Anthea Rowan blogs at Reluctant Memsahib and is working on a writing project to explore the themes of raising children and parenting. She asks, how did our parents get it right, and wrong?
My eldest daughter says, ‘you have a tendency to use guilt as a parenting strategy, sure, it’s effective at times, but it can leave scars’. I feel dreadful. But I did ask. I wanted to know, of my kids, what do I do right? Where do I go wrong?
My youngest daughter tells me I’m overprotective. My (student) son tells me nothing, other than his new flat is next door to M16, ‘so I’ll be safe’, as if to collaborate with his little sister. I don’t mind knowing I fret. I’m still smarting at guilt tripping. But I have also, my daughters sweetly insist, taught them to be kind. And, confides the eldest, I have demonstrated ‘overwhelming love (did I smother? the thought makes me flinch) and the sure knowledge that that love would never, ever go away – not just because you had to love me, but because you told me all the time why other people should love me – that made me feel like I was objectively worthy as opposed to just worthy to you’.
There are many nights I’ve lain awake and wondered whether I ought to have parented differently. Parented. Parenting. When did the noun, parent, morph as a verb? Punch the word into Amazon and it spews out 118,685 titles. Many, many more than ‘Rocket Science’ (3 700). Are we over complicating it all? What lessons really stick? Which words lay positive foundations without your ever considering their import? And which maternal rants – thoughtless outbursts because you are too tired to think carefully about what you say – bruise?
How were we raised (for in the seventies, I’m pretty certain it was about bringing kids up, not parenting?), what marks have our own experiences left? Unconscious, indelible. Mine means my fruit bowl at home is always full, we sit as a family around a table for meals, we play Sevens and Gin Rummy on holiday. Mine also mean that I urge my daughters towards the university education and career my own mother never felt was necessary.
I’m researching a writing project, not parenting, and certainly not rocket science, a project that investigates where our own mothers got it right, or wrong. And what – more importantly, more prudently given this contemporary age – our children think of the way we did things. Ask them, if you dare, “where did I go right? Where did I go wrong?” Then email me your answers to be included in this writing project. Your voices, thoughts and anecdotes are important and anonymity guaranteed. Email me at mumproject2016@gmail.com
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Rebecca Beesley
Monday 2nd of May 2016
Can't wait to read more about the findings of this project. I'd be interested to see about cases where parents struggled with things like depression / anxiety and how this affected the children. I have a feeling that the way i have been shaped has stemmed partly from my mum's struggles and i think there is a theory that underpins this - where a child will not see their parent as being wrong so they think that the problem lies with themselves and so they never cease trying to improve, do things to make the situation better, and it can lead to a feeling of never being good enough whereas actually the root cause is that the parent was unwell.