Adult Children Raising Children

from Adult Children Raising Children pp.20-22 In our parenting, we need to come to grips with the idea that our children are often a barometer of our relationship with ourselves. It is the best indicator we have, yet we often ignore it because we are so actively avoiding taking on any more guilt. But it is hard to ignore that when we are depressed, they are cranky. When we overwork ourselves, they are over demanding. When we are at peace, they are playful. We are their models for emotional power, self-esteem, personal growth and spiritual self-determination. It has been said that we teach others how to treat us by the way we treat ourselves. It is inherent in the human species for the child to learn by copying, mimicking, imitating, mirroring the parent. We have the longest growth period of any species on earth precisely because our long apprenticeship to our parents is essential to teach us the intricate technological skills and social patterns that have been responsible for the success of our species. But this pattern of reflecting the parent does not mean that the parent is meant to control the child’s being or can if she wants to. The parent can look to herself and to the way she relates to the child. She cannot focus on changing the child by direct action without asking for disaster. The spiritual distinction between influencing others positively, on the one hand, and taking responsibility for their lives, on the other hand, is an important one throughout our own recovery process. We each do what we can on any day, and our children have their own path to follow. If we help them, this was meant to be. If not, or if we have made mistakes in the past, this was also meant to be. If we dwell on what might have been, then we will miss our chance today to be what we can be. I find it helpful to think of the parent-child relationship as a third entity independent of either parent or child. There is you, there is your child, and there is your relationship – the connection, the link, all that bundle of words, body language, actions and expressions, that teach one about the other and you both about your connectedness. Neither can force the other to change to suit his or her personal goals. One can surely use physical force on the other to obtain a certain immediate result. But he has no control at all over the consequences, any resulting change in the other, or any effects on the relationship. The only way we can expect good to come from our interaction as parents is if we focus attention not on the child alone and not even on ourselves alone but on the way we interact with each other. With parenting we want so much to do it right, to pass on the benefit of our experience, to spare our children from pain. But it is a paradox of life that we cannot save another from pain. We can only help them learn how to use it. We cannot predict where someone else’s pain will come from but we can set an example of what to do about it. Of course as parents it is our job to protect our children from dangers they can not anticipate at their particular age. But here I am talking about the kinds of fears a parent takes on when they are familiar with the emotional pain of addiction or co-dependency. Our surest way to save our children from this kind of pain is to set an example by trying to truly feel our own pain, to accept it, to value it, to move through it, to forgive any and all who we may have blamed for it, including ourselves, and to move into joy. Pain that is denied is passed on. Wrongs to ourselves that we have not mourned and let go become the “sins” of the parents that are visited on the children, try as we might to prevent it. Our children will not avoid the pain we suffered by our overprotection, by careful orchestration of lessons, by a martyred parent, or by the close-to-perfect parent. They will avoid it by being loved unconditionally by a parent who models self-love, who accepts joy and play from within, who communicates with feelings and about them, who radiates and resonates with a willingness to increase her self-knowledge and self-determination in her life with her child, and who looks to her spiritual self, not her child, to heal her pain.