“You only loved the dream child”
by Mira and Charles on September 15th, 2009Years ago we wrote about this issue, and now it’s back in the news. It was as harrowing a scene as I’ve ever witnessed as a family therapist. A young man, Tom, was confronting his parents. He’s been struggling with depression. He told them about how affected he was by all anxiety they showed toward him, the over-involvement, the ways they pushed him, the way their love seemed to go up and down like a yo-yo depending on how tightly he kept his nose pressed against the grindstone.
And then he said, “But it was never me you cared about. You only cared about some image of the perfect kid becoming the perfect adult. You said you loved me, but you didn’t. You only loved the dream child you hoped I’d be. You hated the real me, because I was so imperfect.”
There was tremendous pain in the room after this remark. Tom’s parents had done their best But they realized that Tom was right. They’d poured all their love down the drain.
All the years he was growing up they’d kept their eyes focused on a clear goal: how they wanted their kid to turn out. If Tom deviated from that vision of their dream child, they let him know fast about their disapproval. The message he got was loud and clear: we love you when you are the way we want you to be, but we don’t love you if you’re not like that. And kids so often aren’t just the way their parents want them to be.
So what do you think? Is this the right way to parent?
No. And new research confirms that parenting based on acceptance of your child as he or she actually is is the best way to go.
Let’s quote from the article about this that appeared in today’s New York Times:
In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.
It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.
In a companion study, Dr. Assor and his colleagues interviewed mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting proved damaging. Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.
This July, the same researchers, now joined by two of Dr. Deci’s colleagues at the University of Rochester, published two replications and extensions of the 2004 study. This time the subjects were ninth graders, and this time giving more approval when children did what parents wanted was carefully distinguished from giving less when they did not.
The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.
What these and other studies tell us, if we’re able to hear the news, is that praising children for doing something right isn’t a meaningful alternative to pulling back or punishing when they do something wrong. Both are examples of conditional parenting, and both are counterproductive.
Now get this: The approach this research supports is just the approach we were the first to advocate in an award-winning book that we published almost 20 years ago. One of the reasons we wrote Parent/Teen Breakthrough was to give parents an alternative to the way Tom was brought up, an alternative that actually works, because it is what the most effective parents actually do. Read this book if you have kids. You’ll be glad you did.
When you make your child feel loved and accepted for who he really is, you give him or her the best possible foundation for a happy and productive life. And nothing is better than that.
