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Parents Face Their Own Issues as Their Children Grow
by Ruth Bittner

Books, magazines, TV shows, the pediatrician, our friends and family. We, as parents, have many resources available to us about child rearing. We know several different approaches to discipline and toilet training. We’ve heard lectures on sibling rivalry, and we’re familiar with the current theories on sleeping, weaning, school readiness and peer relations. From the most mundane--diapering and burping--to the more profound--falling in love and nurturing--we try hard to support the development of our children.

Yet there are far fewer avenues available to help us reflect on the experience of parenthood. This leaves many parents alone in their experience, feeling isolated and second-guessing themselves.

Parenthood turns up the volume on our feelings, causing us to feel different, although we may not be able to identify how or why. For example, when my son was an infant, my husband rescued a wounded baby bird from our backyard. He wrapped it in a towel and brought it to me to examine. I was seized by a sadness I couldn’t explain. I only know that before becoming a parent, I probably wouldn’t have given the bird a second thought. A friend of mine gave up eating lamb chops after the birth of her child. Thinking about the sweet face of a lamb made her lose her appetite for the animal. What accounts for the amplification of our feelings and this change when we enter parenthood?

Parents Relive Own Childhood

Parenthood requires us to relive our own childhood experiences during each stage of our children’s development. We have no choice in this; it occurs naturally and unbeknownst to us. At each new stage of our children’s development, feelings and memories from our past are revisited. These may be pleasurable or painful for us. Think of your infant, asleep in your arms. She is totally dependent upon you for everything she needs to develop and to flourish: nourishment, warmth, stimulation--all of which we experienced with our own parents. We can expect that, as parents of infants, we will be stirred by feelings of depen-dency that echo back to our own childhood. These feelings may be deeply pleasurable for us. We may enjoy being cared for by those around us, and consequently experience deep pleasure caring for our baby. But we may also feel confused or threatened by such feelings. One mother shared with me that when her daughter was born, she actually felt like a little girl herself. This worried her and caused her to think that she was not capable of being a parent. She felt burdened by these feelings for several years until we talked about them and she understood that these were memories of her own early dependency, stimulated by her daughter’s birth. With this understanding, she felt less threatened by these feelings and more secure about herself as a mother.

The Start of School and Separation

When your child begins nursery school or child care, you’ll be reminded of your first experiences separating from your parents. You may feel both sadness and satisfaction, as you and your child master something new. Witnessing our child’s normal ambivalence in taking a new developmental step, we revisit our own feelings and experiences time after time. One mother, who stayed with her tearful daughter during the first weeks of nursery school, remembered her mother who pushed her into the classroom and walked away on the first day of school. She wondered why she had been so upset about her daughter’s reaction. When she realized that this experience was colored by her own childhood memory, she stopped criticizing herself as a mother.

These developmental memories are normal and are experienced by all parents. They enable us to relive our own childhood as we raise our children and they provide us with a second chance to do some things differently with our own children.

Supporting Kids through Stages

Parenthood requires us to support our children’s development from one stage to the next. We’re cheerleaders, providing support and confidence. The demands of each stage, however, change and, consequently, we must change, too.

During infancy and throughout the first year, the basic task is for infants and parents to become attached to one another and for the infant to develop basic trust and confidence in the surrounding world. We enable our baby to do this by falling in love with her and by becoming attuned to all her needs. This lays the groundwork for a child’s ability to establish loving relationships throughout life and it forms the building blocks for the development of a self.

In the second and third years of life, with firm foundation for a self, the toddler now makes forays into the larger world, exploring and pushing against limits. Now our role changes. Parents become a safe base from which our child can venture out and explore. Now we must begin to lengthen the tie and become comfortable in allowing appropriate explorations.

As children move up the developmental ladder, we experience gains and losses. The toddler is no longer the lap baby. The school age child with friends outside the home is no longer dependent on just her family for stimulation and knowledge. With each new achievement, we must adapt to changes in our children and in our relationship with them.

One mother described the sight of her thirteen-month-old sitting at a table with a group of toddlers as bittersweet, "She looks different, older. It’s nice but it happened so fast." Another mother, who does not enjoy infants, is delighted with her toddler’s antics. With each change, we give something up, but we gain something in return. On balance, the pleasure that accompanies the gains outweighs the feelings of loss.

Disequilibrium for Children and Parents

We know that children experience feelings of disequilibrium as they move from one stage to the next. We realize that all development is two steps forward, one step back. Parents, too, experience tensions as we guide our children through this process. We are required to be flexible, to move along with our children and to re-experience our own childhood, all from the vantage point of adulthood. At times, this process will be experienced as profoundly enriching. Other times, it will call up a vulnerable self, responding to the ups and downs of one’s own growing up. Parenthood takes us back and forth on this continuum, from the deepest of pleasures to the deepest feelings of vulnerability. And there is a panoply of feelings in between.

Like a richly patterned tapestry, the threads of past and present are woven together. Always in process, this tapestry forms the emotional fabric of parenthood.