Has being an AP made you realise that your parents f’d you up? How did you come to terms with how you were parented?

[neens]

@furiouscat4323 My inlaws want us to visit ‘more often’ so our baby can ‘be familiar with our house when she stays for a week’. First of all they maybe visited once a month and just for an hour or two. We visited them twice so far. Baby doesn’t even recognize them and cried our most recent visit cause she viewed them as strangers. Second, I would never leave her there for a week ever regardless of her age (6 months now). Grandpa is verbally abuse to grandma therbwhole lives. When my husband was born, she went back to work TWO weeks later. Boy yes they did f’ up. Our pediatrician actually had us fill out a questionnaire if we had been abused or neglected as kids, it does reflect in your parenting. My mom says crying is good for babies, im sure she did CIO with me. I have nonself esteem either growing up constantly being compared to others. Even now she says I am spoiling my baby. It just never ends.

 

[mackman55]

@furiouscat4323 Similar things to you op, not being allowed to express emotions, needing to be the good kid and perform in a certain way to have approval. Love was conditional on my good behaviour. Found out from my mum when my kiddo started going through tantrums at about 18 months, that she can only remember me having one tantrum when I was 4 years old. I was floored. I had just been learning about how important tantrums are for expressing emotions, and how kids are the worst with their parents as they are their safe sapce. I felt so sad for toddler me, who clearly had already realised that the intense expression of emotions through a tantrum was not OK in my home, and I didn't feel like my parents were my safe space. So on reflection, I have never felt like I could rely on anyone else to meet my emotional needs or support me emotionally (or that anyone would want to). The realisations I have made as a result of my parenting are leading me to making some major changes in life atm. Happy to report that my kids have multiple feral, snotty, screaming, crying tantrums on a regular basis and I am right there with them helping them process, and reassuring them that even at their worst outpourings of emotion, they are still lovable and I love them unconditionally.

Edit: I'm coming to terms with it as I recognise my parents did their absolute best, and realise that my dad doesn't have the emotional capacity for anything, so that will never be anything more than a surface level 'nice relationship', provided i never do anything to upset him. It's kinda fun to poke that bear sometimes as he cannot cope with me disagreeing with him on anything. My mum is seeing my parenting choices as a learning opportunity for her, and is grandparenting my kids in an attachment way. It's leading to friction between her and my dad unsurprisingly, but with my oldest now 6 years, he's seeing she's an awesome kid, and there's probably some merit to AP. He's unable to see my choices in parenting as anything other than a statemen that their parenting was shit unfortunately In his mind you do as you were raised yourself and never change anything. Needless to say there's been disfunctional parenting on both sides of my family for generations, and AP is helping me break the cycle of emotional distance and abandonment for my kids.

 

[tannerking1]

@furiouscat4323 Therapy if you have access to/can afford it.

I was emotionally and verbally abused throughout my childhood, neglected especially when it came to me being sexually abused and needing to be protected. So that obviously messed me up quite a bit and I ended up in therapy for years and I’m still on medication to treat my anxiety, depression and PTSD. Having my two daughters was very traumatic because I realised how easy it is to love them, it didn’t take any effort at all. Which made what my parents did so much more painful. With having my own children also came the fear of somehow turning into my own mother, what if I was somehow genetically designed to at some point just not care anymore?

Therapy has helped a lot with my anxiety around parenting and the memories that have resurfaced. For a long time I felt like a little girl desperately wanting to be loved, now I have redirected those feelings into being an empathetic, loving and kind mother.

I wish you well in your journey to heal.

 

[wini]

@furiouscat4323 Therapy, lots and lots of therapy.

Also I read a really helpful book called 'Parenting from the inside out'. It really did help me come to terms eit3h how the way I was parented egfecrs me and colours the way I want to parent vs what I sometimes instinctively do (I don't want to fall into the same patterns as my parents did with me but sonetimes that's what happens). It was slow going reading the book because it kept bringing up really strong feelings that I had to process before zi could keep going.

I sometimes look at my kids and cannot fathom the why or how behind some of the choices my parents made. Mostly I use it as an opportunity to reflect on my parenting choices and to parent deliberately not by default. I might still screw my kids up but it won't be in the same ways my parents screwed me up and I'm doing everything I can to not screw them up even when it's not the easiest option for me.

 

[fcarter]

@furiouscat4323 My mom's passed away, and my dad has described their relationship as "two burnt children who found each other". They both had trauma and they did their best.

My parents did a lot of things right, and actually had an AP light approach to parenting. But teaching me to accept and manage my emotions, especially negative emotions, not one of them (probably because they didn't know how to do that themselves). Negative emotions were shut down and ignored; if we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist, apparently.
I was also bullied horribly in school and they didn't really do anything about it. So I've had to do therapy as an adult to deal with the aftermath.

I'm very much aware of how I'm raising my daughter. She's only 15 months, but I try to validate and speak about her feelings. Such as saying: "I can see you're frustrated that you can't play with the remote, but it isn't a toy. I'm here for you. Let's find something else to play with", when she has a tantrum.

I want her to know that she has value and is always loved, even when she's experiencing big emotions.

 

[roseann344]

@furiouscat4323 I already knew about some of how my parents fucked me up when I was an older kid, but parenting has caused me to think and wonder more about how I was parented as an infant. I don't remember much of my childhood, but I realise I have three sleep-related memories:

a) lying in my bed alone as a young child (maybe 5) worrying about death

b) having to go to sleep on the floor in daycare or some institutional setting with all the other kids and feeling profoundly uncomfortable

c) more than once, lying in bed in my own piss (also maybe about 5) angry at myself for having wet the bed... and just forcing myself to go back to sleep because I didn't want my parents to know and be pissed off at having to get up and change my sheets.

From that I'm going to deduce that sleep wasn't always easy for me and that my nighttime needs weren't welcome. I have carried a sense of aloneness with me throughout my whole life. I don't want my baby to experience that.

I also notice my Dad (who I actually have a great relationship with now) sometimes trying to discourage my responsiveness to my baby, which surely says something about the parenting philosophy that was applied to me, too. I do wonder if that is part of why I have a generally pessimistic/melancholy disposition and depressive, anxious and perfectionistic tendencies. On the whole I'm pretty happy and well these days, but I have to work inordinately hard at it. Again, I would like tor a sense of positivity, optimism and security to come a little easier for my daughter, which is why I parent the way I do.

 

[thegoalie]

@furiouscat4323 I feel exactly the same way. I was never abused, I was raised in an ordinary way by loving parents who did their best. But they also smacked me a lot, there was a lot of shouting, guilt trips, basically feeling like I was an inconvenience. I can’t imagine treating my child that way.. in part I think that’s why I naturally leaned to AP.

I love parenting this way, but like you, I don’t love what it brings up for me.

 

[amerigo]

@thegoalie

But they also smacked me a lot, there was a lot of shouting, guilt trips, basically feeling like I was an inconvenience.

I think you may have been abused.

 

[4kidsmom]

@furiouscat4323 It's so normal to be triggered when you become a parent because you're reliving those moments! My husband and I are going through kind of a lot right now because of our upbringings.

We're in therapy now too, and a lot of our work is just identifying what's triggering us, why, how we can shut down negative thoughts, and how we can be better parents.

It's hard work. I haven't got much advice, but just a congratulations for doing the work and trying to be better!

 

[shkana]

@furiouscat4323 I have a question - have you ever been able to talk to your parents about these things?

 

[katrina2017]

@furiouscat4323 My mom was a stay at home mom and my parents did a lot of things right but for me some big things that still affect our relationship today involve dismissing my feelings because of religious beliefs and my parents just not having the emotional energy for all three of us. I've always wished and continue to that my parents were more emotionally available. I remember at about 20 trying to talk to them about developing a friendship as adults and being blown off. It really seems like in my younger years my mom did everything right it was around puberty that they didn't know how to deal with me. I plan on only having my daughter so I wont have to split my time and I plan to bring her up outside of strict religion (Catholic) which I found to be demeaning and dismissive of my own feelings personally.

 

[furiouscat4323]

@katrina2017 Yes! I’ve been realising this too. I feel like both my parents really checked out around the time I was 15. Maybe they were trying to give me my freedom and let me make my own mistakes. But I could have really done with some guidance, I was expected to make such big choices that I knew nothing about.

 

[mythicangel516]

@furiouscat4323 my mother recently told me I was formula fed because she wanted to drink :| I didn't grow up with her but still. I have a lot of issues with food texture (partly from my stepmom's cooking skills) and also got left with grandma while my dad and his wife took her children and their friend on vacation every year. they tell me now how hard they fought for custody to get me away from my mother, but always treated me like they didn't actually want me. I'm struggling with feelings of guilt over my baby but I hope she never ever is made by us to feel like she wasn't wanted or doesn't count as an individual just because she's smaller.

 

[dianah123]

@furiouscat4323 I hear you. I was separated from my mom too when I was 6 months old but because she was hospitalized after having a stroke (at 33!). Then she acquired meningitis at the hospital and had to stay even longer.

My parents left me with my aunt who told me more recently that she would just leave me in the back room to CIO and that “babies will fall asleep eventually”. Stuff like that breaks my heart.

 

[amerigo]

@furiouscat4323 My shrink said that there are studies that show there's a built in failsafe in parenting. According to her, if you show up at least 30% of the time, your child will remember you as having been there. So how little were my parents there if I can't remember them ever having been there? And why would you become a parent to more than one child if you can't even hit 30%?

The more I live with my kids, the more diverse the experience with them, the more I realize how utterly screwed up my childhood was. Everything ends up a trigger, at least the first time. Like going to fireworks and my daughter was on my husband's shoulders. My dad used to carry me that way and I'd get yelled at (like yelled at) for holding on because it meant I didn't trust him. And then my husband put her down and she was toddling along one of those small cement curb things and kept falling off- I got yelled at for that too. I'd be told, "You can't do it! You don't have the balance! If you can't do it properly, don't do it!" when I was like four years old. But isn't that the point of doing it? To learn? To get motor skills and balance?

What gets me too is the division. It's classic narcissistic parent behavior, but as a mom of two kids now, I can't imagine pitting them against each other. I LOVE that they're friends. I love that they hang out and love each other so much. I would never dream of coming between them. I also don't know how some parents tolerate one child bullying the shit out of the other. Or even having favorites.

Overcoming your training isn't as easy as it seems when your babies are babies. It comes out sometimes. But you can apologize and work on being better.