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The Reactive Parent
Grace also worries about her childhood’s influence on her parenting of her own
children.
Grace has five-year-old twin girls and woke up seemingly overnight to a
diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at forty-one. When she was growing up, her
younger sister had leukemia, and died when Grace was twelve. Grace was her
bone marrow donor.
Grace says it’s hard to provide even-keeled parenting, given that in her own
childhood world, “The other shoe just kept dropping. You worried every day,
‘What’s coming next? Will my parents be home tonight, or at the hospital? Will
my baby sister be alive tomorrow?’ I think that probably gave me a very
different nervous system than if I’d had a family life in which the four of us
sailed through. All my parents could think about was my sister, and I understood
that. Our parents were great parents, but they couldn’t really be my parents and
give my sister all that she needed and deserved at the same time.
“When I was pregnant, all I could think of was, Will my twins be born
healthy? Will I survive delivery? But my friends who were pregnant around the
same time were not stressing in that way. They were searching online for onesies
with cute logos on them.
“I’m always on the worst-case-scenario channel in my mind,” Grace admits.
“I was with the girls at our local playground. One of my daughters ran up to me
and said, ‘That boy was mean, Mommy, he called me a bad name!’ She was
sobbing. And seeing her that way made
me
so upset, I was shaking
instantaneously. Literally my hands were shaking, my fingers jumping around. I
just could not speak calmly. I was so upset about how devastated and lost my
daughter seemed. Before I could think about it, I took both my girls by the hand
and yelled to this boy’s mother, “You need to do something about your son—
he’s a bully!” I began walking home, pulling them along, and they were both
crying. My mind was just buzzing as I replayed the whole scene. I was so
preoccupied I didn’t bother to soothe
them
. I just dragged them along while I
mentally rehashed what I should have said or done differently.
“I don’t want to parent like this,” Grace says. “I don’t want to be that kind of
mom who is so caught up in her own anxiety she can’t think about what’s best
for her kids in a calm, cogent, reassuring way. How can you soothe your kids
with shaking hands?” Grace wants to teach her kids by example how to deal with
life mindfully, calmly: “I want to be the kind of mom who, even if the house
were on fire, could get my kids out, then sit with my arms around them on the
curb as firemen put out the flames, and say, ‘It’s all going to be okay, everything
is going to be all right.’ But that calm mom is the opposite of who I am.”
For someone else, with a different set of Adverse Childhood Experiences—for
instance, with parents who had ridiculed and diminished her when she was
needy—the reaction might be the opposite of Grace’s. She might shut down her
own feelings and those of her children, underreact, and tell her child to forget
about it: “Don’t be sad, don’t cry, go back in there and play!” Or, she might lace
her comments with criticism, “Don’t be a crybaby!”
Either way, whether parents overreact or underreact, a toddler gets the
message, When I feel bad and tell Mommy, I just make Mommy feel sadder—or
madder;
Mommy can’t help me.
As Grace puts it, “I know I am not the mom I want to be. I’m trying, but I’m
not there yet. I sometimes beat myself up for that. I wonder, what
is
the good
enough mom?’ ”
Parenting is simply the hardest, best job you’ll ever have. As a parent, you want
your kids to know that you will offer them welcome arms, a safe haven, no
matter what occurs. We always want our kids to feel that same sense of love we
gave them when they were small, and came running into our arms. “
There you
are, there you are,”
we tell them. They know they are what matters most to us in
all the world.
But parenting mindfully and taking care of all of your children’s needs amid
life’s challenges is demanding. Sometimes there is simply too much to navigate
or we’re exhausted. Kids can be uncooperative and endlessly energetic. Teens
can be self-centered, flippant, forgetful, defiant, and make poor choices. It’s easy
to be overwhelmed, lose your patience, and mutter or yell things you regret. If
you are parenting teenagers, you almost certainly will lose it now and then.
Not every experience in family life can be “loving and close,” “warm and
friendly,” or “understanding and sympathetic.” Family glitches happen—one
person’s reactivity ignites another’s meltdown. (I have a friend who refers to
family meltdowns this way: “It was not our
best
day as a family.”)
We never know what small comments—words that are less than skillful or
wise but are nonetheless not messages that foster childhood adversity—will be
misunderstood or misinterpreted, stick in our kid’s head, and bounce around in
there for years, causing resentments we don’t even know about.
We parent in the moment, as best we can. When we fall short, we hope that
our shortfalls will be forgotten.
Yet the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey and Childhood Trauma
Questionnaire tell us that only about one-third of kids grow up in families in
which no ACEs occur. That means that nearly two-thirds of parents are
struggling in some way, whether they know it or not. Maybe their stressors stem
from events, illnesses, outside influences, accidents, or losses beyond their
control.
For our purposes, however, we’re going to look at the latest neuroscientific
findings on how your own childhood Chronic Unpredictable Toxic Stress might
affect your ability to parent as well as you’d like. It’s important to step back and
ask yourself, with absolute honesty, how reactive am I in my family life?
Happily, even if the answer is “very,” it’s not too late for us, or for our
children.
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