. “The idea is to look for what the child is doing
right rather than what she’s doing wrong,” says Casarjian.
4. Correct behavior without condemning the child. Accepting your
youngster does not mean tolerating any and all behavior. Parents must
discipline a child who misbehaves. The challenge is to help him understand
that he made a mistake – not that he is a mistake. One father, for example,
refused to speak to his son for hours after a disagreement. The father’s
withdrawal said, in effect, “I’ll love you when you’re good – i.e., live up
to my expectation – but I won’t love you if you’re bad and disappoint me.”
The message the child gets is that he must edit himself if he wants to hold
on to his dad’s love. This is damaging, because the child will feel he can
never just be himself.
A more workable approach is to acknowledge and accept the feelings that
underlie a child’s misbehavior. Let’s say your eight-year-old is upset
enough to swear at you because you’ve told him he can’t have a friend
overnight. If you snap “Don’t talk to me that way,” he hears only that he is
“bad” for being upset. If you say “I understand your disappointment, but you
have to express it without swearing,” you affirm your child’s right to his
feelings even though they are unpleasant for you. “However, you need to not
only speak the words, but to see the whole, healthy, wise, loving, peaceful
core of the child,” says Casarjian. “You can say all the right things, but
they won’t work unless your have a genuine respect for his essence.”
5. Develop internal rather than external standards for success. There
are two ways to measure a person. You can compare him to others, or you can
compare his current performance to his previous behavior. The first standard
dooms children to defeat – you can always find someone who writes, plays
piano or throws a baseball better. The second standard allows children – and
parents – to experience the enormous satisfaction of growth. My own
daughter, for instance, has a 250-word vocabulary. Judged against the
external standard of what other four-year-olds can do, she falls far short.
Measured by an internal standard, each word is a triumph.
6. Become more tolerant. When parents are able to appreciate
opinions, ideas and traditions that are different from their own, they give
their children the confidence that they too will be accepted even when they
disagree. Parents who have a very narrow sense of what’s acceptable create
unnecessary anxiety in their kids. “My mother was very intolerant of people
who weren’t like her,” recalls one woman. “She was so judgmental that I
always felt her acceptance of me was provisional – if she really knew who I
was, she wouldn’t love me at all.”
7. Have fun with your kids. Parents sometimes become so caught up in
their roles of teaching and guiding that they rarely enjoy their kids as
they are. As one father puts it, “When I play ball with my kids, I sometimes
try to coach them. They usually don’t want that because they feel they are
being judged. So then we just toss a ball around, or I grab them and roll in
the leaves.” Jason Holder agrees that playing with a child – without a
hidden agenda – can work wonders for his sense of self-acceptance. “If a kid
is discouraged and down on himself, get out, play and have fun,” Holder
says.
8. Affirm your unconditional love every day. This is particularly
important when you aren’t getting along. Both you and your child need to be
reminded that your love transcends specific squabbles. “Even if the last
thing in the day is a battle, give your child a hug anyway,” says Holder.
“He may still be upset, but he’ll go to sleep feeling loved and cared for.”
As these ideas suggest, accepting your child isn’t something you do once and
for all. It’s an unfolding process of discovering and respecting another
person’s uniqueness. The rewards for children are unmistakable. “When they
are treated with respect for who they are, they become more confident, less
fearful about making mistakes, more able to become the best they can be,”
says Borysenko.
The benefits for parents may be less obvious, but they are every bit as
real. My daughter’s deafness has made me rethink a lifelong assumption that
what’s important about life can best be expressed in words. By sharing her
experience of the world, I have learned valuable truths about human
connections that transcend language. I’m sure there are new lessons to come,
but the four years we’ve already spent together have taught me that opening
up to the realty of a child’s feelings, capabilities and ambitions frees us
from the boundaries of our own experience and the limitations of our own
assumptions. Each child’s uniqueness is a gift as well as a challenge.
This article is reprinted with permission from Carolyn Jabs. It first
appeared in Working Mother.
Carolyn Jabs has often written about families. Her monthly column, Growing
Up Online, helps parents guide children when they use the Internet. She has
three children including a daughter who is deaf. More information about her
work is available at
www.carolynjabs.com
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There is an
energy in us which makes things happen when the paths of other persons touch
ours.
from the Monks of Weston Priory
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