Author: Gail Vincent

Post #13 E Good Enough  

Depicting Good Enough

In our pre-adoption assessment interviews, I asked the social worker contracted to assess our preparedness for adoption if I should stop taking birth control pills. That she jumped on the question with a fair degree of horror in her voice has stayed with me. “Absolutely not!” or words to that effect, for this child is going to need your undivided attention.  Whether because our 55 minutes were up or because my mind was slow to register her response, I did not ask why.

Yet Good Enough Parenting’s baseline seems to be that parenting occupies only a third of the influence on a child’s life, once the constant needs of infancy are passed. But before I get into Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’ I need to back track to D. W. Winnicott who gave parents permission to slow down to ‘Good Enough’, saying that meeting a child’s needs about 30% of the time is good enough and promises the child the opportunity to grow in self-discovery and self-reliance.  Scroll down to Distilling Good Enough to check out Pip Johnson’s Good Enough Parenting.  She says, Edward Tronick: “found that imperfect attunement is consistent with healthy attachment” for parents.  Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., in Brainstorm: the power and purpose of the teenage brain (TarcherPerigee, 2013,52,53) defines ‘attunement’ as being interested in what is going on in the mind of another, an “essential aspect of empathy”.

Pip Johnson details Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’. Contrary to images they may have of themselves, in healthy child-parent relationships, parents are “perfectly in tune with the child around a third of the time. Another third of the time, parents struggle to work out what is wrong with their child and so are unable to meet their needs. This might be when kids are angry or crying and we don’t seem to understand why, and so they must soothe themselves and recover on their own. The final third of the time, which Tronick judged to be the most important for creating healthy attachment, is when parents are not initially in tune with their children’s needs but work to become attuned. This experience provides a safe experience of distress and resolution, which promotes general resilience” demonstrating that “imperfect parenting is better for kids….”

Recently I came across two words in Azar Nafisi’s memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books (Random House, 2003, 86) — “essential paradoxes”.  Paradoxes, combining seemingly contradictory features to reveal truth and coupled with the qualifier ‘essential’, are popping up like wild daisies everywhere in my meadow. Popping up like that, these little daisies make what feels to me like tectonic shifts. I know very little about tectonic shifts but if what I do know is correct, my brain, post- tectonic eruption, is settling into whole new paradigms, geologically referred to as ‘denudation’. Denudation sounds apt on the face of it.

In the realm of parenting, one of those ‘essential paradoxes’ we live with comfortably or otherwise, might be the need to de-nudify (if it is a word) or shift perspectives on Authoritarian, Neglectful, Permissive and Authoritative Parenting Styles.  On paper, the directions for parenting are printed in black and white but get a bit more smudgy in the real world, the messiness of life. Maybe just a little of each parenting style shaken together into Good Enough is good enough parenting. Perhaps we start as amazing Authoritative parents with dabbles in Neglectful and Permissive but when our child gets that teen blast of neuronal development and hormones, at times we lose control and explode into Authoritarian mode in attempts to retain control. Top all this with moments when one parent flips to the page on Permissive parenting and the other parent says, “Nope, it has to be the page on Authoritative parenting”. And then there is that crow flying over their heads as they argue, cawing, “Imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome.” (I guess the couple are sitting outside in their hot tub playing tug of war with these pages) And arguing or not, the couple hear that irritating crow forcing unwanted thoughts about the everyday insecurities of doing parenting right, measuring themselves against the Jones next door with their picture-perfect family. (I failed Child Care 12 because while I did fine on the tests, I couldn’t knit around the corner of the baby bonnet and never thought to get my mother to do it for me like others did). Somewhere I read that if we sculk about as imposters, we cannot love ourselves, and if we cannot love ourselves, we cannot adequately love another. Groan, what does that mean and how do we measure if we love ourselves?

Adopters, seeing themselves as imposter parents, may also be harbouring a wiggly little worm drilling holes in the certainty of their right to be legitimate parents of their ‘forever’ child, however they shield themselves with what at times sounds like a desperate affirmation. In the dream I had decades earlier, I am running with this little boy I believed to be mine from pursuers determined to take him from me because, I guess in their minds, I was not the legitimate mother of this little blondie.   In adoption story after story, it is those feelings which may sometimes be closely examined or tentatively hinted at, or at other times, outright denied. You will find books by people whose adoption experience ignited in them questions that led to academic research, you will find memoirs in which people circle their experiences as they learn to cope with what Dr. Claire Weekes, in Hope and Help For Your Nerves (1969), termed ‘fear of the fear’, and you will find stories of people who wanted everyone to believe, sometimes quite aggressively, the child they adopted was fully, and only ever, their child.

Some of this insecurity is stirred up when here and there we come across stories: we read that Joanie Mitchell found the daughter she gave up at birth in favour of her career.  There was no ‘breaking news’ cast for the baby girl’s adoption, only a shroud of secrecy.  But now the world had righted itself again and we were happy to hear Joan Mitchell has found her long lost daughter. In memoir after memoir, reality show after reality show, the big news is the reunion of birth parents with an adoptee.  The adopters, while given a quick, little and hopefully reassuring hug, with the promise “You will always be ___’s ‘real’ mom and dad”, are then written out of the script.

I have been mulling this feeling of insecurity as an adopter for a long time.  My thoughts, standing before me like some security gorilla at a bar, arms crossed over a ridiculously bloated chest, have demanded I read beyond the adoption fluff books to find a checklist against which I can determine if good enough is not just the most realistic, but actually the best parenting style for our child. If we are his parents, are we good enough if he became ours through adoption and we parented him in a manner that was in tune sometimes, absolutely not in tune at others, but always striving to become in tune.

Because Yasik came to us just weeks before kindergarten and after school play with friends took up a good portion of each day, influencing only 30 % of his life was a given. Against that 30% opportunity, were Dave and I sometimes “perfectly in tune” with Yasik? I can only judge our attunement by the cuddles, laughter, turning to us in stress, sharing fun times that were woven into my memory and journal notes of our life with Yasik through to his teen years. Playing soccer or hide and seek with the dog, building rafts, camping and beach memories. Dragging us through low bush to show us a treasure he’d found, an old car battery. Yelling and laughing together with Dave while battling it out on the computer. Working with me to help beached salmon get on with their trip upstream. Confiding with us about a girl and wanting us to rate her as highly as he did.   In an earlier post I shared the night I dressed Yasik for bed. I didn’t have a clean set of PJs ready for him so I put him in trunks.  He started to sob into my chest. He didn’t have the language to tell me what was troubling him. Moments later Dave came in and without language was yet immediately aware that Yasik wanted a T-shirt top too.

Yasik was working on the spelling of the week and Dave, the parent preparing his young son for the future and trying to make sense of spelling drills, told him this was just the beginning.  Yasik needed to learn these words so he would be able to read and write them and go on to more and more spelling. It never stops etc.  Yasik laid his head down and wailed.

In the last-minute rush to get him off to school one morning, I wanted to check that he was ready for spelling. Lost flashed a neon warning light across his face. I stopped, called him to me, held him, fighting tears and said we will go over them together. He lay against me, not holding back at all and then spelled them all well. This from a kid who was still struggling with language.  Another night Yasik and I were saying good night to ‘Dear God’. I said, “Thanks for helping Yasik with his spelling”, and he pipes in, “I got them all right God”.

Another time, Yasik brought home a note from the teacher. It said, “Yasik has been very uncooperative today”.  Dave told Yasik he would only punish him for not telling Dave what had happened, not for what Yasik had done.  Yasik asked, “Even if it was nasty?”

He went on to tell Dave that “the teacher was making me read something over and over and I just didn’t want to read it over and over. I didn’t say anything bad. I just didn’t read.”

The journal doesn’t offer Dave or my response to that day maybe because it was still so fresh in our memories how much we felt for Yasik in that situation. The journal does however note how often we felt we didn’t know what we were doing nor were we there for Yasik. We were “parents[who] struggle to work out what is wrong with their child and so are unable to meet their need”.

What strikes me about Edward Tronick’s second ‘third’ is that there is a sort of dusting off of the hands, with a ‘well that’s that. It is what it is’, no reparations possible here, justifiably or otherwise.  We could be there to read to Yasik at night and practice reading with Yasik as homework helpers, but I was at work, not home-schooling, and Dave was at school or work. And that is actually the way life works. Child at school under the supervision of others for 3 to 7 hours each week day, parents elsewhere. As I have already written in Post #13 B, Neglectful Parenting, the female judge in Scott Turow’s novel, The Laws of Our Fathers, {1996,66) is being pressured by her daughter to be allowed to stay home from school, but she is a busy judge starting a high-profile case so she cajoles, threatens, manipulates and promises future impossible temptation. “Someday, I always promise, it will be as she asks…. But not, of course, today. Today there is duty…. I must go off to my other world…”.

Even if we had home-schooled, our child would have been in dreamland for at least 1/3 of the 24 hours each day offers.  If he had a bad dream we might have taken him into our bed or comforted him but if he flailed about and we were needing what sleep we could scrape out of that night to meet the demands of the day to come, we may have said, “Enough now, off to your own bed”. The unexpected may have come up and we didn’t pick him up on time from school; he had to deal with a few scary moments of ‘Where are they?’. If he was too short for the school toilets, we weren’t there to help him figure out how best to pee.  Other times we simply made the wrong parenting choice and it was irreversible. I was country at heart, not urban, and had this fantasy that Yasik too would have a much richer life in a rural setting. Just as he finished elementary school and was about to enter middle school, we sold the first home our child had become attached to, a child who had spent his first year with unstable parents, then a year and a half in a hospital and 2 years in an orphanage before moving into a new country, new family, new friends and new routine, with the new family at his side about a third of the time.  A Google quickie says that the disruption of moving is one of the 5 major stress events in a child’s life.  The only argument Yasik could come up with to show us he was worried about moving was to remind us that this home he definitely didn’t want to leave had the attraction of being right next to a major throughfare where “We get to see accidents here.”

We moved to a new neighbourhood, one where most of the kids on the block had long established relationships.  Our adult to-do list didn’t include helping him negotiate a new social structure. Yasik’s covering with yelling and door slamming was too easily translated as another message. I write at one juncture:  Trying to stay on top of things but it feels like we never quite do. 

There was one nice plus in the move to the country, a very big hot tub. Though I have noted often enough, not only because that damn crow was relentless, but because it was actually a fact, Dave and I were aware from time to time that we were not yet ready to write a self-help on parenting. And so we conferenced at the end of the day in that relaxing tub – arguing heartily for varying positions.  Yasik’s early forays into the world of girl-boy were, as I have said before, well out of my personal experience and maybe not well-exampled by Dave’s experiences. Or were they? His mother would show up at a party and drag him out.

We were savvy enough to understand that some of what we were dealing with was transitioning to the teenage brain. Though Yasik had new curiosities igniting his neurons, those neurons may not yet have found the best synapse to shoot neurotransmitters over or were still in need of a few years of pruning. What do teens do with sensations of independence they don’t really understand but test out and sometimes get frustrated when the results aren’t great.  Yasik would pull out these cool words to spit at us when he was angry at some thwarting. A moment later we would see the tiniest bit of uncertainty as he watched for the results, even some surprise and definite discomfort. Oh, that didn’t go well.  Disgust sometimes when it didn’t have the desired effect – a kid working on the sensations of growing up. Our role when we could or were up to it was to handle this experimenting with care. That old hot tub witnessed more than one session with parents who dearly loved their son, who “not initially in tune” with Yasik’s needs, worked “to become attuned”.

Defining Good Enough

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Good Enough Parenting – an adaptation of Google’s AI generated Definition

Good enough parenting is a theory that acknowledges that parents are not perfect nor can they do everything.  It’s okay for themselves and their children to make mistakes for that is how we all learn and develop strength.

Here are some characteristics of good enough parenting:

• Responding to your children’s needs, especially in their infancy.

• Working to accept and celebrate your children, not for who you hope them to be but for who the individual each child is, here and now.
• Setting boundaries, looking for the best possible reasons for your children’s misbehavior. Providing routine care, being loving, present, and available, but not trying to give your children more than that.
• Acknowledging problems and working to solve them not assigning blame, trusting your children to figure their problem out.

The concept of good enough parenting was developed by UK psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott in the 1950s. Winnicott suggested that as little as 30% of the time spent meeting a child’s needs is enough to raise a happy and well-attached child.

Research has shown that over-parenting can negatively impact a child’s emotional growth and executive functioning. It can also lead to anxiety, depression, and feelings of helplessness.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/going-beyond-intelligence/202011/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-good-enough-parent

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-narrative-nurse-practitioner/202407/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-good-enough-parent

https://www.mffy.com/blog/is-good-enough-parenting-relevant-in-2022

“To Be Good Enough”    Savithiri Ratnapalan https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2654842/#__sec2title

“The Good Enough Parent Is the Best Parent,”   Peter Gray https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/freedom-to-learn/201512/the-good-enough-parent-is-the-best-parent

“What Is a Good Enough Mother?”   Marilyn Wedge https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/suffer-the-children/201605/what-is-good-enough-mother

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_enough_parent

A key function of good enough parenting is to provide the essential background to allow for the growing child’s disillusionment with the parents and the world, …

Complex PTSD: from surviving to thriving: a guide and map for recovering from childhood trauma      Pete Walker    CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013, 41

When I apply the concept of “good enough” to people, I generally mean that a person is essentially good hearted, tries to be fair, and meets his or her commitments a large portion of the time.

I also like to apply “good enough” to other concepts such as a good enough job, a good enough try, a good enough outing, a good enough day or a good enough life. I apply this concept liberally to contradict the black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking of the critic which reflexively judges people and things as defective unless they are perfect.

‘Anthem’ The Future    Leonard Cohen  1992 album

‘Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.’

Distilling Good Enough

The Not Good Enough Mother    Sharon lamb    Beacon Press, 2019, 44,45,46,55,56,66, 146, 183

This is the book that introduced me to the idea of Good Enough and it remains for me the one which stirs my mind the most.

Summary

Sharon Lamb is a psychologist and expert witness evaluating parents. She also, she makes clear early in the book as she attends an Al-Anon meeting that she attends Al-Anon meetings, not “as a therapist but as a supplicant”.  She has a son she is uncomfortable talking about around people whose children are living successful lives. She has a need to be with people who are living with troubled loved ones.

She offers definitions of good enough parenting throughout the book: “… No mother has the right food for the child all the time – God, the lunchbox items my kids tossed away. No mother always praises her child—I recall a time Willy showed me a drawing and I stared at it blankly, my mind elsewhere, until he said, “Don’t you like it?” No mother listens to her child whenever he speaks –…”

…Sometimes I think that I will die before I see that my son is okay, really okay, that my own life and my family’s lives have been ruined by drugs and by what I didn’t or couldn’t do.  When I think like that, I run, hide, space out, or watch Law and Order. But I have a counter-thought that is as soothing as the end of many episodes of Law and Order. This thought is that we are all, right now, in this moment, okay.  And I add to this comforting thought, every person, every family has some trauma to live through at some point or other in their history, whether it’s a death, a mental illness, an accident…

Lamb gets into D.W. Winnicott’s message, adding another piece about needing only to be good enough with, “The good enough mother mirrors the baby when he needs mirroring and allows him to go on being when he doesn’t.  …Then later, when she allows him his separateness, allows him to “go on being” and doesn’t intrude into that space, she gives him the opportunity to develop creative thought and to understand that even when she isn’t reflecting him, he exists. He is all right.

Mirroring produces mind-mindedness, the ability to understand what is going on in another person’s mind. …. [G]ood enough parenting depended on parents being able to understand what was in the minds of their children. 

…It is deeply unfair that mothers carry the largest load in what is surely a shared responsibility for children. Motherblame and mother guilt are social mechanisms that relieve everyone else – state, health insurance companies, schools, dads, therapists – from their responsibility. It is just such a complicated issue, the cause and effect of child development, and motherblame is an easy answer.

WINNICOTT AND PARENTING       Ingrid Masterson  HOME / INSIDE OUT / ISSUE 24: SPRING 1996 /
https://library.parenthelp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/iahip.org_.pdf

Summary

A review of D.W. Winnnicott’s message in The Child, the Family and the Outside World taken from work with war evacuees which led him to see from the “emotional life of babies and children” that “[t]here is no such thing as a baby …”, for a very needy baby cannot be a baby outside a relationship with a caregiver, usually a mother — rather a stark observation.

As the baby continues to develop, “[r]easonable success, in the gradual introduction of the baby to a world of external reality which can meet his needs in a ‘good enough’ manner, helps him move from ‘need’ to ‘desire’”.

… Parents who can hold reality for their child, especially the reality of their own good feelings alongside their human limitations, as well as his good and bad potential, until he can take over this function, are helping him to come to terms with a world that can be sometimes gratifying, sometimes frustrating, but essentially good enough to realise some of his desires.

…The main demand of parents is that they be around long enough and be secure enough in themselves to survive emotionally ‘intact’, for the child to reach each stage at his own pace without forcing beyond his own developmental capacity.

Bad Therapy: why the kids aren’t growing up    Abigail Shrier   Sentinel, 2024

It is probably best to say of this book: Just read the book.  It is a counter-balance in very many ways.

In particular the chapter “The Road Paved by Gentle Parents” deals with parenting styles.

Why parents should stop blaming themselves for how their kids turn     Yuko Munakata PhD Jan 12, 2021  https://ideas.ted.com/why-parents-should-stop-blaming-themselves-for-how-their-kids-turn-out/   This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, a TEDxCU Talk.

This is such a good article I am tempted to leave it on the page as is but I know it belongs to Yuko Munakata so I encourage the reader to go straight to the article.

Summary

Yuko Munakata tells us that while parents want the best for their children, they do not control how their children will live out their lives. Near the end of the article, he offers Andrew Solomon’s observation on parents: “even though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.” Munakata encourages us to let go of trying to control our children’s lives for endless studies show children are shaped by genes, yes, but also by environment, peers and culture. To further the point, he talks of studies that show how varied children and the lives they live are even if they are raised in the same household.

Munakata’s advice in light of these studies: “Stop blaming yourself as if you’re in control of your child’s path. You have influence — but you don’t have control”.  And stop blaming your parents for the same reason. Stop judging other parents.  As a parent of a child who was going to have a limited life said, “Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today. Now. In fact, for any parent anywhere, that’s all there is.”

The 4 Common Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Kids   Updated Jan. 30,2025

https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/

One of the hugely overlooked truths of parenting is that parenting involves both parents and their equal contributions make up for a suitable condition that ensures an overall general development of the child. It’s a myth that the mother has a bigger role to play in raising a child. Absence of a father can have drastic effects on the emotional, social and economic well-being of the child. Therefore, both of their involvement is crucial.

Scaling Up Parenting Interventions is Critical for Attaining the Sustainable Development Goals

Matthew R. Sanders · Gauri Divan · Meghna Singhal · Karen M. T. Turner · Richard Velleman · Daniel Michelson · Vikram Patel   April 2021 / online: 4 May 2021 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10578-021-01171-0 Child Psychiatry & Human Development (2022) 53:941–952 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-021-01171-0

Summary

These authors are offering “culturally and socioeconomically diverse” research backed suggestions for how parenting support programs can improve “a wide range of developmental, emotional, behavioral and health outcomes for parents and their children”.

These are: (i) creating a safe, nurturing and engaging home environment, (ii) creating a responsive, positive learning environment, (iii) providing assertive and consistent boundaries and discipline, (iv) having reasonable expectations of children and oneself as a parent, and (v) having the capacity for self-care in the parenting role.

Acting on these suggestions – the features of Good Enough Parenting – promises to lead to “positive family relationships skills, healthy relationships with peers and significant others, good language and communication skills, intellectual skills, emotional and behavioural self-regulation, independence and self-care skills, compassion, healthy habits, environmental responsibility, cultural connection” (some paraphrasing here).

Retired elementary school teacher shares biggest parenting mistake she saw during long career   Emily Shiffer 01.24.25   https://www.upworthy.com/retired-elementary-school-teacher-shares-biggest-parenting-mistake-she-saw-during-long-career

Summary

Elementary teachers qualify to offer their opinions on parenting because they spend lots of time with kids and their parents. So TikToker @elenanico22 “interviewed her mom Lisa, a retired elementary school teacher, in an advice video. She asked her mom to share her insights on the question: “What’s one thing you saw people messing up with their kids?”’

The mother and elementary teacher’s “response was simple: “They didn’t enjoy them.” ….  They wanted them to be something that – most of us aren’t exactly what other people want us to be — so enjoy the kid you have.” Others who work with children agreed: “This is so true. I work in childcare and lots of parents literally cannot stand their kids…”

Why good-enough parenting needs to be a movement   Crysta Balis June 2021. Updated Mar 17, 2023  https://www.todaysparent.com/family/parenting/good-enough-parenting/.

Summary

Crysta Balis writes of her relief in finding British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s research as the pressure to become a perfect parent became untenable.  Starting from the recognition “that adapting and readapting to a child’s ever-evolving needs for attention versus independence is no easy feat”, Winnicott affirmed that “perfect isn’t possible, nor is it the goal”. When the ‘good enough’ mother (hopefully he meant the father as well) in their love for their children ‘fail’ “to adapt to every need of the child [the parents help] them adapt to external realities. [Their] imperfections better prepare [the children] for an imperfect world.”

Balis also presents Edward Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’: “parents are actually fully attuned to, or “in sync” with, their infants’ emotional needs only about 20 to 30 percent of the time. Another third of the time, parents are out of sync and drop the ball entirely, like when they just can’t figure out why their child is crying or angry, or when that child manages to console themselves despite the parent’s failed attempts or exasperation”, and “the final one, when, through trial and error, we manage to troubleshoot our way back to being in sync with our kids”.  Added to these studies, a 2018 Harvard study “shows that kids with working moms might actually benefit more in the long run, despite spending less time with their moms overall”.

Good Enough Parenting      Pip Johnson, Clinical Psychology Registrar August 6, 2021 https://forestpsychology.com.au/good-enough-parenting/

As well as summarizing D Winnicott’s contribution to parenting styles, Pip Johnson offers a look at Edward Tronick, “famous for the ‘stillface’ experiments” who “found that imperfect attunement is consistent with healthy attachment” for parents.  Contrary to images they may have of themselves, in healthy child-parent relationships, parents are “perfectly in tune with the child around a third of the time. Another third of the time, parents struggle to work out what is wrong with their child and so are unable to meet their needs. This might be when kids are angry or crying and we don’t seem to understand why, and so they must soothe themselves and recover on their own. The final third of the time, which Tronick judged to be the most important for creating healthy attachment, is when parents are not initially in tune with their children’s needs but work to become attuned. This experience provides a safe experience of distress and resolution, which promotes general resilience”.

All this to say once again that “imperfect parenting is better for kids…. The point of Winnicott and Tronick’s work isn’t that we should not try so hard (though for some that may be true). The point is that we should look after ourselves and be kind to ourselves when we fail”.

ADVANCED PARENTING: advice for helping kids through diagnoses, differences, and mental health challenges    Kelly Fradin, MD    Balance, 2023, 20, 104

While Kelly Fradin wants you to know that you are “ultimately responsible when something goes wrong”, she points us to the Pareto principle, eighty–twenty rule, that the 20 % we do accounts for 80% of the outcome. So later in the book she assures us that “You can be a good parent even if you do not take every opportunity to do more”.

The Good Enough Mother Aiming to be the “perfect” can cause problems for both you and your child   Alexandra Sacks May 2018 https://medium.com/@alexandrasacks/the-good-enough-mother-ab19fd7dad06.

Summary

Not to pick on this article for it is simply the next one in my summarizing line-up. But once again it becomes evident to me that so far the majority of the articles are mother-focused.  Some might respond with “Duh, the phrase ‘Good Enough’ most often is accompanied by the designation, ‘mother’. Still … kids have fathers too.

The article begins with reference to D.W. Winnicott’s taking the pressure off mothers, noting that the phrase ‘good enough mother’ has been around since 1953 but my guess is that might be a surprise to a fair few mothers. Alexandra Sacks addresses the possible mother guilt of only being ‘good enough’ for what might seem to some mothers/parents like excuse-making.

She counters this false, often self-generated guilt by stating the obvious but too often so obvious as to be no longer noticed: we are humans. The word should go straight to that place in our brains that reminds us that being human is so all encompassing that perfection hasn’t a chance to get off the ground.

Certainly, your children aren’t usually judging your parenting and even if and when they do, Sacks reminds parents that “Self care is not selfish — it’s simply a requirement for psychological (and physical) survival”, essential to being a good enough parent, let alone a perfect one. Meanwhile the children the parent believes are being failed by failing parents, have a front row to seat to watch how to cope in difficulties and then have a great opportunity to go off and practice how to take care of their own needs when parents aren’t there for them.

The Abandoners: on mothers and monsters   Begoña Gómez Urzaiz     W.W. Norton & Company,2022, 62-76, 126-134

This entire book asks readers to relook at our perspectives on parenting and mothering. Well worth the demand to examine our deeply embedded ideas.

The chapter “An Ogre, a Princess, an Ass: mothers who leave in Meryl Streep’s Career” discusses views of mothers portrayed by Streep’s characters, particularly mothers who leave or in some way fail their children in the view of society at differing times, for they are always expected to offer personal renunciation as they are “always something different” from fathers.

In a chapter called “Momfluencers and the Economy of Turbomotherhood” Gómez Urzaiz talks of one mother and father caught up in the possibilities of online influencing and looking for an additional edge perhaps or perhaps out of sincere desire decide to showcase their ‘journey’ of adopting from a transnational/transracial option.  In the end they become a showcase of ‘rehoming’ an adoptee they are unable to care for.

Cry When the Baby Cries by Becky Barnicoat review – the black and white truth about motherhood   Rachel Cooke  Mon 10 Mar 2025 09.00 GMT  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/10/cry-when-the-baby-cries-by-becky-barnicoat-review-the-black-and-white-truth-about-motherhood

Barnicoat’s memoir of early parenthood is funny, unflinching and a welcome corrective to the ceaseless pressures new mums face from social media

What Does It Mean to Be a Good Enough Parent?   Reviewed by Abigail Fagan July 16, 2024  https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-narrative-nurse-practitioner/202407/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-good-enough-parent

Summary

I am quoting a fair bit here for the specific detail is helpful. Abigail Fagan, being mother of two children came to realize that “… after my second-born, I realized my girls were simply different. Their behavior had little to do with me, but instead with who they were”.

… Researchers Beatrice Beebe (a long-time mother-infant expert) and Susan Woodhouse (a parenting and infant researcher) independently found responding to infants about half the time seems to be ideal. This is the “Optimum Midrange,” according to Beebe. She found babies in relationships with caregivers in this midrange of responsiveness actually became more resilient than babies of caregivers who didn’t respond—or responded too much. Babies use time without a caregiver’s involvement to learn self-regulation, which offers an essential skill for resiliency.

To Woodhouse, a good caregiver provides a secure base… A mother needn’t respond all the time, but when the baby is in most distress. This way, a child learns they can engage and count on a parent when truly needed, which promotes secure attachment.

The 4 Common Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Kids   Shreyasi Debnath Updated: February 20, 2025  https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/

Now, the question is which one parenting style do I follow for my child? … What parenting styles one will follow highly depends on the cultural and economic background, your status as a parent – if you’re a single parent, working parent, has health issues etc. … None of the parenting styles is fruitful when used independently. … Align their needs with your capabilities. Be attuned with your child’s development.

Why parents shouldn’t always be ‘in sync’ with their children   Pascal Vrticka    27 May 2024 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-why-neural-synchrony-between-parents-and-children-isnt-always-ideal

Summary

Research has shown that secure attachment between parents and their children involves “the coordination of parents’ and children’s brains and behaviour during social interactions”. Considering that in reality parents and children are not, nor can feasibly be, in constant ‘sync’, perhaps it is best not to make that a priority for it can add unneeded stress on the parent-child relationship and impede the child’s need to develop self-reliance.  “What really counts is that the parent-child relationship functions well overall”.

Development and Validation of Parenting Style Scale      S. Batool, Afia N. Mumtaz 2015   https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Development-and-Validation-of-Parenting-Style-Scale-Batool Mumtaz/f95465dd5e09beafbf3c04cc4b4df09a26d14be4

This article provides data on a study of the efficacy of the major parenting styles, considering the following areas contributing to an understanding of parenting styles.

‎ Others would like to make sure the list notes: parents’ and child’s experience of parenting, the level of attachment between them, the beliefs, values, knowledge, cultural influence, biological/genetic influences, knowledge, the characteristics of the parents and the child: temperaments, disabilities, exposure to trauma-ACE, self-regulation, and mental health. And likely this is still an incomplete list.

Baby We Were Meant for Each Other: in praise of adoption    Scott Simon    Random House, 2010, 53, 54, 57, 167

Children without homes don’t need just people who are willing to love them. They need parents. Parents aren’t simply good-hearted people who swoop in with hugs, candy, and promises. They are people who astonish even themselves how gladly and rapidly they put their children at the center of their lives.  Parents don’t altogether stop trying to be cool, staying up late, or telling naughty jokes. But with their first cries, children call us to be less selfish and more humble (even humiliated).  They give us a living stake in the world beyond our own short lives…. Parents are the kind of people who are enthralled and fascinated, even as they are often exhausted and appalled, by the challenges and vexations of children…. The best we could do for each kid is to help them to learn from their own bumps and bruises, and all the shots life is going to throw at them….”

One young fellow adopted as a teenager says of his adoptative parents: “They were parents, … Someone to give you not only unconditional love, but regular meals. Someone to take you to the doctor and dentist. A reason to come home…”

The 5 principles of parenting: your essential guide to raising good humans    Dr. Aliza Pressman    Simon Element, 2024, xix-xx, 64, 128

Summary

Dr. Aliza Pressman makes her agenda clear in the Introduction by saying that we need only to respond to our child’s needs 50% of the time, BUT on the very same page she states her list of non-negotiables:

• Take care of the mental health of the primary caregiver.
• Do not engage in physical or emotional abuse.
• Commit to habits of consistent sleep, movement, and nourishment.
• Establish clear Rules that enable emotional and physical safety.
• Be sensitive … to your child’s needs (which are not the same thing as their “wants”).

The heading on the next page is Remember That Good Enough Is Good Enough.

Pressman moves through the book with advice to guide your parenting. She also provides a piece I have never yet encountered: three periods of great neuroplasticity take place in our development- first, in our first years of life, second, in our teen years and third, in the years we become engaged in care-giving, in whatever capacity, not just in parenting.  A bonus I would think to parenting.

And here she finds a plus for failure in parenting: The more our kids get to see us making mistakes and learning from them, the more they’ll come to understand that life isn’t about getting things right the first time.  Disappointment is natural, but taking the fear out of failing means remembering that imperfect people are worthy of love.

Am I a “Good Enough” Parent?    Dr. Jack Stoltzfus  September 5, 2023 https://parentslettinggo.com/am-i-a-good-enough-parent/

Summary

Dr. Jack Stoltzfus calls parenting “one big guilt trip” citing a study noting that “only 3% of parents thought they were excellent parents”. In his 2024 book, he offers parents a chance to grade themselves with a report card, checking for how they accept what they can’t control, letting go where needed, what their motivations are and are they consistent with their values, do they help their child and are they unconditional and invested in their love and understanding of their children, apologizing when needed. For those aspects that fall below what their values see as acceptable, do they have an improvement plan?

Good enough parenting for all children—a strategy for a healthier society    Jun 23, 2021 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/adc.78.4.293

I am not sure how I gained access to this article for the site says it must be purchased. I will therefore not summarize it except to say that it looks at issues of children’s negative life experiences, seeking the ‘why’ for a healthier society in regards to good enough parenting within the concept of ‘it takes a village’, especially in the years from infancy to ten. The need for love, care and healthy guidance are basic, without which a child becomes at risk for problems.

The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development by Farrington and West “found that one of the best predictors of later delinquency was the teacher’s assessment of “troublesomeness” at the age of 8–l0 years”, further showing evidence that “four other factors were found to be strongly and independently associated with future delinquency: (i) poor parenting; (ii) economic deprivation; (iii) family criminality; and (iv) educational failure”.

Thinking Critically about Child Development: examining myths & misunderstanding, 3^rd ed.   Jean Mercer    SAGE Publications, 2016, 273       

“…it is hard to know whether the children’s development was determined by the parenting behavior or by one or more related factors”.

Great Myths of Child Development    Stephen Hupp and Jeremy Jewell    Wiley-Blackwell, 2015

#31 Parents can usually tell when their child is depressed:   Although most parents may feel they’re “in tune” with their child’s emotional state, this may not always be the case.  In dozens of studies over the last several decades, research has shown that parents are fairly poor informants when it comes to identifying depression in their children…. Interestingly, researchers have found that parents are better informants when their children have disruptive behavior problems (e.g. aggression) as opposed to problems with their mood (e.g. anxiety and depression).

#34 Adults can usually tell if a child is lying: … Studies show that adults are not very good at determining whether or not children are telling the truth.

#40 If you “spare the rod” you will “spoil the child”:   A more modern translation of this biblical reference suggests the rod is more likely referring to a staff shepherds use to guide sheep and that the verse itself is saying, “If you refuse to discipline your children, it proves you don’t love them” or “Those who don’t correct their children hate them …”  The writers then summarize current opinion on the rightness or wrongness of spanking, concluding with … although spanking may be an effective strategy to gain immediate compliance in some case, it may not always be the most effective strategy, it’s related to lower moral internalization in the long term, and it may have unintended negative side effects for the child. …. “[We] also believe that a few occasions of mild spanking will not likely cause harm to a child, and parents shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for using mild spanking as an occasional discipline tactic.  If parents do decide to use an occasional spanking, they should also realize that, at best, the spanking teaches children “what not to do,” so they will also need to think but teaching the child “what to do,” instead, by using some additional approach.

Born for Love: why empathy is essential and endangered    Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, M.D., PhD.    William Morrow, 2010, 41

“When parents feel blamed, they are less able to empathize with their children’s [problems] and may respond defensively, instead of changing their behavior.”

Listening Well: bringing stories of hope to life     Heather Morris     St Martin’s Press, 2022

Some helpful advice is offered in developing the art of listening to yourself and others.

Eve: how the female body drove 200 million years of human evolution    Cat Bohannon    Alfed A. Knopf, 2023, 204-205, 281-282

[Because human babies are needy for much longer than other creatures], in order for hominins to flourish, some kind of cultural revolution around child care must have occurred. How else, after all, would species with such needy babies survive? …. [Some] say we came up with kinfolk eusociality – a kind of furry “spinster aunt”.  Maybe we even started alloparenting, as we still do now, with unrelated folk helping care for others’ babies.

Pregnant and breast-feeding women just so happen to have brains that …violently rearrange themselves. A pregnant woman’s brain will, quite reliably, shrink in volume by as much as 5 percent during her third trimester, followed by a steady rebuilding during the first few months after giving birth.

…the volume loss is most notable in areas of the brain strongly related to how we humans go about building emotional attachments, general learning, and memory.

…a deep pruning that precedes a massive period of social learning.

…No male body will ever experience this phase of development. No woman who lives a birth-free life will, either. …It’s something the human brain does, presumably adaptively, to prepare for the intense phase of life that is to come: caring for an extraordinarily needy human newborn and then continuing to raise that child in deeply social settings for a very long time.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans   Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD.    Avid Reader Press, 2022, 278-287

Michaeleen Doucleff provides a good section on allo-parenting: “any person…who helps to take care of a child….key people who work alongside the mother and father, connecting to form a steady stream of unconditional love as a child grows”. Seeking to cultivate a culture of allo-parenting moves away from the isolating primacy of the nuclear family culture.

Act Natural: a cultural history of misadventures in parenting    Jennifer Traig   Ecco, 2019, 105,218,286,287

Jennifer Traig provides a window on the history of parenting and a self-deprecating willingness to let the reader look through the window into her own parenting.

“There are so many ways to get it wrong and we are just getting started….”  “Parenting is so hard and we are all looking for permission to slack off in some areas”.… “I’m now generally a capable parent, at least when I choose to be…. Though we have been worrying about it for less than a hundred years, we’ve somehow managed to keep the species going without giving it much thought”. 

And though she generally parents the way she was parented, she is “still making parenting mistakes everyday.  I am pretty sure that’s okay. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that barring the really awful stuff, things mostly turn out fine, and the ones that don’t were beyond our control anyway”. 

“In a sense, all parenting is a history of parenting. We do what our parents did because that’s what we know; or sometimes we do what they didn’t do, because now we know better”.

The Trouble with Perfect: how parents can avoid the over-achievement trap and still raise successful children   Elizabeth Guthrie, M.D. and Kathy Matthews   Hardcopy – Harmony, 2002;   audio –  Prince Frederick Recorded Books, 2008

It is my opinion that if you want a spectrum on the idea of ‘good enough’ you might weave your way through Act Natural and The Trouble With Perfect to a parenting path that works for you.

Elizabeth Guthrie and Kathy Matthews advise parents to keep from wanting to control their child’s life, however irrelevantly; instead, get a job to burn of some of the need to control energy and maybe to shake off the “could cloud” that hangs over their guilt susceptible hearts and minds.  And she suggests parents take a good look at what the short and long term consequences are when they control OR when they allow the child to control.

In Search of Stones: a pilgrimage of faith, reason and discovery    M. Scott Peck, Hyperion, 1995, 149, 151,152,159

Speaking of his own parenting, M. Scott Peck is very clear that, psychotherapist aside, he and his wife “did not know at all what it would be like to be parents”…. But they were “glad for the learning”. Scott says, “If you seriously want to learn about life, having and raising children is probably the single best way” …. He says he was not sure “how fully I could have joined in the human race…without being a father struggling to fulfill at least the minimum responsibilities of parenthood”. And in the spirt of good enough, Scott firmly states: “Parents should not be the center of their children’s lives”.

“We need to reassert a healthy masculinity”  “We need to reassert a healthy masculinity” Jonathan Keeperman and Michael Shellenberger Feb. 17, 2025 https://www.public.news/p/jonathan-keeperman-we-need-to-reassert

Summary

While this is an article in response to the anger against President Trump concerning a perceived lack of empathy and kindness, there are points here to consider regarding good enough parenting.  Others suggest the empathy and caring practices Trump appears to be dismantling seemed to enable rather that reduce the problems of the homeless etc.

A similar story can be told about many other social problems. Psychologists, including Jonathan Haidt, have found that coddling children results in them being discouraged more easily when they encounter problems…. In fact, argues … Jonathan Keeperman, … there has been a “remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior” …. “The most important feature of the Longhouse [the metaphor of the indigenous Longhouse], and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother,” he writes…. Keeperman … is not saying that women are bad or that feminine values of empathy, caring, and compassion are worse than masculine values of assertiveness, aggression, and action. Rather, he argues that Western cultures have become unbalanced toward feminine values…. Without feminine values, our societies would be far harsher and crueler places, but we also need healthy masculinity.… the best approach is often tough love, since that’s what allows people, and nations, to mobilize their internal resources and fortitude to mature and develop.

Ivy League psychologist shares the common mistake she made raising her 3 kids: ‘I wish I had never been that parent’      Tom Huddleston Jr.   Oct 19 2024  https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/19/ivy-league-parenting-expert-on-how-to-handle-yelling-at-kids.html

There’s no such thing as a perfect parent, says Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development.

“Fortunately, making mistakes and owning up to them is one way that parents can actually help teach their kids how to become healthy, successful adults”.  Klien includes herself, admitting she too has yelled at her kids. The thing is she admitted it and apologized to her children, saying something like, “I’m sorry I yelled,” or, “I apologize. I shouldn’t have done that”, thereby modelling the kind of realistic and healthy behaviour children need to see.

What You Can Change … and What You Can’t*: the complete guide to successful self-improvement    Martin E.P. Seligman, PhD.    Vintage Books, 2007, 211, 243

All the usual predictors offering a good life to a child, do not always produce that success: good mothering, high childhood experience, not coming from a multiproblem family, high IQ, good education…. Like the title says, Marting Seligman tells us that the ‘why’ of human behaviour may not yet be well understood, but when there are problems with behavior we do know that we can make changes. “So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not.”

Despite good parenting, some kids go bad – it may be genetic: research on chemical in brain adds to nature-nurture debate  Melissa Healy   Vancouver Sun,  October 6, 2011, B4

The article asks: why do some kids with bad parents turn out fine and some kids with good parents, turn out not so nice? The answer offered: “The answer may lie in the genes. Specifically, the almost famous 5-HTTLPR serotonin transporter-promoter gene, which governs the activity of the mood chemical serotonin in the brain”. The upshot suggested: while four out of five kids are “impervious to the quality of the parenting they get”, that one of the five kids who was born with a variant may turn out sensitive to the impact of the parenting. Being careful though, the article warns us not to dismiss the environment/setting for this set in parenting.

Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence   Dr. Nicole Letourneau with Justin Joschko    Dundern, 2013, 182, 226, 236

Here’s some encouragement.

“Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when we engage in something as evolutionarily beneficial as motherhood our brains praise our noble behaviour with a burst of mood-enhancing hormones. Oxytocin is one of them. Dopamine is another”.

“You are going to get a lot of help [parenting your child]. Not from professionals or parenting experts, but from your child”.

“But what do we mean when we say support? What is it that successful parents provide to their children? Is it attention? Encouragement? Discipline? Education? To a certain extent, yes. But what really matters is relationships. Children need to forge tangible emotional connections to their adult caregivers.”

And as for D.W. Winnicott’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as a baby without someone else’, Letourneau and Joschko say Winnnicott “means that babies do not become distinct individuals immediately after birth. They wade into personhood gradually, buoyed by the calm and protective waters of family”.

Hold on to Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers    Gordon Neufeld, PhD. and Gabor Maté, M.D.   Vintage Canada, 2004, 54, 215

Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate tell us “It takes three ingredients to make parenting work: a dependent being in need of being taken care of, an adult willing to assume responsibility, and a good working attachment from the child to the adult”.

“…Parenting is above all a relationship, and relationships don’t lend themselves to strategies… We do not require skills or strategies but compassion, principles, and insight. The rest will come naturally – although I’m not saying it will come easily…. [W]e may have to struggle with feelings of futility.  Very few parents come ready-made. Parents are begotten out of attachment and adaptation…. We must, however, let ourselves feel the sadness and disappointment when we have a sense of failure”.

The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture    Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté     Knopf Canada, 2022, 179,180

Gabor Maté continues the message of Hold On to Your Kids with a quote from James Gabarino from 1995: “We need to put aside blaming parents and take a good hard look at the challenge of raising children in a socially toxic environment”. For as I noted in earlier posts, Gabor Maté reminds us that “Yes, parents are responsible for their children; no, they did not create the world in which they must parent them.”

A Good Enough Mother: a novel     Bev Thomas   Pamela Dorman Books, 2019, 119

When one character, at hearing the suggestion to consider the idea of D.W. Winnicott’s ‘good enough’ as an approach to consider, groans, “Sounds like a way of letting yourself off the hook if you mess up. An excuse for mediocrity”. [The narrator, a psychotherapist] shook [her] head. “It‘s become oversimplified. The original meaning’s got lost. It’s about the fact that maternal limitations play an essential role in separation and the child’s developmental process.”

In Search of the “Good Enough” Mother: how to honor the complexity of motherhood  Jennifer L. Kunst, Ph.D.,  May 9, 2012  https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/headshrinkers-guide-the-galaxy/201205/in-search-the-good-enough-mother

Summary

Jennifer Kunst begins by drawing our attention to how far from reality Mother’s Day cards are which is why D.W. Winnicott “came to believe that the way to be a good mother is to be a good enough mother” because a caring mother “provides a holding environment” * and “[w]hen she fails, she tries again”.

Kunst goes on to affirm that “[i]t takes an imperfect mother to raise a child well. You see, children need to learn about life through real experiences”.  * ‘a holding environment’ is a Winnicott term

Unbroken Brain: a revolutionary new way of understanding addiction    Maia Szalavitz    St. Martin’s Press, 2016, 165-166

Talking about a similarity between parenting and addiction, Maia Szalavitz offers three comparisons: “Even normal parenting, for example, involves a touch of OCD. Parents notoriously become obsessed with the safety of their children and ways of protecting them” …. “Another crucial aspect of learning in early parenthood, of course, is learning to bond with your particular baby.  Contrary to popular belief, parental love is not always “instant” …. But just like in addiction, it takes repeated exposure and repeated engagement …nothing is actually “instantly addictive” …. And babies, thankfully, come equipped with features that make them addictive to adults…The fact that addictions can be built on the same system is not an insult to parents or to the meaning of love – but a testament to their strength and power”. 

Old-School Traditions Modern Families Are Leaving Behind    Zayda Slabbekoorn Dec 23, 2024  https://www.yourtango.com/family/old-school-traditions-modern-families-are-leaving-behind

Summary

Each of us must make our own decisions of how many of these traditions apply today, how much is mythology, how many add value to our family’s life, and how many have actually been left behind and why.

We are apparently relegating the following to the dustbin “to save time, money, and space”: bedtime stories, heirlooms, photo albums, ‘family style’ dinners, cards and non-digital letters, family time without technology, family recipes.

According to research … the average American family only spends around 6 hours of time together weekly, compared to an average of between 12 and 20 hours in the 1990s.

Yet, usually due to financial issues, “surveys from the Pew Research Center have reported…. More than 88% of young adults aged 18 to 29-years-old are still living with a parent today, compared to an average one-third in the 1990s”.

‘Lighthouse Parents’ Have More Confident Children And Here’s How To Be One 

 Trine Jensen  https://everymum.ie/my-family/lighthouse-parents-have-more-confident-children-and-heres-how-to-be-one/

Summary

Because parents “…all want to raise confident children,” Trine Jensen, thinks it best to leave her children to figure things out for themselves rather than “micromanaging” their lives, saying, “Sometimes the best thing parents can do is to do nothing at all”.  Jensen turns to “an essay for The Atlantic, parent and educator Russel Shaw”.  

Shaw says, “Too often, I watch parents over-functioning – depriving their kids of the confidence that comes from struggling and persevering, and exhausting themselves in the process”, leaving the child to wonder if he or she might be incapable of taking care of him- or herself.

Shaw encourages parents to step back more and more as the children mature, instead learning to be there as a listener, guide and support but leaving the children to it.

Helicopter? Free-range? Concierge? What kind of parent are you?: How do you parent? There’s a meme for that amid the modern obsession with dissecting and defining parenting styles   The Irish Times DAC Jul 18, 2023 https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/2838432152/3D22720E0AA34700PQ/10?accountid=48753&sourcetype=Newspapers

Summary

The writer of this article seems a bit boggled by the plethora of labels in parenting styles that have been spawned from the original three- authoritarian, authoritative and permissive and the later added, neglectful parenting.

But for whatever style we choose to align with in our parenting, “ultimately, [O’Malley] believes, we revert to ourselves”. Furthermore, and I think this is a needed balloon buster, to the parenting style we chose for child number one, O’Malley says, ‘“Then you think you’ve got it sussed – until the second arrives and you realise everything you knew is wrong.” With the rise in one-child families, those parents can propagate the idea that a certain type of parenting works, she says, because in their case the fallacy of that will never be put to the test.”’  O’Malley goes further: ‘”We have really undermined our instinctive parenting,” she argues. As a result, “there is a vibe of cluelessness … and a general culture of denigrating parents that we all collude in”. In tandem with that undermining has come greater demands for parental responsibility.”’

And then the article ends with ‘Good Enough’ parenting, noting that 70 years after Donald Winnicott provided the label, this style still makes sense for “most children basically just need well-intentioned, half-competent parents who show them wholehearted love”.

FAFO parenting is the trendy way to let kids ‘find out’ consequences. But is it cruel to let them fail?   Natalie Stechyson  February 21, 2025

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7462555?utm_source=snews&utm_medium=referral

FAFO stands for ‘fool around and find out’ … except it’s the other F-word…with the idea that the approach teaches kids natural consequences to their actions…. as a counterpoint to some of the more modern parenting styles, like the constantly hovering helicopter parents, or gentle parenting, the extremely popular modern style that centres on acknowledging a child’s feelings and the motivations behind challenging behaviours…. [FAFO] also aligns with the trendy “let them” theory of parenting.

the good mother myth: redefining motherhood to fit reality    ed. by Avital Norman Nathman     Seal Press, 2014,34, 35  “The Unapologetic No”    Soraya Chemaly

I fast became the quintessential not-only-can-you-have-it-all-but-also-you-must-have-it-all mother…. I spent years grappling with the expectation that I would just do – mother, work, food, volunteer, more mothering, more work, more food, more volunteering. And that there was no compensation other than the idea that somewhere, somehow, there would be a tacit seal of “good mother” approval.  

The Attachment Effect: exploring the powerful ways our earliest bond shapes our relationships and lives   Peter Lovenheim    TarcherPerigee, 2018, 112,115, 119

Summary                

Peter Lovenheim tells a story of a mother who is considered to be successfully securing attachment with her child through her parenting. Yet, she says, “I fail at [attachment parenting] on a daily basis,”. Fail how?  [Lovenheim] asked. “I have days when I get frustrated,” she said, “and react to Wyatt in a way that I look back on later and say, “Well, that really wasn’t great.’ I mean there’s so little time and only so much you can do. I have to make dinner, do laundry, go to class, clean house.” Yet she considers the idea of good enough parenting half-assed.

But… she is not against babysitters or daycare. She knows “many experts…seem confident that daycare for toddlers and older children can be okay – even beneficial in promoting development- as long as workers are of high quality…” etc.

How to Raise an Adult: break free of the over parenting trap and prepare your kid for success    Julie Lythcott-Haims    Pan Macmillan UK, 2015, 20

Our kids see the strain we’re under. Researcher Ellen Galinsky asked one thousand kids what they would most like to change about their parents’ schedules. “Few of them wanted more face time; the top wish was for mom and dad to be less tired and stressed.”

Adult children who had ‘good parents’ share what their parents did right   Annie Reneau

12.19.24  https://www.upworthy.com/adult-children-of-good-parents-share-what-they-did-right-current-parents-take-note

What well-raised adult children say their parents did right: “supported their kids’ interests without judgment, explained themselves to their kids, were fair-minded and taught fair-mindedness, taught by their own example, broke cycles of dysfunction, yet certainly weren’t perfect”. (abbreviated quoting)

The Gift of the Good Enough Mother

https://seleni.org/advice-support/2018/3/14/the-gift-of-the-good-enough-mother

Our kids need us to fail sometimes. Perfection is not an option.

‘Good enough’ parenting: Negotiating standards and stigma  kylie valentine, Ciara Smyth, Jamee Newland  June 2019,  International Journal of Drug Policy Volume 68, 117-123  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095539591830197X https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.07.009

Summary

This article may address some of the issues at the heart of my personal search.

Here are relevant pieces taken from the article: Policy concern with families has led to the framing of ‘good parenting’ as a skill set that parents must acquire while ‘poor parenting’ is linked to a raft of social problems, including child maltreatment.

Becoming a parent involves new emotions and challenges, among them apparently near-universal feelings of anxiety and guilt. These emotions are especially true for mothers, where decisions around paid employment are freighted with guilt regardless of the outcome: for example, working mothers feel guilty for not spending enough time with their children, and conversely stay-at-home mothers for not earning additional income which could provide their children with more opportunities.

Impostor Syndrome and Parenting – What Is It and How to Overcome It –
YaeBin Kim, Heidi Peter Meier https://naes.agnt.unr.edu/PMS/Pubs/2023-5185.pdf

Summary

Impostor Syndrome and Parenting Impostor syndrome, also known as impostor
phenomenon or impostorism, involves feeling like a fraud despite one’s achievements and
worry someone will find out about it. It can cause feelings of anxiety and affect relationships…According to studies, 70% of adults experience imposter syndrome at least once in their life…

Causes of Impostor Syndrome:
“… personality traits, culture, family background and parenting style” … and confusing societal messages of praise or shame. Postpartum symptoms or quickly becoming aware of how little, in the reality of parenting, that you actually know about parenting or having too high parenting expectations contribute.

Symptoms of Parents’ Impostor Syndrome: Rigidity in daily routines, Black-and-white thinking,
Catastrophic thinking, Lack of sleep, Thinking too much about mistakes, Minimizing accomplishments, Negative self-talk

Some generate within themselves the impostor syndrome by judging themselves by the research they compulsively seek out, or by trying to be all things to all beings, or striving for perfection, or insisting on going it alone. The parent labelling his or herself an imposter is advised to talk with others, adjust expectations and stop comparing.

The Experience of Motherhood Imposter Syndrome and How to Overcome It   DECEMBER 14, 2020 https://theeverymom.com/imposter-syndrome-as-a-mom-how-to-overcome-it/

If you’re unfamiliar with imposter syndrome, it was originally identified in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzane Imes and is the internalized feeling that your success is due to luck. Imposter syndrome can be experienced with feelings of doubt in your skills, talents, and/or accomplishments, with a fear that at any moment you might be exposed as a fraud.

Apparently, so many mothers experience this that it’s referred to as motherhood imposter syndrome or even as Psychology Today called it, “Momposter Syndrome.” And if you’ve ever questioned your parenting ability, you’re not the only one.

When putting all your supposed learnings into practice, you might realize that nothing can actually prepare you for the real thing. And when all your tricks seem to fail, the feelings of not being up for the job as a mom can creep in…. Take comfort knowing we’re all learning as we go.

Nothing but the Truth: a memoir    Marie Henein    print Penguin Random House audiobook McClelland & Stewart, 2021, 75, 232, 236

If you have developed imposter syndrome, this is a book you will find pragmatically helpful.

Marie Henein is “recognized as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers by Canadian Lawyer”.  Of her mother, she says: [My mother] Evelyn wasn’t the mushy bake-you-cookies-and-read-a bedtime story kind of mom. I didn’t know moms like that when I was growing up, and if she had been that kind of mother, I would not have been who I am. Yes I have taken this out of the context Marie Henein was focusing on, her mother’s sense of her personal strength as a human being, but I think it also speaks to the ‘good enough’ mother conflict.  Near the end of the book, Henein speaks further to this conflict of women being questioned if they are both careerists and mothers.

Henein is often asked, “How do you balance work and family?”  [Her] answer is always the same: You do not. Because there is only one of you and you can only be in one place at one time. When you are at work, that is where your attention is, and sometimes your family suffers as a result. At times, it is your family that requires all of you, and your work must take a back seat. Maybe your partner or someone else has to lend a help hand so you can have the freedom – so you can be liberated from the delusion that it is possible to create and sustain this balance…”

If You Did These 10 Things, You Were A Better Parent Than Your Kids Give You Credit For:

There’s no such thing as a “perfect” parenting, there’s only trying your best, taking accountability, and making sacrifices. Zayda Slabbekoorn  Nov 06, 2024 https://www.yourtango.com/family/you-were-better-parent-kids-give-credit-for

When your children feel free to drag their toys out of their rooms to play in the living room, when they demonstrate independence, when you can talk with your kids and they feel they can talk with you because you are open about your own mistakes and when you want to know what made them laugh in their day rather than asking them to account for how they did at school you were good enough. When you see them as human beings whom you are committed to loving, understanding and supporting, when you can agree to disagree yet they still come to visit and may even ask for help, you have been good enough.

Parents Under the Influence: words of wisdom from a former bad mother   Cecile David-Weill     Other Press, 2020, 120

In a section titled,” The best parents are straightforward with their children”, Cecile David-Weill has found that “[e]xchanges in which we are being up front with our children give them a real chance to live a true and authentic bond with us, and to understand that fundamentally, life and love are about carrying on together amid the details and hardships of reality.

“Why is Dad so Mad: a father dares to explore his rage”    Daniel Engber The Atlantic    July/August, 2022, 87-89

Summary

Daniel Engber is reviewing Keith Gessen’s book, Raising Raffi: the first five years.  In an environment hyper-aware of ‘male toxicity’, Gessen shares his struggle with trying to figure out how to appropriately parent, how to appropriately deal with the frustration and anger he feels and the loss of control he acknowledges at times in dealing with his child. Daniel Engber stands with Gessen, also acknowledging, “But the anger would be coming just the same, as it does for every parent at some time.”  And so Engber seems to shrug or sigh a bit, as in a tenet of ‘good enough’ parenting, Engber quotes Gessan, “But you succeed when you make yourself irrelevant”.

When Parents Hurt: compassionate strategies when you and your grown child don’t get along    Joshua Coleman, PhD.   William Morrow Paperbacks, 2008

This book offers parenting principles, guidelines, advice and exercises to help a parent work through the turmoil of a difficult parent-adult child relationship, looking at the parent’s hopes, dreams, disappointments, emotions, and how parenting has affected the parent’s life.

TIME NOW FOR THE VINYL CAFÉ STORY EXCHANGE      Stuart McLean    “Learning to Skate”   Cheryl Glass, Pinehouse, Saskatchewan    Penguin Canada, 2013, 131

Cheryl Glass, who didn’t know how to skate, watched tensely as her young son struggled to learn to skate, undeterred.

And that’s when I knew, watching him that night skating in the dark, that there are so many things my boys are going to need to learn that I won’t have a clue how to teach them. I’ll do my best to supply them with the tools and to introduce them to the folks who know the ropes. But then I’ll just have to stand by and watch through my fingers as they fall, pray that they will get back up again, and cheer when they do. I’ll have to learn to not interfere when they’re surrounded by those who are bigger, faster, and stronger. And let them go, even when every ounce of my being shouts at me to hold them close. I’ll have to stand by the side of the rink, and watch them skate.

Splinters: another kind of love story    Leslie Jamison   Little, Brown and Company, 2024, 138,139

Leslie Jamison and her father talked about their relationships near the end of her high school days. He told me, “At a certain point, when it was so difficult with you, I just said, Fuck it.”  … In time, I came to see that our difficult years were just that. Years. Neither more nor less. They weren’t everything. They were part of a longer story that we got to keep living.  This about a father who showed up at many of the most important or difficult years of her life.

Crooked Smile: what it took to escape a decade of homelessness, addictions & crime    Jared Klickstein, Bombardier Books, 2024, 186

My unreasonable expectations of life weren’t panning out exactly the way I wanted.  They never do, nor should they.  I’ve found that once I accepted this years later, life started to grow beyond what I imagined was even possible.

Fighting a Theological Monster     Wendell Krossa (my brother) Feb 13, 2025 http://www.wendellkrossa.com/?p=13104

Even Jesus, at least in the Gospel of Luke, says ‘good enough’ is good enough.

Luke offers a better version of this same message of Jesus because his wrap-up ending gets the spirit of Jesus right- i.e. “Be unconditionally merciful as your Father is unconditionally merciful”. Whereas Matthew, to the contrary, messes up by contradicting the very core of Jesus’ message with his ending statement of “Be perfect as your Father is perfect”.

“Immigrant Dad Talk Show” SNL   Jan 19’25

Two lousy parents, Dave Chappelle and Marcello Hernandez, and white guy Mikey Day who is into Communication, Compassion and Care, expose both parenting styles to laughter.

Specific To Adoption  

Parenting an adopted child 2^nd ed     Kathy Lancaster, Ph.D.    Barrons Educational Series, Inc., 2009, 13

As Kathy Lancaster writes, whatever our parenting styles and even if good enough is our common sense aim, we need as adoptive parents a baseline acknowledgement that “[a]doptive families are different than families built through birth…”. Whenever our relationship with our adopted child is strained or is going through a stretch of looking less like ‘happy families’ or worse, a tension will hover somewhere on the edges of our minds: “Is this problem about our parenting or is it about our child’s ‘bad blood’/genetics? “Is this normal or is this adoption?”

Lancaster advises, “Although adoptive parents will attest that the loving attachments are the same in adoption, practically everything else is not the same.

To help our children successfully adapt, we need to acknowledge the differences between adoptive and biological families and take positive steps to incorporate adoption education into our family system”.

Good enough adoptive parenting-the adopted child and selfobject relations

Dorit Noy-Sharav   Clinical Social Work Journal New York Vol. 30, Iss. 1,  (Spring 2002)

https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/227769260/44681D8C7DE74121PQ/8?accountid=48753&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals

Boy does this article pick away at the underlying realities of the message that adoption parenting is different from bio-parenting.  It is well worth reading the entire article.

Google provided definition of selfobject: a person or object that a person experiences as part of themselves, and that serves a function for the self.

Summary

The article, written to encourage assessment for adoption readiness, … “examines several conditions that may impair optimal selfobject relations between adoptive parents and their child, so that self-development and individuation of the adoptee will be at risk”.  These conditions, not always unlike the concerns of bio-parents, encompass the clinical and psychological impact of dealing with infertility, the absence of what the prenatal period engenders, and then the pre-adoption assessment process and working through becoming attached to someone else’s child, one that may not physically resemble the adoptive parents and does not carry the adoptive family genes.  And then there is the question, are the parents on the same page with regards to parenting? With that comes the adopted child’s need-to-know and even the child’s yearnings toward the bio-family, as well as, whatever physical and psychological impact from the bio-parents or caregivers marked the child before he or she was adopted. In order to avoid abandonment again, the child may seek to cover his or her real sense of self, the one that may have, at least in the child’s mind, led to the child’s being given up, to remain secure within the adoptive family and indeed the child may be swept up in a ‘search for self’ that may last a lifetime.  The sense of abandonment may also concern the adoptors, as well, for the child may want to reconnect later with the bio family.

Good enough parenting, to borrow Winnicott’s (1960) well-known idiom, demands that the parent be able to go beyond his own needs for selfobject relations. By being an adult, having a cohesive self, he is expected to be able to differentiate between his own needs for security, containment, control, continuity and the changing needs of his child; he should be able to view the child as a separate subject, with her own personality. Even more, in order to provide the child with a facilitating environment that enables an optimal development the parent often forgoes his own needs in order to serve as a reliable and attuned selfobject for the child, being not only parents, but possibly therapist for the child.

Sharing of an adoptive parent’s experience of key themes central to adoptions   Abba Specialist Adoption & Social Services     http://abbaadoptions.co.za/articles.html

Summary

Aiming for/settling for ‘good enough’ parenting may be a common sense target when parenting adopted children for as the children work through the normal developmental hurdles of growing up, they may have added hurdles: a sense of rejection or grief/loss of their bioparents leading to shame or guilt, an uncertainty of their personal identity and about the best way to express these feelings and to what degree they are safe to give themselves up to trusting the parents they have now.

Adoptive parents are encouraged to build a secure enough base for their children to find a way to articulate and work through these feelings.

Older Sister. Not Related: a memoir    Jenny Heijun Wills    McClelland & Stewart, 2019, 150

One of the questions that comes as an adoptee seeks balance in her relationships with her adoptive family and her birth family: “Why do [the adoptive parents] think their love is so good that it is all we’ll ever need?  How can anyone’s love be that good?” 

Why “Good Enough” Parenting is Better than Perfection. You can ditch the stress. Everything will be OK. Chris Prange-Morgan, M.A., MSW  August 1, 2022  https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/full-catastrophe-parenting/202208/why-good-enough-parenting-is-better-perfection

Summary

Chris Prange-Morgan asks how as an adoptive parent she, like many other adoptive parents, could be guilt free but still do parenting right for children who have often started life in a traumatic environment when trending parenting advice seems to push a parenting style hard to maintain in the vagaries of human experience. D.W. Winnicott made the point that “that striving to be the “perfect” or “best” mother can cause some unintended problems for parents and kids alike”, impacting , as research has shown, children’s “emotional growth and executive functioning, and it leads to anxiety, depression and feeling helpless”. Parents’ relationships with their children are also impacted when they are driven by the pressure to be whatever is currently the perfect parent.  And if imperfection is all parents can maintain, Prange-Morgan offers this: “Role modeling self-love and acceptance provides the best possible foundation for my children to venture out into the world, and to know they will be OK, even in the rocky patches”.

Parenting Adopted Teenagers: advice for the adolescent years    Rachel Staff, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2015, 31-32,89

Summary

Under a heading, “Understanding the relationship between the past and the present when providing support”, Rachel Staff talks to adoptive parents who may be struggling with a sense of guilt as their child is having difficulties in the teen years. Not easing the sense of guilt, the wider circle of professionals, who may be now involved with the teenager’s difficulties, may make assessments that start by questioning the parents’ parenting.

Yet that assessment must take a wider view, starting with a look at the stability of a delayed securing of attachment with “an adolescent brain, firing on all cylinders from the amygdala (the emotional brain) is also characterize by immature and poorly developed prefrontal functioning. They are without the benefits of this ‘top-down’ moderating influence on their emotional response; they are therefore experiencing a double whammy which is likely to make their emotional experience this stage even more ‘wobbly’”.

Living through the experience with the teenager, the adoptive parents may not be managing constantly perfect parenting either.

Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies    Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden    Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2023,192,193

A key component to help repair a rupture is to offer a true apology for not knowing what we didn’t know [about the struggles of being adopted]. “Apologizing for some of the decisions we made when we didn’t have the understanding of adoptee loss can go a long way toward healing,” says Elizabeth. “It’s also helpful for struggling parents to find a community of other parents who get it and can sit with you as you wonder how things got to the point of estrangement. If we can acknowledge our role in the situation and not be so defensive about it, we might be able to shift the dynamic.”

… “It is not about blaming. It is about moving forward with new understandings…”

The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide    John Brooks    Scribner, 2016, 62-64

As time went on, parenting Casey often felt like breaking a wild stallion. They instinctively protect their space and dominate their handlers……There is no single method of training that works, because every stallion is different….

I wish I’d had a gift for understanding my own daughter. As infuriating as her behavior was, we had no reference point to determine if this was normal, because we had no other children. Instead we’d allowed our child to manipulate us into giving her whatever she wanted in order to avert her tears. It had to be us. We were incompetent parents. 

Seeking professional or otherwise advice did not help.  They tried the usual: time-outs, withholding privileges, rewarding good behavior and talking to her.

Feeling like miserable failures, Erika and I turned on each other. We came from very different parenting models.

Detachment: an adoption memoir   Maurice Mierau    Freehand Books, 2014, 152-4

Like Keith Gessan, Maurice Mierau is also conflicted by the frustrations of parenting, his image of what is appropriate and his reality when his parenting is challenged.  Yes his boys are adopted and likely have trust issues but it is worth noting that bio-child or adopted child, these men’s father struggles are similar.

Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents     Deborah D. Gray    Perspectives Press, Inc., 2002, 58,97

Parents who are struggling with raising their children will question their parenting: “a sense of failure is normal. Parents are vulnerable to shame. They are sometimes too loyal to share their child’s history”.  Or they may feel they must be apologetic for their child’s behaviour.  They need “to develop a sturdy sense of self-esteem”.

The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook: what traumatized children can teach us about loss, love, and healing    Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz    Basic Books, 2017, 100-103

Bruce Perry offers suggestions for helping struggling children become secure and free to develop by telling us how Mama P. cares for the children she is parenting: hugging and loving them whether it appears age appropriate or not.

Explaining Parenting Stress among Adoptive Parents: The Contribution of Mindfulness, Psychological Flexibility, and Self-Compassion   Ana Luz Chorão, Maria Cristina Canavarro, Raquel Pires  Int J Environ Res Public Health 2022 Nov 5;19(21):14534. doi: 10.3390/ijerph192114534 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9658673/

The conclusion of this study states:

Identifying and reducing the levels of parenting stress among adoptive parents is of the utmost importance, as it may lead to less emotional reactivity and, consequently, to more positive parenting practices, contributing to greater family harmony and healthier development of children. In turn, the innovative results of this study elucidate the importance that mindfulness, self-compassion, and psychological flexibility may have in reducing parenting stress and demonstrate the usefulness of cultivating them with (prospective and current) adoptive parents, particularly through their inclusion as target goals of psychological intervention both preventive and remedial.

adopting older children: a practical guide to adopting and parenting children over age four Stephanie Bosco-Ruggiero, MA, Gloria Russo Wassel, MS, LMHC, and Victor Groza, PhD.    New Horizon Press, 2014, 222,225-226

The advice: It is true, no one else is perfect and neither are you, but by providing a safe, permanent home and family to your child you are making a profound difference in his life. Some days you will doubt your ability to be an effective parent. On these days, give yourself permission to make mistakes. One day your child will hopefully understand that you’re not just Super Mom or Dad but a real human being with needs, fears and feelings too?

They quote one mother: I am an intelligent, articulate, confident woman and these little humans reduced me to a crying, irrational mess on more occasions than I care to admit…. I’m not sure how this is different from my bio-parent friends who go some level of crazy after bringing home their little bundles. I think we all share a similar challenge in that way.

Thicker than blood: adoptive parenting in the modern world    Marion Crook    Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016, 89

Instead of looking at raising children as a long-term war of wills, we can look at it as a long-term teaching project.

Environmental determinants of physiological reactivity to stress: The interacting effects of early life deprivation, caregiving quality, and stressful life events   Wade, Mark,  Sheridan, Margaret A,   Zeanah, Charles H,   Fox, Nathan A,   Nelson, Charles A   et al.

Cambridge Vol. 32, Iss. 5,  (Dec 2020): 1732-1742. DOI:10.1017/S0954579420001327 https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/2476511845/599377201D30433DPQ/3?accountid=48753&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals 

Summary 

Children who spend their early lives in institutions experience profound psychosocial deprivation [of parental care] that is associated with altered stress response system development… Early-life deprivation is associated with persistent blunting of stress response systems, but normalization may be achievable if SLEs [stressful life events] are limited following placement into enriched family-based care.

Most research has been with younger children so less is known about the impact on older children who have lived an institutionalized life though research has shown that there may be continued “blunted response” to “HPA-axis responses to social stress among post-institutionalized children … Similarly, production of oxytocin – a hormone that regulates stress responses”…. 

In this study, an adapted version of Coddington’s Child Life Events Scale was used. The study “showed that prolonged institutional deprivation early in life increases the risk of long-term blunting of stress reactivity,”.  Though, “Emerging evidence suggests that recalibration of the HPA-axis may occur after but not before puberty among those with a history of institutional care….”  ….  “In other words, it may be that positive caregiving alone is insufficient to foster recalibration, but that puberty opens a window for recalibration, possibly thorough a mechanism of increased responsiveness to environmental input”…. for “adolescence is a period of heightened neurobiological plasticity that may explain emerging individual differences in cognition, risk-taking, and psychopathology…”

“Thus, while early adversity has clear and long-lasting effects on psychobiological development, later experience may either mitigate or exacerbate the effects of early adversity, thus offering opportunities to intervene during this period of increased vulnerability in order to protect against the development of psychopathology”.  Despite the depravation pointed to in this study, I think the study is leaving the door of hope open for parents wanting to offer loving stability and support as part of the “offering opportunities to intervene”.

And then there is this

So … we moved irrevocably toward the teen years; we were now living in a rural community. Yasik’s most hopeful friend potential was a sort of eat-all-the-fun-food last ditch friend and I prayed for 14 year old boys who love soccer, basketball, paintball, hockey, mountain biking, snowboarding and computer games and guitar – not a book on the list.  My attitude at this point was: do what you can today and if you can’t, try again tomorrow. Optimistic?  I actually wrote at the end of the 2004 journal: we have happy lives now which means no stories any more. Yet I also noted that while we have so much to live for, I carry a constant feeling of foreboding that something will hurt our happiness – it happens to others all the time.

At the time, I heard a guy on the phone one day at the library say, “So even if you get sick or your life falls apart you’re going to be there for me?” Initially it seemed an amazingly immature and self-oriented concern, and then my mind re-ran the phrase “life falls apart” and I started thinking about this concept. We see life as an entity that doesn’t include the things that made it fall apart. Life then must be when all is well – ordered, happy, secure.  If anything negative happens – that is not life. The hell it isn’t.

So the question: Good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough. Good enough.  Which is it?

Carl Jung asked: How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow?  Amanda Montell in The Age of Magical Overthinking: notes on modern irrationality, (2024,148,149) quotes a study that concluded, “Individuals with a more nuanced approach – even a biased one – do better than the extremes.” …Wouldn’t we have less imposter syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? …to embrace our ordinariness … wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace.”, Montell wonders.

At the January 25, 2025 Golden Globe Awards, Demi Moore, as she accepted ‘Best Female Actor’ award, told that audience that she wondered at one point if she should continue to act because she had heard negative critiques of her acting.  She said, “At the time I made it mean…” that she was not good enough. I think it is important to note that she let the thought in.  Later, a woman said to her, “Just know you will never be enough but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick”.

Yet, according to adoption writers, for adoptive parents, doesn’t the question come down to whether or not the parenting style they choose to engage with helps the adoptee bridge the attachment gap sufficiently enough to support the adoptee into a stable adulthood?  Does this presume that ‘going beyond’ level parenting is demanded?

And the final word goes to Micheal Jordon, just cuz I like what he said: “If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.” A Coach’s Diary – “If you run into a wall, don’t turn… | Facebook

Post #13 D  Authoritative Parenting

Depicting Authoritative Parenting

This is the parenting style we are encouraged to strive after as parents, but to actually affirm that as parents we are golden parents feels a bit uncomfortable, like chest puffing, not quite politically correct or sufficiently self-deprecating. Added to which, the preceding entries reveal, via example after example, and even accounting for natural self-deprecation, our mismanagement of Yasik’s parenting. Can anything be found in my oracle, the journal, to suggest that we might have been parents guided by authoritative parenting skills? Did I like any good reporter only write the breaking news that would horrify, sidelining or shrugging off the positive stories?

Wellll, hopefully not puffing our chests too unnaturally, we did skinny into Authoritative Parenting in the parenting skills quiz we tried back in Post/Entry #13, Introduction to Parenting Styles and certainly it was our ardent desire to be the best parents we knew how to be for this kid we loved.  Had we been offered a lecture on parenting skills in the seminars we participated in pre-adoption, it would have been a no–brainer for us, like every parent in the room, to recognize that Authoritative Parenting was the ideal way to raise a child.

Like Goldilocks, who chose a bowl of just right porridge, did we sometimes manage to hold the parenting teeter totter in a just right balance, not too permissive and not too neglectful? Incidentally, I have discovered that the Goldilocks metaphor and the ‘just right’ message are go-tos for many parenting writers. Dr. Aliza Pressman in the 5 principles of parenting (Simon Element, 2024,102) tells the reader

Somewhere in the middle, there’s the authoritative parent – high on limits and boundaries and high on sensitivity. Developmental psychologist Dr. Stephanie Carlson calls this position “Goldilocks parenting” – the optimal balance. And the research has remained steady. Goldilocks parenting is associated with the most integrated child developmental outcomes – and more evidence that a middle-of-the-road approach gets better results than the rigid or extreme approaches.

We are aware that we need to teach our children that life is about sharing and caring for each other as they learn to take care of themselves while we as parents try not to be controlling yet stay in charge – to establish boundaries and maintain them, all with a warm, loving and supportive approach.

I begin by retelling one story but rearranging it to look, not at the Permissive or Neglectful or Authoritarian aspects, but to suggest that some intuitive part came from the Authoritative parenting.  It is the story of accompanying Yasik to a school gym to support him as he was now being encouraged to join in more school activities.  At the Christmas program the previous year Yasik was the one kindergartner allowed to remain sitting in the audience rather than being expected to join the rest of his class on stage. Now in his second year at the school, he would be encouraged to no longer sit on the sidelines.  Entering the gym he went into automatic sideline mode.  And as I recount in an earlier entry/post, I went into automatic threat and bribe mode. The bribe worked enough to get Yasik on the trampoline but wasn’t enough to entice him into a second turn. I returned to threat mode and up he climbed again. This time I saw a mix of the struggle with fear and a shy enjoyment register on his face. He had conquered the worst of it.  He was on his way. Between the first and second attempts there were tears on my neck to add to all this and, as I watched him get up and try this in front of peers who babied him still, I had to fight tears too.  I was so proud of him and all he attempted and of his stubborn refusals too.  He wasn’t following blindly – he was taking care of himself, and I was balancing the parental teeter totter somewhere between Permissive and Authoritarian.

What if that teeter totter could be balanced by one parent being the ‘demander’ and the other being the ‘warmer’? The journal acknowledges that Dave and I, while perhaps not able to articulate that we wanted to be Authoritative rather than any of the other three styles, would talk over our concerns: me being too permissive and he taking on the role of disciplinarian more often. (Don’t worry. I am aware that ‘Good cop/Bad cop can be read between these lines) We were trying to follow through on areas needing discipline and Yasik seemed happy with it – after the fact.  The journal notes: “He bores easily- so it is a fine line between control and creativity.  He needs support and control”.  We also talked about how to give Yasik more independence, holding our breath on the consequences. Case in point, Dave warning me off jumping into action when Yasik wanted me to help him go sikats (I am no longer certain that is the correct Russian word). Dave was firm that at five he should be taking care of this business on his own, whether the orphanage had prepared Yasik for this independence or not. The reality was no one was going to help him at school.  He had to figure out how to wiggle up on a toilet with pants tying his ankles together and how to stay dry while managing all the steps to follow before making sure the toilet bowl was cleared of debris.

We had, after all, taken the age-appropriate step of putting him in school three weeks after he moved into our lives, society and country. It took several days of accompanying him to school, a situation the other children, having started a week earlier, had already adjusted to but the moment came when his teacher decided it was no longer necessary for us to stay with him even though Yasik had peed his pants in class that morning, too shy or language-deprived to seek help with oncoming sikats. Later the school office called to say he had settled.  The battle, my journal says, to accept attending kindergarten as part of his new life was over. Well almost or sufficiently.  We were out walking that weekend and pointed out the school to Yasik. He wrinkled his nose and stuck out his tongue.  But come Monday he went without a fight.

As much as there are risks evident in the Authoritarian, Neglectful, and Permissive parenting styles, there are risks in Authoritative parenting, not always fun to engage with, but sometimes….. The first time Yasik wanted to drive, he and Dave were in the London Drugs parking lot with lots of others.  Yasik figured he could manage it even though Dave warned him he would hit a car but he said, “No. I can drive.”  He had seen Dave doing it a fair few times by then. He climbed in the driver’s seat, got the anti-theft steering wheel club off, and then turned to Dave to check on the next step. “This way Poppa?” Poppa Dave shrugged, reminding him that he knew how to drive.   “Poppa says sorry, you are driving”.  Yasik got the key in and Dave then asked him to think through his next move.  “Look out the back window. You are going to smash that car.”  “Nada, nada, me back.  Me stop down there……  How do you stop? Tell me.” And then Yasik did think and handed Dave the key. “Nada. Poppa drive.”   He figured he might smash the car.  But he had driven cars in video games, soooo.

Learning to ride a two-wheeler bike without training wheels was another of those independence initiatives that surprised me as a parent for its significance. After beating the symmetry out of the training wheels, Yasik made an appeal to Dave to get them replaced.   Big mistake. He should have addressed his appeal to me. Dave knew it was time to remove them, not replace them, to trust biking without these sidekicks.  He took them off and dumped them. Yasik was decidedly disconcerted, thinking that was the end of biking for him.  Dave coaxed him back on the bike, with a moment of hand steadying. With that moment of support, like any kid with access to a bike, Yasik sensed that internal wonder that, Yes! he could handle this balancing act. And he was off, rounding back to show off to me, singing a garbled ABC song.

And then it was September again, several years later: our routine, a tight weekday schedule of university for Dave, elementary school for Yasik and teaching high school for me interspersed with happy holidays and weekend relaxation was fairly established.  We were once again shedding the happy summer freedom and preparing to buckle into the school regime.  Dave had already driven off to his school; I needed to get Yasik to his school before catching the bus to my school.  Only the second day into this regime and I was already falling into ‘Rush, rush, we gotta go’. Yasik hadn’t yet made the ‘Rush, rush, we gotta go’ adjustment. Still holding on to his slow go, he planted a shaky flag: “You can’t run my life.”  I planted an opposing flag: “Yes I run your life until you are 18 and then you run mine”.  Any hint of Authoritative, warm but demanding, open to opinion on family decision making here?

The rush to the tantalizing year 18 speeds up when puberty is activated. One day Yasik found himself confused by the advances of a neighbourhood girl, telling Dave, “I don’t know. I am not a girl” when Dave helped him extricate himself from said girl’s teasing.  Months, weeks, days, nanoseconds later, (I don’t remember nor am I holding tightly to the journal on this one), Yasik was thrilled when a girl from his school called to say she liked him.  Yasik was still naïve enough to leave the phone on speaker. He had been to birthday party she had invited all their class to, but it seems he was singled out by the birthday girl. When we picked him up after the party, face all aglow, Yasik asked us if we liked this particular classmate on a scale from 1 to 100%. We had merely been introduced to her at one recent school function, yet we went with 100%.  He said, “Me too”. Another day, she invited him to her home; he arrived to find he was the special and only guest.  While her mother thought this arrangement was a viable babysitting option, we stewed over possible problems in our hot tub that night, arguing heartily for varying positions.  At the same stage, Dave’s mother was still hauling him out of parties, and my religion managed to keep me in the land of zero personal experience. We decided that if and when Yasik planned a return invite to his home, we would put in an if/only clause that at least one other classmate be invited as well.

For the spring break of Yasik’s last year in elementary school, the school hosted a 3-day camp for the students as long as each student was accompanied by a parent or caregiver. Whether Dave volunteered or not, he was that parent. At the camp Yasik worked toward and received a babysitting certificate. Word of his new skill traveled down the road and soon he was offered a babysitting job for a neighbour, at $5.00 an hour. No longer did he have to work at home for a piddling $5.00 a week. “Fine”, says parent Dave but, “If you want work done for you then, it’s work for work or pay for it”.  I don’t think that was how Yasik initially understood the world of family expectations versus the world of outside employment. We conferenced says unblinking journal and that seemed to work out some misunderstandings.

But there was still lots of fun with Lazer tag, big paint ball tournaments and Dave and Yasik building a paintball web page, sitting down first to pull together a business plan.

Defining Authoritative Parenting

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Δ   Warm/ High Responsiveness/Nurturing

Supportive, in a secure environment, openly affectionate, with a hands-on approach, valuing open and frequent communication in an egalitarian/partnership, discussing decisions with the children, listening and taking into consideration the children’s thoughts, feeling and opinions before making decisions that affect the children, respecting their point of view, encouraging self-expression and autonomy to develop their own identity. Allowing kids to explore with positive reinforcement to encourage confidence, assisting them in resolving problems, while not intrusive or restrictive, flexible, understanding, recognizing that independence should increase with age.

Δ   Demanding/High Demandingness/tough but fair

Assertive, firm but clear, with realistic boundaries set by the parents, teaching them to regulate themselves, consistently guiding them to learn from their mistakes, with achievable and clearly explained regulations and goals. Discipline is not harsh and control is moderate, with the aim of guidance. Offering freedom to make mistakes without judgement, allowing natural consequences to occur and guiding the children through the consequences.

https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/parenting/what-parenting-style-is-right-for-you/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html

https://www.verywellmind.com/parenting-styles-2795072

https://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/style/authoritative-parenting-the-pros-and-cons-according-to-a-child-psychologist/

https://www.healthshots.com/mind/emotional-health/authoritative-parenting-benefits-side-effects/

https://positivepsychology.com/authoritative-parenting/

https://www.joonapp.io/post/what-is-authoritative-parenting-and-is-it-right-for-you

https://parentingscience.com/authoritative-parenting-style/

https://psychcentral.com/health/authoritative-parenting

https://wellspringprevention.org/blog/pros-cons-parenting-styles/

Distilling Authoritative Parenting

Fantastic Antoine Succeeds: experiences in educating children with fetal alcohol syndrome.[i]

This book begins by clarifying that “rich, open, unstructured” parenting is not the best for FAS/FAE children. Note that while high responsiveness may be in that phrase, high demandingness is not.

The parenting handbook: your guide to raising resilient children[ii]

Tania Johnson and Tammy Schamuhn offer some age-appropriate ways to encouraging the growth of resilience:

Ages 5-7 Games that involve strategy, physical activities that require attention, fast-moving ball games, guessing games (Yasik and a friend were drawn in by the I Spy books), imaginary play

Ages 8-12 Organized sports, gross motor games that require attention: jump rope, Lazer tag, paintball (I don’t remember Yasik jumping rope much but check, check, check on Lazer tag and paint ball), playing a musical instrument, dance, (didn’t manage dance and previous posts note how well piano went), brain teasers

Parents who raise mentally strong kids never use these 7 phrases when their children are young.[iii]

To teach children to develop “mental toughness”, “high self-esteem, develop resilience that allows them to stay positive amid challenges and learn from their failures”, avoid the following phrases.1. ‘Calm down!’ Instead let them know it is OK to be upset and then redirect them to something calming. 2. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Instead ask them what they can do about whatever is worrying them. 3. ‘You’ll do fine.’ Because you don’t really know it all will be well, rather encourage them to do their best and then deal with whatever the result is.  4. ‘Don’t ever let me catch you doing that again.’ The reminder here is that if the parent has encouraged honesty in the child, even when the child has done something punishable, an opportunity for growth is more possible.  5. ‘You’re the best!’ Instead of praising the outcome which may not be repeatable, praise children for their process. 6. ‘That’s perfect!’ Again, “praise their effort, rather than the outcome.”   7. ‘You’re making me mad.’ Rather than teaching children how to blame another, teach them by example, to think about how to control their own thoughts, feelings, or actions in frustrating situations.

What Kind of Parent Am I?: self-surveys that reveal the impact of toxic stress and more[iv]

Dr. Letourneau offers a questionnaire you might check out for it offers some concrete ideas in Authoritative parenting. Dr. Letourneau takes parents from this questionnaire to the tennis metaphor of “serve and return” to encourage parents, when the child seeks their engagement, to come back with a response, rather than ignoring the child’s overture, whether to get put to bed, or to laugh together over something that amuses the child.

Is Authoritative Parenting the Best Parenting Style?[v]

Summary

Anita Febiyanti and Yeni Rachmawat stress that parenting styles are impacted by cultural context: individualist and collectivist cultures. They contend that while most parenting theory is western (ie Baumrimd), parenting in practice does not always match theory which endorses authoritative over authoritarian parenting.
But are the children always more successful, reliable and responsible in an authoritative environment? It may depend on how children understand themselves in relation to the society they live in. In an individualist culture, the values are “emotional independence, assertiveness, autonomy, and the need for privacy”.  Parents negotiate; strong control is not acceptable.  In a collectivist culture children “have cultural values where the people are attached to a strong bond and every individual is obligated to maintain group loyalty and focus on the communities in which they live” …. “[prioritizing] socialization, obedience, security, and family integrity”. Parents are strict, with rules and warnings.

How to raise a boy: The first lesson on boundaries starts with the mum — and it’s best drawn as early as possible [vi]

Summary

This article might be seeing things in a context similar to the point being made in Is Authoritative Parenting the Best Parenting Style? though I am not sure that it should be relegated to a cultural context. I think it has universal importance. Pooja Sardana provides this opinion as a mother of a young boy. She begins with the observation that “Managing boundaries is about power in a relationship” and offers Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys: Why Boys Are Different — And How to Help Them Become Happy and Well-Balanced Men as a guide.  She paid attention when she read: “Wherever you see a gang of boys looking unruly, you know the adult leadership is failing”.

Sardana became concerned as she dealt with a son moving through his childhood with ever more effective manipulations starting with tantrums, then employing cuteness tactics. By the time he reached the end of his first decade he was attempting intellectual argument to get what he wanted whether it crossed others’ boundaries or not. She ends the article with “We’ve started building an age-appropriate mechanism that reflects real-life relationships and consequences”.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, healthy little humans.[vii]

Summary

Concerned by how things were working out for her and her daughter, Michaeleen Doucleff, accompanied by her young daughter, visited some more traditional cultures to see how they parented differently from the western model she knew was not working well for her or her daughter. Her interpretation of Authoritative stresses the importance of holding to both sides of the definition.

“So [she says] I consulted Dr. Google and decided that “authoritative” was the “optimal parenting approach” that would help with [my daughter’s] tantrums…. From what I could tell authoritative meant being both “firm and kind”. With this start and from her observations of parenting successes in other cultures, she offers Chapter 10, “Introduction to Parenting Tools” for dealing with tantrums, changing behaviours, and transmitting values.

The 5 Principles of Parenting: your essential guide to raising good humans[viii]

Sonia, a single mother of a 3 year old, 7 year old and a 10 year old tended to over compensate by doing more for her children than might have been good for their individual journeys to self-sufficiency out of guilt that they did not have a second parent. She needed to “let them do for themselves what they can do for themselves” …. even “what they can almost do”, perhaps initially showing them how, providing support or doing it together as necessary and then let them at it.

How to Raise An Adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kids for success[ix]

Summary

Julie Lythcott-Haims was a dean of freshmen at Stanford University. Ergo, she has dealt with a variety of young adults who may or may not have been ready to handle college on their own after high school. She has written a book to help parents help their children do just that. She suggests parents start when their children are young preparing them for ever increasing levels of personal development. She offers some examples of the things that can be expected of children at each age level: ages 2-3 – basic chores and grooming, 4-5 – important names and numbers and safety skills, 6-7 – basic cooking, 8-9 – pride in personal belongings, 10-13- becoming independent like being able to stay at home alone, 14-18 – more advanced skills in cleaning, car maintenance, handling prescriptions, job interviews and cooking full meals.

But do so with support. She advises parents to first ask themselves whether or not the directives are about them rather than about their children so encourages parents to notice who their children are, what they love and are good at, not what the parents love, are good at or think is the best path for their children. “Know when to push forward, when to pull back. Prepare them for hard work. Don’t do too much for them.”

The authoritative parenting style: An evidence-based guide[x]

Summary

Headlining with questions, Gwen Dewar defines Authoritative parenting as combining warmth with setting limits leading to successful outcomes in child-raising, setting it apart from the other styles because it is a middle path between Authoritarian and Permissive.

While she does consider pros and cons like the place of culture which she dismisses as likely a matter of semantics, she sees the Authoritative parenting style as leading “to better emotional, cognitive and behavioral outcomes”. It is the style that combines warmth with limits. Authoritative parents “want kids to develop self-discipline, maturity, and a respect for others”.

To help parents take on Authoritative parenting style, Gwen Dewar provides a set of statements, with examples, to try on for size – check her site out if you interested in asking which of these statements ring true for you in your parenting?

She also asks the question I ask: is it possible to be a purist authoritative parent in every situation?

Dewar reminds the reader that, although it is important to remember that one size does not fit all, in studies across cultures, one point remained consistent with Authoritative parenting: “[w]hen their children misbehaved, they talked with them, and explained the reasons for the rules” to “think – constructively and non-selfishly – about how their behavior affects others” for which she uses the term ‘inductive discipline’.

Listening Well: bringing stories of hope to life[xi]

Heather Morris offers helpful tips for good listening skills.

Influence of Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive, and the Uninvolved Parenting

Styles on the Reading Attitudes of Students in Anambra State, Nigeria[xii]

This study compared the reading attitudes of children from each of the parenting styles and found that authoritative parents fostered the most positive reading development in their children.

The Parenting Handbook: your guide to raising resilient children[xiii]. 

Specific To Adoption           

Attaching in adoption: practical tools for today’s parents[xiv]

Summary

Deborah Gray endorses Authoritative parenting’s high structure and high nurture for adoptees because she says that most parents of adoptees are parenting kids who are “emotionally younger than their chronological ages” … “Recognizing that children have missed dependable nurture, parents are supplying what was missed”. Gray cites parents, who with lots of hugs, first explained to their children and then expected from the children that they must stay close to them until they understood who they were attached to now that they belonged to a family. And until they understood where the sadness within comes from, not from lack of love in the adoptive family nor a lack of material things or food, but from past grief their now family would be seeking to help them deal with the grief by offering nurture and guidelines. This book ENDORSES hugs, snuggles, and kisses.

Parenting Adopted Teenagers: advice for the adolescent years[xv]

Rachel Staff brings forward the same point regarding focusing on the developmental age rather than the chronological age of an adoptee.  They need to be in a safe, structured and nurturing environment, ergo high structure, high nurture, aka, authoritative.

Methods Of Care For Children Living In Orphanages In Saudi Arabia (An Exploratory Field Study)[xvi]  

Summary

This article demonstrates that interest in care of orphans/adoptees is global rather than only western, and more specifically, that Saudi Arabia is trying for healthy parenting styles for children in orphanages by adopting “one or more of the following five methods of care when treating children: attention vs. non-attention, equality vs. discrimination, kindness vs. cruelty, acceptance vs. rejection and democracy vs. authoritarianism”.

These children have “lost their parents and could not be taken care of by other family members and those who were born out of wedlock and have been abandoned (unknown lineage)”. The children live together in a home with one caregiver in shift rotation and its attendant weaknesses), with the intention of providing an environment of more intimate, safe, loving care “guiding the child into adulthood”. The caregivers usually have sufficient life experience or a “mother’s (caregiver’s) instincts and emotions in dealing with children” as they are between 31 and 40; they are also required to have a bachelor’s degree and continuing education in caregiving is offered to them.

8 Ways to Bond with your Adopted Child[xvii]

This site sounds like Authoritative parenting to me!

Child Welfare Information Gateway[xviii]

Child Welfare Information Gateway connects adopters to trusted resources on the child welfare continuum. We provide publications, research, and learning tools selected by experts to support thriving children, youth, families, and communities.

Sharing of an adoptive parent’s experience of key themes …[xix]

Some of the key themes to be aware of when seeking to be both high in responsiveness and high in demandingness:

Loss: Adopted children mourn the loss of their birth parents

Rejection: Adopted children may often feel rejected by their birth

Guilt/Shame: Adopted children often believe there is something intrinsically wrong with them

Grief: There is no ritual to grieve the loss of a birth parent

Identity: Adopted children often feel incomplete and at a loss regarding their identity because of gaps in their genetic and family history

Intimacy: Many adopted children, have difficulty attaching to members of their new family

Mastery and Control: Adopted children sometimes engage in power struggles with their adoptive parents or other authority figures in an attempt to master the loss of control they experienced in adoption

The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child[xx].

Summary

In this book Barbara Cummins Tantrum offers guidance when parenting a traumatized foster or adopted child.  Come into the relationship seeking to “avoid power struggles”, even if the child is using lying as self-protection.  As do most authors I have read on this subject, Tantrum also advocates for routine, reflective listening in whatever way allows children to trust they are being heard, and going into calm mode first before engaging with traumatized children. She warns that these children may have sleep issues coming from a lack of a sense of safety.

Baby We Were Meant For Each Other: in praise of adoption[xxi]

Summary

Scott Simon is for affirming that adoptors offer the best support to their children not by avoiding/dismissing struggles but rather helping their children learn from their struggles.

He also makes the point to adoptors who may feel they don’t quite have the right to claim to be the ‘real’ parents that they will be the ones not only to love, but to change the diapers, get food on the table, take their children to the doctor and offer their children “A reason to come home. …”

The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.[xxii]

Summary

Chapter 10, “The Kindness of Children” provides an example of a child who was not at his chronological age when he was adopted. In some ways the child did act appropriately for his age but presented as a much younger child in other respects.  Dr. Perry describes this developmental delay as “splintered development” due to deprivation/lack of stimulation of some brain regions. I appreciate and find hope in the phrase ‘or had not yet’. Dr. Perry finishes the sentence off with: “or had not yet received enough stimulation to make up for the earlier neglect”. Dr. Perry encouraged the parents to interact with the child at his developmental level. He talked with them about the impact the child’s emotional stress would have had on his development. With this explanation, Dr. Perry aimed to reduce the parents’ fears that they were “babying” him.

Dr. Perry also tells us about a foster mother who babied children who had experienced trauma and were not at their chronological ages.  She believed in holding them and rocking them long after they had left infancy.

“These children had never received the repeated, patterned physical nurturing needed to develop a well-regulated and responses stress response system. The had never learned that they were loved and safe; …”  “A foundational principle of brain development is that neural systems organize and become functional in a sequential manner”.

What Type of Parent are You? The 4 Types of Parenting Styles Behind The Decisions You Make[xxiii]

Summary

This is a good article to round off the Resources section as baseline and pragmatic information is presented from recognizing that most parents will get their guidance from family, friends and professionals to recognizing that parents’ parenting practices will slide back and forth across the parenting spectrum as the family’s needs change. The writer/s ask parents to ask themselves both what values guide them and what goals direct them.  They understand that these guiding principles are impacted both by internal direction as well as by how they want to be seen as parents. And we are assured that research shows moving across the parenting spectrum may not always be problematic for a family.

Making daily or making more over-reaching parenting moves will be considering “genetic influences, social environment, parental income level, parental education level, the number of active/engaged parental figures and the developmental and/or physical needs of the child” and cultural value.

And then there is this

Here is a situational irony: While anyone can see this is the parenting style loving parents should follow, I, who loves my son, find myself the least engaged in studying it.  It is Goldilocks’s choice, the one any loving parents who love their children would choose. Either because I have an ingrained suspicion of anyone’s capacity to be this good in their relationship to their children; Or because I am jealous of those who can jump out of bed each morning and maintain Authoritative parenting for the 16 hours of that day; Or I am making too much of what I read of this style; Or I just wish I had known more about it and engaged with it more than I did.  Really don’t know.  I do know that the conversation we should have had with Yasik about whether to move to the country or stay in the neighbourhood he had grown up in we did not think was necessary to share with him.  Our parents never asked our opinion about moving; that was not considered our business. One particular move our parents made got me off a path to problems but set my brother on a path in the other direction. An article I cannot now locate offered a drawback to Authoritative parenting for families living in a “low socio-economic background as the children might be exposed to more violence and aggression and the parents need to be strict with their rules and regulations to establish restrictions on them” (Gfroerer et al., 2004; Rothrauff, Cooney, & An, 2009).

Some writer among the above ended with:  be sure to give yourself grace when you make mistakes, too.

Footnotes

[i] Fantastic Antoine Succeeds: experiences in educating children with fetal alcohol syndrome.  Ed. Judith Kleinfeld and Siobhan Wescott, University of Alaska Press, 1993, 13

[ii] Johnson,Tania, R.Psych, and Tammy Schamuhn, R. Psych. The parenting handbook: your guide to raising resilient children  Barlow Books, 2024, 26,27

[iii] Huddleston, Tom Jr Parents who raise mentally strong kids never use these 7 phrases when their children are young. . Apr 16 2023, https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/Adoption/FMfcgzGtwWGdxtvgqRbFdKVwwWqTbnWN

[iv] Letourneau, Dr. Nicole. What Kind of Parent Am I?: self-surveys that reveal the impact of toxic stress and more  Dundurn Press, 2018, 51,52-53.

[v] Febiyanti, Anita and Yeni Rachmawat. Is Authoritative Parenting the Best Parenting Style?  Department of Early Childhood Education, School of Postgraduate, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia *Corresponding author. Email: anitafebiyanti@upi.edu Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 538 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Early Childhood Education (ICECE 2020)

[vi] Sardana, Pooja. How to raise a boy: The first lesson on boundaries starts with the mum — and it’s best drawn as early as possible  Nov 19, 2024 22:48 IST https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/how-to-raise-a-boy-the-first-lesson-on-boundaries-starts-with-the-mum-and-its-best-drawn-as-early-as-possible-9675420/

[vii] Doucleff, Michaeleen. Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, healthy little humans.   Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2022, 2,3, 198-200

[viii] Pressman, Dr. Aliza. The 5 Principles of Parenting: your essential guide to raising good humans   Simon Element, 2024, 34-36

[ix]Lythcott-Haims, Julie.  How to Raise An Adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kids for success    Holt Paperbacks, 2016, 167-169, 218-225

[x] Dewar, Gwen. The authoritative parenting style: An evidence-based guide   Ph.D., 2010 – 2024  https://www.apa.org/act/resources/fact-sheets/parenting-styles

[xi] Morris, Heather. Listening Well: bringing stories of hope to life  St. Martins Publishing Group, 2022

[xii] Echedom, Anthonia U. (Ph.D), Tochukwu Victor Nwankwo & Evangeline U. Nwankwo.  Influence of Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive, and the Uninvolved Parenting Styles on the Reading Attitudes of Students in Anambra State, Nigeria  Journal of Library and Information Sciences December 2018, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 1-25 ISSN 2374-2372 (Print) 2374-2364 (Online) DOI: 10.15640/jlis.v6n2a1 https://doi.org/10.15640/jlis.v6n2a1

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tochukwu-Nwankwo/publication/330076069_Influence_of_Authoritative_Authoritarian_Permissive_and_the_Uninvolved_Parenting_Styles_on_the_Reading_Attitudes_of_Students_in_Anambra_State_Nigeria/links/5c2bdae6299bf12be3a7223a/Influence-of-Authoritative-Authoritarian-Permissive-and-the-Uninvolved-Parenting-Styles-on-the-Reading-Attitudes-of-Students-in-Anambra-State-Nigeria.pdf

[xiii] Johnson, Tania , R. Psych and Tammy Schamuhn, R. Psych.  The Parenting Handbook: your guide to raising resilient children.  Barlow Books, 2024

[xiv] Gray, Deborah D.  Attaching in adoption: practical tools for today’s parents.  Perspectives Press, Inc., 2002, 28-29, 54,61-64,191, 224-5,229-231,

[xv] Staff,Rachel. Parenting Adopted Teenagers: advice for the adolescent years.  Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016, 25-26

[xvi] Ashaalan, Latifah, Ibtisam Al-zeiby.  Methods Of Care For Children Living In Orphanages In Saudi Arabia (An Exploratory Field Study)  Journal of International Education Research – First Quarter 2015 Volume 11, Number 1 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1051139.pdf

[xvii] 8 Ways to Bond with your Adopted Child Adoption Choices of Colorado  Jul 8, 2019

[xviii] Child Welfare Information Gateway Child Welfare Information Gateway https://www.childwelfare.gov/

[xix] Sharing of an adoptive parent’s experience of key themes …

Abba Adoptions  https://www.abbaadoptions.co.za › docs › adopt…

[xx] Cummins Tantrum, Barbara.  The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child.  North Atlantic books, 2020, 71, 85, 109, 193-197, 233-235

[xxi] Simon, Scott. Baby We Were Meant For Each Other: in praise of adoption.  Random House, 2010 57, 166-8

[xxii] Perry, Bruce D.  MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.   Basic Books, 2017, 100-103, 152, 241-58.

[xxiii] What Type of Parent are You? The 4 Types of Parenting Styles Behind The Decisions You Make  https://maisonvieneworleans.com/what-type-of-parent-are-you-the-4-types-of-parenting-styles/

Post #13 C Permissive/ Indulgent/Laissez-faire/  Passive Parenting style

Depicting Permissive Parenting

I was still trying to sleep at 7:30 am the morning I started this post, the retiree’s right, I believe.   I think, Brodie, our Rottie/Shepard-cross hasn’t read the policy which lays that point out quite clearly. He’d just heard potentially exciting noises coming from the trail across the street.  Not really aware that going out the backdoor doesn’t connect him to the front yard, he wanted me to help him check things out. With absolutely no regard for my rights, he confidently strode into our bedroom, came around to my side, nosed my bottom and then sat back on his haunches, expectant that I would now jump obediently out of bed to let him outside. I didn’t roll over, so Plan B. He started whining. 20 minutes of intermittent whining, stalking out of the bedroom, returning to whine and I caved.  Ok, so he did have to pee, but he was out there to warn off potential intruders. Brodie got to indulge the joy of threatening barking. I got to deal with the fallout before the neigbourhood noise patrol might begin shaking their annoyed heads.  I know, I know, any good dog training book I’ve read says we should not give into our dog’s whining or allow him to learn that whining is a way to get what he wants.

And are there any parallels here with how Dave and I might have parented Yasik?  Anything I have read about Permissive parenting might suggest there is.  Actually, there are likely many, many more media sources on Permissive Parenting than on lax parenting of our puppies.

Roger that, let’s get back to seeing what the journal recorded of this aspect of our parenting. Surprisingly, at least to me, I don’t have many journal entries pointing to our experiences with Permissive parenting. Not that we can’t find ourselves often enough in the definition of Permissive parenting.  Just the other night, on a call to Yasik, Dave called him by Dave’s younger brother’s name, something he has done many times over the years.  He mixes Yasik up with his younger brother both because of what a brother signifies and because this brother was one of his closest friends growing up.   Hearing the mix-up, though I have heard it many times before, I ran for note paper as I am now looking at the definition for Permissive parents, that of seeing or wanting to see the child in the light of a friend/buddy relationship rather than in the light of the parent-child relationship. Of course, now, though it is a slip of the tongue, it is also, as these two adults interact, a compliment.

For me the, at times, razor sharp line between playful interaction with my child, wanting him to see me as his friend rather than see me as taking on the business of mothering, began barely a half hour after our driver turned the van back toward Moscow. For Dave it came more apparent later as he and Yasik explored the wonders of the computer together.  For neither of us would this, any more than any of the other parenting styles, have been a conscious parenting style selection.

Yasik was sitting in Dave’s lap but the translator in the front seat continued with Yasik’s immediate care, feeding him while telling us that he was not used to being in a vehicle and might throw food up.  She then showed us this sort of pat-a-cake game. Dave took it over as the front seat-back seat stretch was awkward.  Yasik was getting into the game, relaxing away the tension of saying good-bye to the orphanage.  Initiating is not usually my auto-response when I am in a new situation, but soon I too tried the pat-a-cake slapping hands game.  Four-and-a-half-year-old Yasik, in the middle of a vehicle full of strangers, most of whom are wrapping him in happy attention, was by now feeling the Russian version of Yeah! Alright! This is Cool!  Translation, maybe Yasik’s emotional dial was swinging a bit out of control. There was more haphazard but stronger sting to the slap.  I have never been comfortable saying “No” to much of anything, let alone the first half hour of excited play in my first day with my son.   I allowed the slapping to continue until Dave thought it had gone too far.

Once we felt Yasik was settled into our lifestyle, we set about honouring the suggestion given to us at the orphanage to encourage Yasik’s interest in music.   It was evident watching his wonder listening to music via headphones on the return flight from Moscow.  It was evident watching him soothe himself, alone on the living room couch, rocking and singing songs of his childhood. He loved music. Did we have a rock star or a Mozart in the making? Whatever, we were going to follow up on the orphanage’s directive.  As far as we knew that meant getting him into piano lessons. And for the first while Yasik seemed quite happy with the music lessons, admittedly, maybe more so when he got to play the drums in the class. Never thought to ask the little guy for suggestions.  At his recital, he seemed proud to be dressed in long pants and a nice shirt, playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in front of an audience. Dave and I – well memory balks here – I was in tears.  The practices leading up to this recital had been less tear-inducing, more frustration and laughter inducing as Yasik would flop his head down on the keyboard when asked to hit the keys. Still and all, we were giving him the opportunity to develop a skill we believed had roots somewhere within him.

We were ‘giving him the opportunity’ by bribing him with an allowance. That, and threats always the backup.  Threats and bribes – two side of the same coin? ^[i]

The child will perform for the immediate benefit or pressure, sure.  And we were heaping praise on his efforts as well.  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star never sounded so amazing to my heart. We believed that we were giving him every opportunity to find his place in the world.

So why was Yasik not embracing the opportunity with the appreciation and thrill we had imagined. The only other little boy in the group seemed proud to be learning to pay the piano. Yasik continued to moan and groan and flop around on the piano seat through the mere 10 to 15 minutes of piano practice before school.  I continued to push, bribing and threatening to contain his conflict with piano practice.  That last sentence might lead you to ask why I put this story in the Permissive parenting post rather than the Authoritarian parenting post for it is a bit of a stretch to see it as illustrating one of the traits in the definition of Permissive parenting:  These parents mostly allow their kids to do what they want and offer limited guidance or direction. They prefer to avoid conflict and will often acquiesce to their children’s pleas at the first sign of distress.^[ii]

The journal records one particularly bad lesson after a week of sketchy practice (some adjustments for the essential story).   I have not recorded (in itself a comment) how Yasik might have been feeling, but I image relief that the class was over and he was going home to TV, computer time or maybe the freedom to go down to the park to play with his friends.  I came away from the awkward class hour feeling self-pity at my unrewarded struggles to get him to practice, probably the driver of the next few minutes. I asked him if he wanted to quit piano.

“Yes”, he said. Groan.

“We’ll have to get rid of your piano you know.”

“Ok.”, this from a kid who had shown signs in the apartment in Moscow of the hoarding trait sometimes noticed in kids who’ve spent time in an orphanage.   I guess the need to hoard was no longer a trigger; maybe competition with his cousin would trigger him.

“We’ll give it to Kyle”, who a couple of years later showed roughly the same interest in piano as Yasik.   “OK.” he said. I’m dead.

On to the next manipulation. I turned off North Road at Foster Ave. to loop around and return to the building housing the piano school.  I told Yasik, now showing some concern, that I was disappointed in his choice. No comment.

But if it was his choice, then “OK, you can quit if that is what you want – but you have to tell Mrs. B. We are going back to the school to catch her before she closes up.”

“OK.”  Maybe it’s for the best I even thought. No more hassle. But I hated to have to tell Mrs B. I hate disappointing authority.  And what if it was a chance he’d never have again.

And into this downward-spirally dream came an inspiration. I had just run a yellow light near Lougheed Mall and he’d told me to be careful.  He had less confidence in my driving abilities than in his father’s.

“OK. If you quit, I can too.  I’m just going to quit driving.  I’m not good at it.  It’s too hard.  We will park in the mall and then we will walk up to the school. You go in to tell Mrs. B. you are quitting and then we will leave the car and walk home.  Dad can come and get the car.”    It was now becoming dark, cold and raining.  We bundled up, got out and started to walk. Seriously.

He was saying we can’t do this.  I said we can and we marched.

We walked almost two blocks when he said, “I was just fooling.  I won’t quit.”

And I said, “OK, I’ll drive.”  I grabbed him and hugged him.  He was embarrassed in the street but I know he was happy for the hug and kiss, and relieved that we were finally just going home.  For a plus, when we reached Lougheed Mall, I let him drive (sitting in my lap of course) around the empty parking lot.   Manipulation or not, I wondered at the time.

I was holding Yasik to piano playing not in a direct authoritarian, no revolt-tolerated plan of action, but with bribes and threats in ‘his best interest’.  Cecile David-Weill, in Parents Under the Influence: words of wisdom from a former bad mother ( Other Press, 2020, 57) wonders if a parent might push piano lessons on his or her child to give the child an opportunity the parent felt was missing from his or her own childhood, making the push for lessons “all about her, her own upbringing and her own regrets, rather than about her son and his interests, which don’t even cross her mind.”

Is it possible that both Authoritarian parenting and Permissive parenting come from a place of parent-driven choices for the child, one coming at it from direct demands, the other from threats and bribes? Do Permissive parents really not want to get in their child’s way?  Do they think that a softer approach will get them what they want?  Expected obedience/threats or bribes, are they too just two sides of another coin?

Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising at Stanford University, has written How to Raise an Adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success because she has seen the impact of over-parenting on young people.  

Some students bided their time until they could finally get out from under their parents…. Some expressed anger at their parents. I read the resignation in their eyes.  I sensed their bewilderment at the dawning realization they were living within a landscape full of possibility unavailable to them because they were on a leash and led down a path of their parents’ making – that they’d spent years learning how to reach for and achieve their parents’ ambitious dreams but were not allowed to dream dreams of their own…. Sure there’s the chance that all of this striving for perfection, even in a field the student doesn’t think she likes, will by some measure turn out to be “worth it” in the long run, or that a kid who never mastered anything in particular will later regret being allowed to quit piano.… I’m focusing on what happens when harsh, not-necessarily-fitting expectations have been imposed on children and they have lived up to those expectations.  A great many students experiencing such things sought mental health counseling.  Some dropped out of school for a while. Some fell completely apart. ^[iii]    

Of course this piece seems to fit more precisely into the post on Authoritarian parenting, unless we are flipping a coin here between direct commands and threats or bribes.

Have we ever resolved the question of whether or not it is problematic for little boys to play with guns or how much TV or computer time is damning? Media regularly address one or the other of the concerns, and regularly we hear rumblings the government is going to apply restrictions in the ‘best interests of the child’.  So was it cute or worrisome to come into our living room to find our young man sitting on the couch with his little hockey stick, popping off cars passing by on the street. Little boys, they say, turn anything from carrot sticks to Lego blocks into guns.  I went with being disconcerted while Dave was tempering. Yasik had become what I felt was too interested in shooting bad men.  Yet if we truly believed shooting cars with a hockey stick would lead to a life of crime, our response was lame. Dave and I tried to child-proof the remote with whatever techniques were available at the time, but Yasik figured out how to get all the channels back.

Until the movies came out or until the night I came into Yasik’s bedroom at the end of an evening as I routinely had done since his first nights in our home, to read him to sleepiness, I had been reading him books that progressed from one-sentence per page stories to the magical Harry Potters.

One such night Harry gets into some trouble and Yasik said, “He should have just lied to save himself.” What does a formerly god-fearing, morals-valuing mother say to that?

With all the backbone of someone who hates conflict, I muttered that I didn’t think Harry lied.

Yasik came right back with, “Sure he does.”

Two pages or so later, Harry definitely lies and Yasik said, “See Mom.” There is no record in the journal of any morally-guiding comeback from me.

The Harry Potter movies started to come out when Yasik was around 12; about the same time, for whatever impressions Yasik had picked up, he had come to the decision that the nightly bed time book routine must come to a halt.  Sleeping in a top bunk he shared on the weekends with our client on the bottom bunk, he had barricaded himself or snugged himself up there by draping blankets over the edge of the bunk’s sidings.  He popped his head over his parapet to tell me I didn’t need to read to him anymore. And that was that.  I accepted his decision with hardly a whimper.

Nightly bedtime stories with me were replaced, as was true for all his friends, with computer games, usually set up by his dad for him and for his friends.  I noted in my journal that I wondered (with the bemused word ‘actually’ fronting ‘wondered’) if gaming is like whiling the hours away reading which suggests that however much I may have tried to shrug off Yasik’s gun toting and game playing, I did feel, and at times muttered to Dave, that it might be deleterious to a healthy moral upbringing.

It is less clear in the journal whether we showered Yasik with too many things; certainly he had everything any of his friends had, but was that not par for the course for a middle-class lifestyle?

So let’s go back to those ‘mutterings’. They might segue into a peek under the covers of our marriage.  Which could be a somewhat misleading metaphor.  Rather than where your mind might head if on auto-pilot, focus on the blanket covering our marriage bed, flopping about as the two individuals beneath each seek a don’t-go-to-bed-in-anger relationship and a good night’s sleep.  This to say that if Permissive parenting style defined any part of our parenting, it was more often than not expressed by one or the other of us, not often by both of us together, ergo the image of the blanket covering marital tensions beneath it: Good Cop/Bad Cop parenting.

Starting right from that first hour as parents in the van. Even as Yasik was hitting and later biting, I was reluctant to say “Nyet!” Dave did say “Nyet!” when he thought Yasik was crossing a line.  Within a few weeks, Dave felt he was looking like the bad guy and being rejected for “Nyet!” was coming from him more often than from me.

One evening in that first September as parents, we were taking a walk before bed.  I was holding Yasik’s hand to help him balance as he goose-stepped on top of a small, stone property boundary. I was not paying much attention but perhaps I was letting Yasik stray onto private property.  Dave was disturbed by it. In frustration he said so to me because once again saying “Nyet!” put him in a less favourable light with Yasik.  That metaphoric marriage blanket settled into an uncomfortable silence.

Parents Under the Influence author, Cecile David-Weill, suggests that infants/children develop a “sixth sense” of their caregivers’ “state of mind” and “may feel responsible for the tensions around them”.^[iv]  Did Yasik sense the tension between his parents? Had he become adept at sensing tensions around him very early in life?  Maybe, for when we got home to bathe him, he turned very specifically to Dave. And then they were checking out the wonders of Toy Story together before bed.  The interactions within a family are five minutes of this and then, spin, and it is five minutes of something totally different. A fine line between fun and tension, yet something to take note of.

We were each pulling for our share of the blanket when Yasik needed to go ‘sikats’ on his own.  I wanted to help that little penis point in the right direction but Dave felt Yasik was ready to practice aiming on his own.  I think Yasik did figure out where to point.

It wasn’t all awkwardness or tension as Dave and I tugged for cover over permissiveness or strictness under the marriage blanket.  There were funny moments too.  Times like one afternoon. Dave had come skulking around when he felt I was being too easy on Yasik for an impudence or tantrum. All 40 some inches and 40 lbs. were trying to stand up to Dave and I. When it ended with Yasik crying, Dave turned and went back to the computer set up in the kitchen. I followed him and Dave, with his back still to me, said, “And I don’t care what you think”.  Then he wheeled around and demanded, “What do you think?”  Partly delay tactic, partly not knowing what to say and wanting to avoid conflict or feeling the moment was not right for talk, I returned with a confused, “I haven’t thought anything yet”.

In sum, Dave and I concluded that he expected too much and I expected too little; this was probably in terms of differing priorities because I suspect that while Dave wanted Yasik to learn to behave appropriately and respectfully, I wanted him to do well at school. Depending on which priority was being tested by Yasik, one or the other of us donned the cop uniform we felt necessary for the moment concerned. Sometimes Permissive, sometimes Authoritarian?     

But all this high-minded talk of priorities can get very personal and somewhat less the look of child-centered parenting. At the time it felt to Dave like the two of us are siding against him.   When Yasik and Dave were on the computer, I felt like I was left out.  But did we see more clearly what the problem and solution were? Not really – we weren’t able to step outside ourselves to look at the problem.  The journal suggests I did realize I had a husband who was fascinated with how things work and what they lead to when they work; at that time, it was the computer which combines technology and art potential and it kept one step ahead of him. Besides which he was learning things we all needed to know.  I got a chance at a good education later in life and I valued it as one of life’s highest gifts.  We also had a young son who wanted our attention most of the time even if his emotions degenerated into hitting out in over excited play or anger, responses that should not be excused or ignored.

John Brooks and his wife Erica dealt with angry outbursts from their daughter and came at this struggle in ways similar to Dave and mine:

Feeling like miserable failures. Erica and I turned on each other.  We came from very different parenting models. Erika’s immigrant parents had always been strict and controlling, like their parents, whereas mine were fairly laid-back, like Ward and June Cleaver. Erika accused me of being too easy on Casey while I felt that Erika needed to give her a longer leash. She believed firmly-and rightly so- that we need a united front in complete alignment against such a willful child and she was ever watchful for any threat to the alliance.^[v]

Was he getting spoiled as Dave suggested? How is ‘getting spoiled’ even defined?  Amy Anderson came from a family of 10 while her husband, Chip, was ostensibly an only child. They started their life together with only his step-son but later added two they produced together. To Amy allowing their children choice in school lunches seemed overkill whereas Chip couldn’t see what the big deal was. So one kid wants a choice of mustard, pickle or cheese and the next one doesn’t?  Not an issue unless there wasn’t time or resources for that kind of choice when 10 lunches needed to be made. ^[vi]

The one explanation that cannot be countenanced in a question of becoming spoiled by our Permissive parenting is the accusation that a child is being manipulative.  One evening when Yasik was a few years older, my journal says ‘Last night after Yasik worked on manipulating me by saying, “You guys never play with me.” I agreed to play a board game with him. Dave came in to say, “No, we should teach him not to say ‘Never’ and guilt trip us. He should know to just straight out ask to play”.

The common thought, most of my adult life has been that children are capable of manipulation. Recently I have noticed writers take a paragraph or two to caution against that assumption for a child needs a developed pre-frontal cortex to manage the executive function I suggested he was employing, something not operating until the child is no longer a child.  Check out the addresses in footnote #vii for more on that inappropriate accusation of a child’s tantrum, a tantrum being the child’s way to express frustration.^[vii]

Dave and I have always been determined not to give up and close the door on trust of each other so after some stewing time we would talk about issues of expecting too much or too little and how to give Yasik more independence because we do believe in not taking our disagreements to bed, lucky for the blanket.

So what did we have in the end? A tenderhearted man who was frustrated by feelings of guilt and fear of being left out, a son who was just being a kid, playing with those he loved, and a woman who struggled between a daydream and reality, wanting to enjoy picture perfect and knowing there are realities, some of which I accepted and some I didn’t. Work and school’s priority I understood, but Dave and Yasik wanting time on the computer to play computer games, not so much. Dave understood playing on computer but a kid having a tantrum, not so acceptable.

Defining Permissive Parenting

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Δ   High Responsiveness: warm, loving, non-controlling, accepting, relaxed, indulgent, affirmative, involved, but not in a traditional way.   In carrying out their responsibility for their children, these parents are more likely to treat their children as friends rather than acting as authority figures with their children who need discipline. They communicate openly, are highly involved in their children’s lives, going to great lengths to fulfill their children’s desires whenever possible, sometimes at their own expense.

Δ   Low Demandingness: offer limited, inconsistent guidance or direction, have a hard time setting limits with the children, usually with minimal expectations, structure or rules either not set or rarely enforced giving in against their better judgment when their children get upset so as not to disappoint or upset the children, non-punitive. These low levels of expectation seldom result in using discipline. The children are allowed to exercise full autonomy, being left to explore the world all by themselves and decide for themselves. Not wanting to say “No” or disappoint their children, they support their children almost blindly, allowing them to push boundaries and “get away with” poor behavior. Children can avoid punishment by begging because permissive parents are lenient and forgiving. This can be the result of the parents having grown up with an Authoritarian parenting style in their own household and not wanting to put their children through it.

The parents are often liberal, middle-class professionals, thus are rewarded for taking initiative, being self-directed, and assertive in their jobs.  These parents encourage their children to have those qualities as well by rewarding independence and self-reliance.

Sites referred to for the definitions are in footnote #viii^[viii]:

Distilling Permissive Parenting

Good Cop/Bad Cop

Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents   Deborah D. Gray deals with it early on in the book for it may lead to an unhealthy parent-child relationship which might feel good to a child initially but may lead to a sense of insecurity in the child.^[ix]

Some parents find themselves replaying the “good cop, bad cop” style that their parents used…. But for parents having a hard time connecting with children, playing a role as the mushy confidante can seem appealing… In portraying one parent as the “bad cop”, parents are telling their child that one parent is insensitive, unfair, and inadequate…. The logical conclusion for the child is that the tough parent is not safe for attachment. At the same time, the parent who is the “soft touch” does not seem strong or effective to a child. If children … know that they are themselves in charge, not their parents… [t]his makes them anxious.

Bribes/Threats/Manipulation

When Is a Child’s Reward Actually a Bribe? Reinforcing motivation and self-esteem versus manipulative behavior.^[x]

Rewards are a positive consequence for your child’s behavior that has already occurred…. Bribes, however, are persuasion-based offers of something in advance of the moment to stop your child’s current negative behaviors. Rewards are meant to encourage motivation and reinforce positive behavior. Bribes, on the other hand, can undermine a child’s intrinsic motivation and lead to entitlement or manipulative behavior.

Manipulative Parents^[xi]

In most cases, manipulative parents refer to parents who use covert psychological methods to control the child’s activities and behavior in such a way as to prevent the child from becoming an independent adult apart from their control.

Emotional manipulation by parents: love withdrawal, guilt induction, silent treatment, gaslighting.

Fear exploitation: coercion, humiliation, social comparison, financial manipulation

Permissive Parenting Pros and Cons

Permissive parenting: An evidence-based guide^[xii].

Permissive parents don’t present themselves as authority figures or role models. They might use reason or manipulation to get what they want. But they avoid exercising overt power.

The positive and negative effects of permissive parenting

…[O]n the positive side, children with permissive parents are better off than kids whose parents are uninvolved. In addition, kids raised by permissive caregivers tend to have high self-esteem, and they may be more resourceful than kids raised by uninvolved or authoritarian parents.

But, on the negative side, there is also a lot of research supporting the claim that “indulged” kids tend to be less self-disciplined and less responsible than are children with authoritative parents.

But there are exceptions.

For example, on the one hand, it’s not clear that permissiveness is always inferior to authoritative parenting. Several studies, conducted in Spain and Latin America, have reported no differences between teenagers raised by permissive or authoritative parents.

Why do different studies report conflicting results? It may be that parenting styles have different effects depending on the local culture. But it’s probably also a question of methodology.

So by using different screening tools, researchers are, in effect, defining “permissive” parenting very differently. Is one definition better than the other? Not really. It doesn’t matter how we label people — not as long as we understand each other’s definitions. 

I think the important takeaway from all studies is that “ignoring bad behavior” is generally linked with suboptimal child outcomes. By contrast, being very controlling or bossy — like insisting that a teenager do every task in a specific order — isn’t associated with the best child outcomes.

In defense of permissiveness

… Baumrind’s permissive parents don’t sound like people who routinely let their kids get away with antisocial behavior — not, at any rate, behavior that I find objectionable, like deliberate rudeness, or violations of other people’s rights and feelings.

Instead, Baumrind’s permissive parents sound more like radical democrats. People who believe that parents and kids should exercise equal power.

… I wonder if the evidence against permissive parenting is really evidence against a relatively extreme, “anything goes” type of permissiveness.

… The adolescents who scored as being the best-adjusted — and the most supportive of prosocial values — were the ones whose parents rejected punishment and scolding as a means of disciplining kids… And as I’ve argued elsewhere, kids are more likely to develop as innovative, creative, critical thinkers when we let them experiment and tinker. If you want to raise a scientist, let your child ask offbeat questions, get dirty, and take things apart.

The Psychology Behind Different Types of Parenting Styles^[xiii]

… [A] growing body of research suggests that parenting’s influence on the children’s psychosocial adjustment can also vary as a function of the cultural context….

[F]urther, research findings regarding change in the parental dimensions of warmth and strictness across generations suggest a tendency toward an increase in parental warmth and a decrease in parental strictness…, although it is not clear which specific practices of warmth and strictness are changing across generations….

The present study examines cross-generational differences in parental practices …. Overall, results showed cross-generational differences in parental practices [showed][t]he indulgent style (warmth but not strictness) was related to equal or even better results on psychosocial adjustment outcomes than authoritative parenting (warmth and strictness), ….

Nevertheless, findings from the present study do not agree with some evidence from other cultural contexts where parental strictness is a necessary component of parental socialization in order to obtain children with good psychosocial adjustment.

Respectful Parenting Is Not Permissive Parenting^[xiv]

These parents might worry that their child’s spirit will be crushed or she’ll stop loving or trusting them if there is a conflict of will. They coax or distract their child into the behavior they want (or out of the behavior they don’t want) rather than risk being the mean guy who says “no”.

“Basically, most parents are afraid of disciplining their children because they are afraid of the power struggle. They are afraid of overpowering the child, afraid they will destroy the child’s free will and personality. This is an erroneous attitude. “         –Magda Gerber

Permissive Parenting Is Non-Intervention Because of Fear!^[xv]

1. The parent’s own fear of not being loved!
2. The parent’s own existential fear of being restricted and losing freedom
3. The parent’s own fear of losing inner stability and peace of mind!

Humankind: a hopeful history   Rutger Bregman makes a strong argument for unrestrained play, room for freedom and creativity. “[K]ids can be trusted with an abundance of freedom”.… The question is not: can our kids handle the freedom? The question is: do we have the courage to give it to them?”^[xvi]

Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans^[xvii]

…our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids: We interfere too much. We don’t have enough confidence in our children. We don’t trust their innate ability to know what they need to grow.  And in many instances, we don’t speak their language.

  In particular, our culture focuses almost entirely on one aspect of the parent-child relationship. That’s control – how much control the parent exerts over the child, and how much control the child tries to exert over the parent. The most common parenting “styles” all revolve around control. Helicopter parents exert maximal control. Free-range parents exert minimal. Our culture thinks either the adult is in control or the child is in control.

  There’s a major problem with this view of parenting. It sets us up for power struggles, with fights, screaming and tears. Nobody likes to be controlled. Both the children and parents rebel against it. So when we interact with our children in terms of control – whether it’s a parent controlling the child or vice versa – we establish an adversarial relationship.

Why parents shouldn’t always be ‘in sync’ with their children^[xviii] 

My colleagues and I carried out research which showed that brain-to-brain synchrony between parent and child can be helpful for children’s attachment, and tends to rise when a parent and child play, talk or solve problems together. Recently, however, we started wondering whether more synchrony is always better…. Our recent study, published in Developmental Science, suggests it can sometimes be a sign of relationship difficulties….

… For example, research revealed that for about 50-70% of the time, parents and children are not “in sync”. During these times, they may be doing separate activities, such as a child exploring something on their own or a parent working. They rather engage in a constant “social dance” comprising being attuned to each other, failing to do so and repairing this disconnect….

And it’s this flow of connection, disconnection and reconnection that offers children an ideal mixture of parental support and moderate, useful stress that helps growing children’s social brains….

… [P]arents and children constantly being tuned in to each other…. can increase stress on the relationship and raise the risk for insecure child attachment….

In our new study, we actually observed that mothers who had an insecure, anxious or avoidant attachment type showed more neural synchrony with their children….

Great Myths of Child Development^[xix]

Myth #48 – Rewards usually decrease the desirable behavior they’re intended to increase

…[W]hile decreases in desirable behavior can occur following rewards, rewards quite often are followed by sustained increases in desirable behavior. This increase is quite frequently maintained once the reward is faded out.

Myth #49   Praise undermines children’s ability to be successful

…Critics of praise often point to laboratory research showing that after children experience a failure, they respond differently to different types of praise…. Even the praise critics encourage the use of some praise; they just call it “encouragement” instead of “praise.” 

Myth #50 Parents were not permissive when I was a kid

…people like to complain about the new-fangled problem of permissive parenting. Nevertheless, there have always been parents with high degrees of permissiveness, and there probably always will be. Indeed, there will also always be someone there to complain about them. 

In chapter 4 of Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence, Dr. Nicole Letourneau with Justin Joschko look at studies of mice and the impact of both their genes and their environment in terms of how they came to deal with the worlds they found themselves in. When itty bitty mice born to “scaredy-mouse” mothers were then fostered by “tougher” mother mice, they showed a resilience not expressed by their bio-mothers.^[xx]

Might tuck in here a reminder of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1798) and his theory of child raising that supported allowing children to be free and unfettered to learn from experience naturally, unrestrained by adult direction and books.

In How to raise an adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success, ^[xxi]

Summary

Julie Lythcott-Haims offers an observation to parents from Stacy Budin, a psychiatrist: “You can’t have a healthy family life if you’re so focused on the kids that you lose connection with each other”.

Lythcott-Haim also offers this:

Kids- – particularly adolescent boys – often make poor choices as a normal part of development as humans; they’ve got an impulse to do the bad or crazy things but their prefrontal cortex is still developing, which means they can’t yet appreciate the danger involved and so can’t use what we would call “good judgement”…. Enforcing consequence for our own kids is essential.

Fish don’t climb trees: a whole new look at dyslexia^[xxii]

… if a child wants to have a goldfish, and the parents are adamant that it will be the child’s sole responsibility, the child has to be willing and able to buy the fish food, feed the fish and clean the tank. That part is usually easy to establish. The parents now have to make peace with the idea of watching the fish tank getting greener and greener, and the fish dying in its watery dungeon, because the minute they give in and decide to change the state of the hungry fish, into a fed fish, they have assumed control. This means that there is now joint responsibility for the goldfish, and their offspring will not take the sole responsibility back.

Others’ parenting experiences, speaking to at least some aspects of the Permissive Parenting Style.

How to raise an adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success^[xxiii]

… [W]hen it came to raising their two children, they couldn’t have been less like-minded about how to help their kids “make it”. Don’s wife wanted to help their kids as much as possible, which to her meant letting the kids enjoy their free time instead of doing chores, and hovering over them to ensure their homework was done.  Don saw both of these seemingly helpful things as quite the opposite. “I’ve looked back at my life and I believe one hundred percent that the responsibilities I had taught me how to be self-sufficient, and that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do but you suck it up and do it anyway, and that’s what teaches you humility, work ethic, responsibility, and follow-through.

“My ex felt like she always had to observe our son and daughter, tell them what to do, and remind them of this or that. And when they didn’t do the things she was constantly reminding them to do, she’d get frustrated and keep telling the kids, ‘You need to start your homework’ – nothing would happen- ‘You really need to start your homework’ – nothing would happen. These repetitive reminders and requests went in one ear and out the other. And there were no consequences”. …. “My child should be accountable for their work…. At work we call it micromanaging versus empowerment”.

Mom Who Tried To Gentle Parent Her 5-Year-Old Daughter Says She Raised A ‘Little Monster’ — ‘Everything Is A Fight’^[xxiv]

One mother … was struggling with this internal battle with her 5-year-old daughter. Originally, she’d casually tried the “gentle parenting” technique, but quickly realized her daughter was growing into a “little monster.”

…Not only does her daughter expect her parents to do everything for her, but the mom admitted that parenting has been a constant battle. 

…“I don’t expect her to magically be able to do everything,” she clarified, “just some small things like eat independently or put her own shoes on.”

…“We’ve had something similar recently with our little guy,” one mom added under the post. “You have to call their bluff — their power in the situation comes from the fact that they think/know that you will ultimately dress them because you wouldn’t send them to daycare/school like that.”

Detachment: an adoption memoir ^[xxv]

“These kids seemed more like wild dogs who needed me to establish dominance over the pack, not exactly my strong suit”….

One of Mierau’s sons saw someone on a bus with a mohawk haircut and wanted it.  Mierau edged past the request by temporizing that they might talk to mom about getting one. Later Mierau said, “I was scared that Bohdan would actually remember this conversation….” 

When his kids wouldn’t go to sleep one evening while they were on a visit to his parents, Mierau “spent half an hour threatening, negotiating, cajoling them. In the end I said fine, do what you want, and fell onto my bed for a few hours of exhausted sleep”.

“’Peter, you have to go down the hill right now. Or else.” I had no idea what or else meant, …”

The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s guest to understand his daughter’s suicide ^[xxvi]

As time went on, parenting Casey often felt like breaking a wild stallion. They instinctively protect their space and dominate their handlers. Sometimes they have limited patience, lash out and bite. Only the most experienced handlers can train them. There is no single method of training that works, because every stallion is different.  In each case, handlers have to project confidence and speak with authority to gain the stallion’s respect…. I wish I’d had a gift for understanding my own daughter. As infuriating as her behavior was we had no reference point to determine if this was normal, because we had no other children. Instead we’d allowed our child to manipulate us into giving her whatever she wanted in order to avert her tears. It had to be us. We were incompetent parents.   

A perspective on Permissive Parenting specific to adoption:

What must also be considered is the impact of adoption on a child who struggles with self-regulation or has learned a regulation that may not work in the world he or she has been adopted into.  Or is simply in the emotional upheaval of a new world, one that doesn’t usually deal with the emotional immaturity or lack of confidence or whatever the adoptee’s emotional, mental, etc. state is in face of the expectations of something like piano lessons.    Yasik may have tinkered with a piano because he loved to listen to music and perhaps it had a calming effect but regular practice may have been a whole other, decidedly less calming aspect of music for him.   What was the fight he was having with piano that, we believing we had been given a young Mozart into our care, did not understand?

Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents ^[xxvii]

Parents whose own parents were too rigid tend to see roles as either being rigid or unstructured. They like to choose the unstructured, since it feels loving. Of course, lack of structure does not bring out the best in children. It is a harmful parenting style for children who need a lot of structure to succeed. Almost without exception, children who are described in this book need high nurture along with high structure. If they want to assure themselves that they are parenting in a kind way, not a rigid way, parents can look hard at the nurturing they are doing along with their structure.

The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child^[xxviii]

I’m sitting in my office, doing an intake for what looks like a very nice couple who are coming in because they are very concerned about their five-year-old adopted son. I listen to the facts that are sadly so familiar to me – two years of trauma with his bio-mom before his removal, a few different foster homes, and then adoption by this family who earnestly wants the best for him. But then they say the “M” word and I find myself nearly flinching.

“Everything he does is just trying to get attention,” the mom insisted. “He’s trying to manipulate me.”

…The truth is that children aren’t capable of manipulation until adolescence, because to be able to manipulate, you need a more developed prefrontal cortex…. [According to the dictionary] in order for one person to manipulate another, an action has to done to control another with clear purpose by unfair or artful means.

Most children that have been traumatized just don’t have the developmental maturity to be able to do this. Even typical children can’t do this until at least early adolescence (around nine or ten), and generally speaking, children with trauma tend to have developmental delays in the areas of emotional and social maturity.

So, if it’s not manipulation, what is it when a child does things to get certain reactions, leaving us feeling manipulated? These actions are survival strategies for the child; strategies that they’ve had to learn to survive very difficult circumstances.  And when we as adults see these strategies, we often interpret them through our lens and ascribe adult meanings and motivations to the behavior….

One of the keys [to handling the behavior better] can be looking at it from the child’s perspective, and asking what need they’re trying to meet with the behavior.

And then there is this

At the point of entry into the teen years, Yasik was almost as tall as I was. The 40” x 40 lbs. long gone. He was finding his way into manhood, hair as long as he could get it to grow and flipped outward in the front but wavy in the back. His acne was under control and he was smoothly tanned. He wore T shirts, boarder pants which looked to me like retro-fitted old men’s golfing pants. He had biked into town and bought them himself at a friend’s mother’s store, 2 pairs too big for him I thought, but his pants, his choice.

Footnotes

[i] https://www.childproofparenting.com/blog/threats-bribes  Threats & Bribes: Two Sides of The Same Coin

[ii] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html  A psychologist shares the 4 styles of parenting—and the type that researchers say is the most successful

[iii] Lythcott-Haims, Julie. How to Raise an Adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success.  Henry Holt & Company, 2015, 99-100.

[iv] David-Weill, Cecile. Parents Under the Influence.  Penguin Random House, 2019, 9,10.

[v] Brooks, John. The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide. Scribner, 2016, 64.

[vi] Anderson, Amy, “Counting on Cousins” from Rebecca Walker, ed. One Big Happy Family.  Penguin Group, 2009, 63.

[vii] https://www.knoxvillecounselingservices.com/courtneys-blog/2018/10/25/al6ou5mqr2oip3tobptcw8bgg65tux  https://raisedgood.com/toddlers-meltdowns-brain-development-ditch-traditional-discipline/

[viii] https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a26987389/types-of-parenting-styles/

https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/

https://openpress.usask.ca/lifespandevelopment/chapter/parenting-styles/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK568743/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html

https://www.psychologs.com/7-types-of-parenting-styles-you-might-wanna-steer-clear-from/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/basics/parenting/parenting-styles

https://parentingscience.com/permissive-parenting/

https://www.parentingforbrain.com/4-baumrind-parenting-styles/

https://www.positive-parenting-ally.com/permissive-parenting-style.html

[ix] Gray, Deborah, D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2002, 97.

[x] Bernstein, Jeffrey Ph.D.       https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/liking-the-child-you-love/202303/when-is-a-childs-reward-actually-a-bribe  Posted March 22, 2023 | Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

[xi] https://www.parentingforbrain.com/manipulative-parents/

[xii] Dewar, Gwen, Ph.D. https://parentingscience.com/permissive-parenting/   © 2010 – 2022

[xiii] https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

[xiv]https://www.janetlansbury.com/2012/09/respectful-parenting-is-not-permissive-parenting/

[xv] https://www.positive-parenting-ally.com/permissive-parenting-style.html

[xvi] Bregman, Rutger. Humankind: a hopeful history.   Bloomsbury, 2020, 286 – 295.

[xvii] Doucleff, Michaeleen, Ph.D. Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans.  Avid Reader Press, 2022, P9.

[xviii] Vrticka, Pascal.  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240524-why-neural-synchrony-between-parents-and-children-isnt-always-ideal   

[xix]  Hupp, Stephen and Jeremy Jewell Great Myths of Child Development. Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

[xx] Letourneau, Dr. Nicole with Justin Joschko   Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence. Dundern Press, 2013, 62-76.

[xxi] Lythcott-Haims, Julie.  How to raise an adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success  Henry Holt & Company, 2015,  121, 64-65.

[xxii]  Blyth Hall, Sue.  Fish don’t climb trees: a whole new look at dyslexia. Friesen Press, 2020, 196.

[xxiii] Lythcott-Haims, Julie.  How to raise an adult: break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success.   Henry Holt & Company, 2015, 122-123.

[xxiv]  Slabbekoorn, Zayda. https://www.yourtango.com/self/therapist-explains-why-good-kids-spend-whole-adult-lives-recovering    Written on Jul 27, 2024

[xxv]Mierau, Maurice.  Detachment: an adoption memoir.  Freehand Books, 2014, 101,145,153.

[xxvi]Brooks, John. The Girl Behind the Door: a father’s quest to understand his daughter’s suicide. Scribner, 2016, 62-63.

[xxvii] Gray, Deborah, D. Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents.Jessica Kingsey Publishers, 2002, 97.

[xxviii]  Tantrum, Barbara Cumins.   The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child. North Atlantic Books, 2020, 104-105.

Post #13 B Neglectful/Uninvolved Parenting Style

Depicting Neglectful/Uninvolved Parenting

This parenting style, it seems to me, is the most difficult to consider.  Some of the definitions online assess the benefits and drawbacks for the parenting styles.  For this one, Uninvolved/Neglectful they state quite baldly, there are no benefits.

Approaching motherhood, my journal tells me, “I felt I was up to mommying”.  And if ‘mommying/daddying’ for someone working and someone taking a full university class load and working part-time, would, as a friend noted, allow us to avoid the diaper stage, so much the better. Would any traces of Uninvolved/Neglectful parenting show up in our parenting?

Riding the sky train to work in ’96, a year before our adoption, I saw a poster without the Uncle Sam pointing finger but catching my notice nonetheless. I don’t remember what was being advertised, but its focus was ‘the new priority’ – job, family, you. Now I truly wonder what organization would want that as a sales pitch, unless it was a bid for irony. And good on me.  As I read it, I thought if job did take priority during the week I would try very hard to keep weekends free.

So let me state straight up at the start of this post: only once (as I have said in earlier posts) did we leave him at school day care. Kudos to us.

Then where do the following journal entries fit in?

At the end of our very short parental leave I started back to work, teaching a 5:00 pm class on the first day of the new semester. Dave was taking advantage of some studio time after one of his classes. Lucky for us, still new perhaps to juggling schedules, my mother and sister happened to be visiting or maybe I had reeled them in as they lived only an hour away. Yasik had spent about 2 or 3 hours with my family up to that evening.  I was pretty sure he knew they were gift bearers and friendly, and I knew he would be more than safe and cared for by them. But I had no idea what might be roiling in this little heart that had now known 3 weeks of belonging against 4 and half years of insecurity.  I made sure he had strapped himself into the bumper seat in the back, my sister and mom took the front seats, I slipped in beside Yasik and we drove off to Vancouver. 5:00 p.m. is full -on rush hour and my school is situated on a tightly organized street. There was only a moment to double park, pop a quick kiss and jump out. My heart holds the memory I caught as I turned to wave good-bye to this little boy alone now in the back, watching me wave and turn away.  I remember his confused face; I remember him turning to my sister, I guess hoping for the best. Both she and my mother quickly offered reassurances as they turned back into the street. Of course it was all Ok. He was taken back to our home; my husband picked me up after class and by the end of the evening we were all ‘happy families’ again (the positive, not the negative connotation).

And so began the daily battle of what we often refer to as modern day parenting: parenting demands pitted against work expectations.   Read across the decades; such battles are endlessly recorded. And the underlying motives for such battles? Many hope sincerely to be up to the challenge of holding two dreams at the same time: work and family.   I became an Adult Ed. teacher because I saw being a school teacher for children as cut and paste and kiddie stories, not my thing. Adult level classes interest me but Adult Ed. schools are not found on every corner nor do they always offer classes that run parallel to kindergarten hours.  My husband had secured a long hoped for dream of attending art school. Nonetheless, we believed we could juggle effectively.

Yasik’s first day of kindergarten: here it is verbatim from my journal to maintain the attitude emanating from my record.

Sept’97, Thursday, I bathed, fed him and took him to kinder where he stayed outside the door for 45 minutes and I sat inside – bored with the woman’s cutsie voice and inane activities – weather and silly questions – but she speaks Russian, knows what she is doing and handles them all well – so I sat it out and then got him and walked in the hall and edged him in and he knew where he was going – so we looked at the rabbit, he resisted a bit where he could but a helper sucked him in with a book and then slide projector and computer and he was in and sat with me on the rug and again resisted but I held him to it and we made it thru a long 2 ½ hours – I know how long it was because I watched the clock desperate to get out.

By noting that I bathed and fed him I guess I am recording that I had done my duty. But what was with leaving him outside in the hall while I sat in the classroom?  Was that the teacher’s suggestion? Was that my contest with him?

The teacher’s voice really was remarkably little kid like.  But obviously, my mood was bare minimum motherly.  When I either got fed up or kicked into mother mode, I went out into the hall with him and drew him along to the classroom, luring him in with a chance to pet a rabbit kept in a cage in the classroom.  God bless the teacher’s aide who seems to have taken it from there, dangling technology and books before him. I was less generous, holding him to keep him from escaping. This kid had only a few words of English, was prematurely peer-oriented without knowing what he was dealing with among this new set of peers, and still uncertain if his parents really were people he could count on.  Every fiber of his little body must have been desperate to get out of there. And I was hrumphing about having to be there for 2 and half hours of kiddy stuff.

The last weekend of October, ’97, just before Yasik’s fifth birthday and our first with him, we took him for his first visit to my parents’ home on Vancouver Island.  This would also be his first Hallowe’en adventure.  It did not disappoint any of us. At first the thrill for Yasik was getting to run up and ring the doorbell. And then the wonders of freely dipping into a bowl for a handful of candy.  And for us the wonders of watching the wonders that were his.  We put him to bed in my parent’s large bedroom, up and away from the rest of the house, still in that glow, but sticking to our parental responsibility and planning on some adult time with family downstairs. While we were laughing and talking together, my sister, an elementary school teacher who is more attuned to young children, slipped up to check on Yasik. She found this little mite, swallowed up by the bed, and staring wide-eyed into the darkness.  She slipped in beside him and whispered with him until he fell asleep.  Again, the memory stays with me.

On Saturday afternoon, November ’97, my day off and after my marking was finished for the week, I took Yasik shopping at the nearby mall, just after his 5^th birthday. He was now our child for 3 months.

I took him to the mall to get long pants for the cooler weather. Soon he was pleading to go home. Dave would have been pleading too by this point, but he had already learned to avoid following me around a mall.

“Momma, Yasik go home. Momma Yasik GO home”. (Well, it would have been something like that.)

“Just wait, please Yasik. I’m just checking this one more store”. Trying to accommodate, I ran ahead of him to a shop lured by a rack of clothing on sale. I have never been certain that for a moment, with all those clothes crowding my vision, I didn’t forget about him.  I seemed to have assumed that he was right behind me and could see where I was headed, he of 40 inches tall, barely reaching the mid-point on the rack.  But, of course, unused to malls, limited in English, he missed my side-step around the rack.

I clicked back into parenting within what seemed to me mere moments, though the journal says somewhere between 2 and a whole 7 minutes or more, and stuck my head around the rack to check on him. He was not there.

As it was created to do, the urban myth about the child kidnapped in a mall, went all breaking news in my brain. I started scanning in every direction and frantically checked out the nearby shops and then called out to a security guard walking past. And he did his job, trying to calm me, calling for other guards to watch and striding off to look. I heard Yasik crying before I saw him. There he was holding a guard rail in front of The Bay on the opposite end of that level of the mall. His face was stricken. He was standing there with big tears, and once seen, made no further sound.  I gathered him to me, and held on for dear life. I thanked the relieved guard and led Yasik to the closest clothing store, to a change stall. There I pulled him into my lap and we cried, sitting on that change bench until he quieted. And then we got out of that mall as fast as our shaky legs could go.

It can happen just as they say, so fast.

And I wonder why I think I might be an imposter mom?

It is possible to think that Dr. Gordon Neufeld, had he watched this scene, would have understood Yasik’s frightened cries to have exposed his deep understanding of abandonment.  In a class lecture Neufeld made the point: “There is no experience that has more impact upon us as humans than that of facing separation”.[i]  

A long-time colleague and friend came to visit during those early days of parenting. Like my sister, she was someone far more naturally attuned to parenting than I and had always loved being with little ones.  One afternoon during her visit, she and I, with Yasik in tow, picked up my sister-in-law and her two kids for a mid-morning swim at a community pool which offered a kiddies’ pool and an adult pool.  We had been told that Yasik was not a stranger to swimming as the orphanage took the kids to a community pool in Yaroslavl.

I, who loves to swim, and my sister-in-law, not a fan of swimming, got ourselves and the kids into swimming gear. My friend, not having packed a bathing suit, relegated herself to the poolside.

My niece and nephew were already quite accustomed to pools and happily followed their mother into the children’s pool. I walked with Yasik over to the same pool.  I was not aware of any agitation emanating from him.  I stepped into the pool near where his cousins were already splashing and laughing. And once again, just as with the way he would not try out the swings and teeter-totters at the playground until we went sliding with him, and with his resistance at kindergarten until we enticed him with the rabbit, Yasik would not come into my arms to get a lift into the pool.  I tried to persuade him several times with a voice moving from “Come sweetie” calm to one attempting to hold down rising tension. My sister-in-law, my nephew and niece, my friend and likely others in the pool were within hearing. Yasik stood above me mute but definitely not planning to be persuaded into the pool. Sensing the awkwardness, my friend came to the pool’s edge, put her arms around Yasik and led him back to her chair, saying (need I say, with a calming tone), “He can sit with me for a while”.

I turned to my sister-in-law.  She and the kids seemed happy doing their own thing. I climbed out of the kiddies’ pool and went over to the adult pool for a nice long swim.  It is the feeling of shame that remains.

Recently I asked this friend if she had memories of her visit and the swim outing. Very much to her surprise she did find that she had made a journal note after the visit:

It is so much rush, rush in their lives. Little Yasik is a dear. It is almost overwhelming all he faces. We went swimming this a.m. – he was afraid to…. He is so totally dependent on adults & his new parents. They’re ‘elderly’ to be taking him on. I do hope it works out.[ii]

Epilogue: the following summer, Yasik readily worked through all the children’s levels for swimming down at the park.

Some of these examples of times of neglectful parenting can be chalked up to being new parents, still learning the new reality, but the following examples cover times when lack of experience doesn’t hold water as well.

For me, the weakest link in my parenting was the many times we let our son have overnights with school mates before our first year with him was even up.  He was at the age for which it is common. It solved babysitting strains for several families.  Yasik was well-attuned to playing with other little kids having spent most of his time until he became ours with many little playmates.  And as I have repeatedly reminded readers in our defense, we did put him in the school-run daycare ONLY one afternoon. However, those rationalization were long ago countered for me by a story in my nearly worn-out copy of Deborah D. Gary’s widely respected, Attaching in Adoption: practical tools for today’s parents (Perspectives Press, Inc., 2002,62). This story I have for so long worried over is about a couple who did not allow any allo-parenting for the first two years with their children in order to secure the children’s attachment to themselves.  They did not allow their children to have sleep overs or be babysat by others. The children went everywhere with them and were cared for solely by themselves, wanting to ensure that the children were well-attached to themselves and could understand, after previous experiences of insecure relationships, what the meaning of family now was.

Dave and I were not yet deeply aware how weak his bonds of attachment to us were.  We were parents about whom Dr. Bruce Perry would say: “… the limited experience many people have with young children before they have their own still puts far too many parents and their children at risk”.[iii]

Yet, I think your average parenting book will encourage allo-parenting, the ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ concept.  Hunt, Gather, Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans (Avid Reader Press, 2021) by Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD. shows its value in many cultures though most of these books will be looking at children whose attachments are being secured from day one. For these children the option of living in a society where allo-parenting is encouraged is almost certainly ideal.

For children whose early years have offered little in secure attachment perhaps nuclear attachments are essential before taking the child into a wider social circle, a developmental stage our son was chronologically expected to be ready for.  Yet we can assume Yasik had cycled through a large variety of care-givers before becoming part of our lives and family.  It is reasonable to suggest his attachment had become prematurely peer-oriented. His understanding of family unclear.  As many articles in Orphanage Risk Factors point out, a big problem for orphans is the constant change of caregivers on shift work offering inconsistent care-giving leading to an insecure attachment experience for children.

Here though I insert the opposing view of Peter Lovenheim. In The Attachment Effect: exploring the powerful ways our earliest bond shapes our relationships and lives (A TarchgerPerigee Book, 2018, 71-73), Lovenheim counters some of John Bowlby’s strong emphasis on the caregiver, for as social beings we are not necessarily damaged by receiving care from more than one caregiver in order to establish a secure sense of attachment.

Our week days were well packed with school and work and the commutes tying it all together. As we saw it, that meant lots of left over demands for the weekends. If the neighbour wanted Yasik to have a sleep over at her house to free her from the demands of keeping her son entertained and if Yasik was eager to play with his friend, allowing Dave time for to complete assignments and for me to get 27 essays marked, this was a win-win all the way around.

“‘When you are in a jam, it’s hard to remember that you are in a relationship with a person, not just trying to get someone out the door in ten minutes. Problem is, we have our own agendas and sometime we see the kid as an impediment’”. [iv]

Bouncing back from Peter Lovenheim, I, still uncertain whether or not to shake off my sense of guilt about jumping too quickly into allo-parenting, return to the arguments of Gordon Neufeld, PhD. and Gabor Mate, M.D in their book Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more peers. They begin the book’s argument for securing parent-child attachment before allowing the child free-range with peers by drawing parents in with “…in the short term, peer orientation appears to be a godsend”. And as a salve to any worries, Dr. Neufeld acknowledges that “At first glance peer-oriented children appear to be more independent, less clingy, more schoolable, more sociable and sophisticated”. But then Neufeld and Mate give the reader 264 pages to say, “WRONG! IT IS NOT A GODSEND!”.[v]   Yasik was simply not yet secure enough in his attachment to us. Sleep-overs in the first years as a family were not a win-win for us.

It also cost us precious memories like being the ones who took him to the PNE for the first time. I marked papers, Dave completed university assignments and Yasik went to the PNE with the buddy and his parents.

Only later did I question my decision to add a new course to my schedule, one that required extra hours to pull together in Yasik’s first year with us even though we did also have a new debt load as we began to pay off the costs of adoption.  But did we think carefully enough, were we even aware of what trade-offs we were going to have to deal with? About all the awareness I can find in the journal was ‘we are all just caught in a big pressure pool and we’ve got to help each other.’

Dave’s contribution when I read the definitions to him: “I was triggered by Yasik and you and the dog to be involved but at times would have rather indulged in my own interests and engagements”. That is Dave, easily guilted into taking care of others’ needs, even when he wants to do his own thing.

Yasik’s input when I read the definitions to him: “I think you know the answer to that. Yes, there were times when I was left to fend for myself” (though he was mainly referring to times later than this period). “Look where it led me”.

Defining Neglectful/Uninvolved Parenting

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Δ   Cold/Low Responsiveness/Emotionally Absent/Unsupportive/Unconcerned: Parents are neglectful even when they might provide food, shelter and basic amenities for their children. They show lack of warmth, connectivity and care, interest or attention or affection towards their children, not interacting with their children much at all.

Δ   Low demandingness/ Disconnected/ Undemanding/ Indifferent/ Disengaged/ Detached/ Uninvolved/ Overwhelmed with other things: Children are often left to fend for themselves, even taking on a limited parenting role. These parents offer little nurturance, guidance and attention to the child’s social-emotional and behavioural needs, have limited engagement with their children, don’t converse or interact with their children much, don’t attend their children’s activities or events and don’t strive for any kind of emotional connection but do not discipline them either, and rarely implement rules or structure.

Sites referred to for the definitions:

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a26987389/types-of-parenting-styles/

https://www.parentingforbrain.com/4-baumrind-parenting-styles/

https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html    A psychologist shares the 4 styles of parenting—and the type that researchers say is the most successful

https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

https://openpress.usask.ca/lifespandevelopment/chapter/parenting-styles/

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-uninvolved-parenting-2794958

Distilling Neglectful/Uninvolved Parenting

Born for Love: why empathy is essential – and endangered.

Summary

This book has several stories of child neglect rising out of parents’ lack of care due to ignorance or struggles, as well as, stories of abuse even when parents thought they were doing the best they could for their children. The family story in Chapter Six has all the accoutrements of the good life. The child is well provided for,

Ryan didn’t spend his early life in a neglectful orphanage like Eugenia.[vi]He wasn’t raised by a family of con artists like Danny.[vii]He wasn’t beaten or staved or witness to domestic violence or wartime trauma. He grew up in a stable two-parent home.[viii]

Yet in terms of consistency of care, Ryan’s early care was as unstable as the shift workers’ changes in an orphanage. “Ryan’s parents had never been educated about the social needs of infants”.[ix]  When infant Ryan became attached to a caregiver, the caregiver was replaced because his mother would become concerned that Ryan seemed more attached to the caregiver than to her. “This made no sense to [the mother]. She couldn’t understand what was wrong and why her own baby didn’t seem to like her”. So she fired them, eighteen caregivers, before Ryan entered preschool.[x]  By the time Ryan was 3 he had begun to shut down his emotions. When he was 17, he could not understand why raping a developmentally-disabled girl was problematic.[xi]

Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence looks at a study examining causes for problematic behaviour or negative emotional responses in children. The researchers used the Maternal Sensitivity Scale which measures “a mother’s awareness of her child’s signals of needs or wants, her accurate interpretation of those signals, the appropriateness of her response, and how promptly she responded”, either with high or low sensitivity to their child’s needs.  The chapter inserts a defense of mothers who showed low sensitivity:

Keep in mind that the women in the low-sensitivity group were not necessarily bad mothers. The study did not recruit parents accused of child abuse or neglect, nor did it focus on families from groups generally considered to be high-risk (impoverished, uneducated, suffering from alcoholism or drug addiction, prone to violence, etc.) Low -sensitivity mothers didn’t leave their children home alone for hours on end to go party, or drink themselves sick, or bully their children with taunts or smacks or insults.  Some of them were absent-minded. Many of them were overworked and exhausted and didn’t have the energy or patience required to meet their children’s every immediate need, but loved their children all the same and wanted nothing but the best for them.  The vast majority were probably doing their best, and would be horrified at the thought that their actions might be hurting their children. And yet, their children were over twice as likely to display aggressive or violent behaviour as those of high-sensitivity mothers …. It shows that in parenting the little things matter just as much as the big ones.[xii]

On P. 175 Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence also says:

Certainly, neglectful parenting has an adverse effect on children’s development. Our neural gardens need more than fresh soil to truly flourish. They need pruning and weeding and watering.  An untended garden may grow thick and green if the sun is shining and rain comes often enough, but it will be a wild, chaotic patch of earth, fruitful perhaps, but also cluttered and choked with weeds. The same goes with young minds…. Infants need more than food and warmth and safety; they need stimulation and interaction and play, and the more of it they get, the better they’ll be at thinking and reasoning and, above all, feeling.

Great Myths of Child Development, Myth #42: daycare damages the attachment between children and parents: the writers question Spock, Bowlby, Ainsworth and Schlessinger’s dire warning of leaving a child to the insecure attachments that may result for daycare exposure.  The concerns their views generated remain in the wanting-to-do-it-ALL-right parental psyche, even as these parents see no option but to enter the work force or have the desire for a career, as well as parent.  These writers quite strongly dispute the dangers of daycare,

“The preponderance of research says that [daycare] does not [damage children]”. It may even be beneficial in parent child interactions, giving parents greater income, lessening their stresses and helping to make children more school ready. These kids may get more illness, ergo, they will develop a greater immunity to illness….

Yasik certainly came packaged in immunity to illness.  (What I am also saying /suggesting? That orphanage life may have had some real pluses for Yasik?  Yes, of course, it did; the difference is that in a day-care setting, the child is home developing a secure attachment to the parents to balance the time away from the parents.   Yasik didn’t get to go home at night to that other element in the need for secure attachment, his own parents.)

Myth #42 goes on to say

The argument seems to be that “if a mother is not with her child almost all day, then she can’t really be a loving parent. Although it’s true that a daycare worker won’t love and care for a child just like a parent will, sending a child to a daycare doesn’t mean the parent stops loving or caring for their child. The same point could be made about fathers, but the anti-daycare crowd rarely seems to argue that fathers should stay home.” So to all those anxious parents in the world, we say don’t fret. Human babies are not geese, and they won’t “imprint” on a daycare worker instead of you.[xiii]

Perhaps because our faith in the traditional family is deeply embedded, studies have been called for to examine the question of the outcomes for children raised by working mothers versus stay-at-home mothers. The findings: “evidence suggests that children of working moms grow up to be just as happy as children of stay-at-home moms. In fact, having a working mom comes with potential benefits for adult children”.[xiv]

And that observation about the focus on mothers, ignoring the role and responsibilities of fathers:

One of the hugely overlooked truths of parenting is that parenting involves both parents and their equal contributions make up for a suitable condition that ensures an overall general development of the child. It’s a myth that the mother has a bigger role to play in raising a child. Absence of a father can have drastic effects on the emotional, social and economic well-being of the child. Therefore, both of their involvement is crucial.[xv]

And Dr Perry’s question in The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog – Can a child raised in serious abuse have capacity for further development, could his neural system be shaped by patterned, repetitive experience in a safe and predictable environment?[xvi]

[Neglected] children need patterned, repetitive experiences appropriate to their developmental needs, needs that reflect the age at which they’d missed important stimuli or had been traumatized, not their current chronological age…. A foundational principle of brain development is that neural systems organize and become functional in a sequential manner…. If one system doesn’t get what it needs when it needs it, those that rely upon it many not function well either, even if the stimuli that the later developing system needs are being provided appropriately. The key to healthy development is getting the right experiences in the right amounts at the right time.[xvii]

And the needs-to-be-restated preliminary to that is the need for parents to be better informed of the needs of the children they set out to raise. “… the limited experience many people have with young children before they have their own still puts far too many parents and their children at risk”.[xviii]Later in The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, Dr. Perry makes the point several times that such development comes with therapy in a caring environment, perhaps a given.

The stories of survivors of Uninvolved/Neglectful parenting range from abuse to resilience. These children can struggle with a sense of low-self-esteem, abandonment, depression, forming close relationships, hostility, delinquency, substance abuse and a weak sense of empathy.[xix]

People who grew up with very little affection tend to develop these 10 traits later in life (according to psychology) 

Remember, these trends don’t apply to everyone, but they do provide insight into some of the ways our upbringing can influence our adult behaviors….

1) Emotional Self-Sufficiency

Those who grew up with little affection often build walls around themselves. They develop a sense of emotional self-sufficiency, an ability to navigate through life relying primarily on their own emotional strength.…Their childhood experiences often leave them feeling that they cannot depend on others for emotional support, leading them to rely heavily on themselves.  Remember, this doesn’t mean these individuals are incapable of forming emotional bonds. It just means they’ve learnt to rely on themselves first and foremost.

2) Difficulty Trusting Others

3) Craving for Affection

Here’s something raw and honest: people who grew up with very little affection often nurse a deep, unspoken craving for it in their adult lives…. This longing often manifests in different forms – some might seek validation consistently, others might strive to excel in everything they do, hoping to earn the approval and affection they crave.

4) Strong Independence

This strong sense of independence can be empowering, but it can also make it challenging to accept help from others.

5) Unusual Empathy

Here’s something you might not expect: those who grew up with little affection often develop a heightened sense of empathy.[xx]

What is Distracted Parenting?

[T]he use of hand-held devices can get in the way of the day-to-day interactions parents have with their children…  The distraction may get in the way of meeting children’s needs and may impact their healthy development…The mere presence of a cell phone on the table makes those sitting around the table feel more disconnected. 

Parenting in the Digital Age:  The Importance of Secure Attachment Responsive, face-to-face parent-child interactions during early childhood is important in the development of a child’s language, cognitive, and self-regulation abilities. We are wired for human interaction. +[xxi]

A perspective on Uninvolved/Neglectful Parenting specific to adoption: It is hard to image an adoption life story that didn’t begin with some kind of abandonment, whether intentional or otherwise. Thus Betty Jean Lifton would say of adoptees:

They are self-negating. They may look secure but they suffer from feelings of shame, inner badness, and defectiveness. They fear homelessness, betrayal, disintegration, and going mad. But, most of all they fear abandonment.  The message adoptees give to friends and spouses is: “Do anything you want to me, but don’t abandon me”.[xxii]

Others’ parenting experiences, speaking to at least some aspects of the Negative Parenting Style.

For likely as long as the novelist has become aware of the working mother dilemma, novels have built the working mother trope with bits like in Scott Turow’s novel, The Laws of Our Fathers.   The protagonist is a busy judge starting a high-profile case whose young daughter does not want to go to school so the judge cajoles, threatens, manipulates and promises future impossible temptations.

Someday, I always promise, it will be as she asks…. But not, of course, today. Today there is duty…. I must go off to my other world…. telling myself I am not my mother, [who apparently left her alone when she went off to work] that I am somehow on the road to conquering what remains of her in me.[xxiii]

The End of Mom Guilt: why a mother’s ambition is good for her family For Lara Bazelon, the mother, the conflict between career and parenting seems more divisive than for the father but she believes “prioritizing your career- not all the time, but some of the time – models… for the children…independence and resilience.”[xxiv]

Teacher Says The New Wave Of Parents Are ‘Roommate Parenting’ — ‘I Can’t Believe The Decline In Quality, Involved Families’

One teacher argued parents are not invested in interactions and relationships anymore.

https://www.yourtango.com/self/teacher-says-new-wave-parents-are-roommate-parenting

A Quora question: Why isn’t love enough in parenting an adopted child?

I’ll tell you the story of my sister. She was 18 months old when she came to us. I was 4. Of course my parents didn’t share the situation that brought my sister to us with me. But one of my earliest memories is me asking my mom what is wrong with this baby. Even at 4 I could tell this baby was broken. Later I learned the gritty details. I don’t ever use the word hate. It’s a strong word reserved for specific things. I hate my sister’s bio family. They are evil people. They intentionally broke this innocent baby. They starved her in every way you can. No love. No food. No nothing. Their family dog treated my sister better than they did. They would sit my sister in a room by herself during dinner and would throw scraps to the dog. The dog took the scraps to my sister. That dog was a better mother to her than the humans in that house. In child development the first year is critical in developing a child’s trust and security. This is achieved through the love and care we give out infants. We feed them, hold them, bathe them, cuddle them when they are sad, we talk to them with sweet words and show them that no matter what we are there for them. My sister got none of that. Zero, zip, nada. She got neglect on every level. I do not know if they ever physically hurt her by hitting. But they broke her trust and capacity to understand love. She never recovered because they did it at the most critical time in her development. When she was helpless and completely dependent on those who were supposed to care. My parents and us kids love her deeply. And she cares for us, but she is incapable of trusting us to not hurt her. We never have. My parents changed the entire way they parented me and our older brother to accommodate her needs. We used to have a fairly strict snack and meal schedule. Suddenly we had free reign of a section of the pantry and it  was always stocked. They gave her extra time and attention that we didn’t get, we were never neglected and didn’t lack love and attention, but she did demand more. There were other changes, but I can’t remember them. Those were just the ones that impacted me the most. Love wasn’t enough to keep her with us. When she turned 18 she ran. She has gone no contact for years at a time. We often describe her as a person that lives in a made for TV movie, or after school special. She doesn’t live in reality. The problems she creates for herself are always someone else’s fault. She refuses to have any personal accountability for her life. The way she is can all be traced back to that first 18 months of her life when people were monsters and a dog was her mother. I hate her bio family. Don’t abuse your children. Love them unconditionally. And for the love of everything if you take on a broken baby don’t make it about you. Just love them and accept them for who they are. Not all adopted kids are broken. For some, like me, love is enough. But there is a large chunk of adopted kids that have very real, very damaging trauma. Those are the ones that need the most love, but will never thank you for it. Just give it to them.[xxv]

Baby, We Were Meant For Each Other: in praise of adoption, Scott Simon, Simon Schuster, 2010, 142-3

Summary

Neglectful parenting could be saying something about the parents’ experience of being parented.  Because of his own experience of being parented, Steve Sagri has not had a “successful family life“.

“… even with my daughters, even when they were adorable little kids, I never felt real comfortable,” he says, “I never knew how to behave around them. I didn’t know how to be a parent. How would I? I’d never seen it done…”. “Maybe my real fear is of getting hurt,” he muses, “Maybe that is why I’ve built so many ten-foot walls around me. Maybe it’s because I was rejected as a kid that I don’t want to give anyone the chance to reject me now. So I just keep moving…”

Love Works Like This   Lauren Slater (Random House, 2002,169). Goodreads describes this writer’s experience of parenting with:  “career-oriented“, looks at having a child and the need to “reconcile the needs of self with the demands of others“.

It has come to the point where I cannot listen to Eva cry unless she is crying in my arms. I suppose this is a form of love, but not the kind I would most wish for. It is instinctual, biological, love on a cellular level. Intimacy, I am coming to understand, is corporeal.  It has to do with the distance between bodies. I wish for more. I wish for a passion that transcends space. When I am with Eva, she is my heart. When I am gone from her, at work, or with a friend, she ceases to exist.

And then there is this

I saw an ad for the BEST dishwasher soap for loving parents. It did have to remind parents they might need to buy a dishwasher first, of course.

The plot to zing the ad’s proposition straight into parental hearts was built around a mother sitting on the floor holding out encouraging arms to her infant taking her first step. The camera then slides from the middle of the floor over to the kitchen area. There a young father is bent over the sink washing dishes, his back turned away from mother and child.  OMG, he was hand washing dishes. Only when the last dish has been washed does he turn back to his little family. But too late, handwashing dishes has denied him that precious moment parents wait for with bated breath, missing his child’s first step. The judgment or false pity is in the narrator’s tone: for handwashing dishes he has been charged with being negligent and missing out on one of life’s truly important moments.

 Footnotes

[i] Easterly, Sara, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Lori Holden.  Adoption Unfiltered: revelations from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, and allies, “Referring to Dr. Gordon Neufeld’s words… (Gordon Neufeld, PhD, “Session One: Becoming Attached,” Recorded Class Lecture (The Art & Science of Transplanting Children Course, 2011).  2024, 142

[ii] Pegg, Lois.  Journal Entry.  Dec. 7’97

[iii] Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  Basic Books, 2017, 168.

[iv] Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Mate, M.D. Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers.  Vintage Canada, 2004, 196.

[v] Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Mate, M.D. Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers.  Vintage Canada, 2004, 235, 237.

[vi] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, Chapter 3, 45 – 71.

[vii] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, Chapter 5, 96-119.

[viii] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, 121.

[ix] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, 142.

[x] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   2010, P. 125-126

[xi] Szalavitz, Maia, Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.  Born For Love: why empathy is essential- and endangered   William Morrow, 2010, Chapter Six, 120- 144.

[xii] Letourneau, Dr. Nicole with Justin Joshko.  Scientific Parenting: what science reveals about parental influence.  Dundern Press, 2013, 85-87.

[xiii] Hupp, Stephen and Jeremy Jewell. Great Myths of Child Development, Myth #42: daycare damage, Kindle version, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

[xiv] Cuttita, Nicole, Ms.Ed., MHC-LP

Are Stay-at-Home Moms Better for Our Kids than Working Moms?

https://www.newyorkbehavioralhealth.com/are-stay-at-home-moms-better-for-our-kids-than-working-moms/

https://www.hbs.edu/news/articles/Pages/mcginn-working-mom.aspx

[xv] Debnath, Shreyasi.   https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/ The 4 Common Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Kids/

[xvi] Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  2017, P. 145

[xvii] Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  2017, P.152

[xviii] Perry, MD, PhD, and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  2017, P.168  

[xix] Debnath, Shreyasi.   https://themindsjournal.com/4-common-parenting-styles/ The 4 Common Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Kids/

https://wellbeingscounselling.ca/uninvolved-parenting-psychological-effects-on-children/

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-uninvolved-parenting-2794958

https://www.regain.us/advice/parenting/the-risks-of-having-an-uninvolved-parenting-style/

[xx] Fey, Tina. https://geediting.com/people-who-grew-up-with-very-little-affection-tend-to-develop-these-10-traits-later-in-life-according-to-psychology/  May 26, 2024, 10:06 am

[xxi] https://www.mjw-cydc.uwo.ca/docs/brochure_distracted_parenting.pdf  Tips for Limiting Hand-Held

[xxii] Lifton, Betty Jean.  Journey of the Adopted Self: a quest for wholeness.  Basic Books, 1994, 110.

[xxiii] Turow, Scott.  The Laws of Our Fathers.  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996, 66.

[xxiv] Bazelon, Lara. The Atlantic “The End of Mom Guilt: why a mother’s ambition is good for her family” May 2022

[xxv] https://www.quora.com/Why-isnt-love-enough-in-parenting-an-adopted-child

Post #13 A    Authoritarian Parenting Style

Depicting Authoritarian Parenting

I think we managed ‘happy families’ (Vera Stanhope gave me that one) for about as long as our parental leave lasted (3 days) or maybe until we signed Yasik up for school – roughly 3 weeks.  The journal says Week 3 was ‘one heavy duty week’. Yasik was, in parenting jargon, ‘testing boundaries’ in ways I have read are not unusual for institutionalized adoptees, or, for that matter, children from a great variety of family settings. His arsenal, sans effective verbal skills at the time, was physical: kicking, slapping, pinching, punching when we frustrated his desires with a “No”.   Surprised that the little cutie wasn’t seeing things our way, and having not prepared ourselves for that possibility, we went full ‘do what our parents did’; I shut down and Dave threatened tortures like loss of TV privileges and hugs, much the same as how we dealt at the time with disagreements between ourselves. And then, we spanked Yasik.  In our defense the journal testifies, only one smack to his bottom. Yasik cried but the smack quieted him, so I guess it slipped under the wire for not being abuse. Perhaps the crying though shook us up because we did some serious weighing of the pros and cons. We knew we were not comfortable talking about our autopilot choice to spank with anyone else, at all. Is spanking just politically incorrect or emotionally damaging? Is it faster and tidier? Does it teach him to hit to make a point?  But he needs to pay attention to our authority. He can’t be hitting back or talking smart we felt. But then again, we have to watch the expectations we have that set him off.  Right from the start, putting him in kindergarten, I was rushing him and we were regularly late to school, igniting volcanoes of frustration between us. Cecile David-Weill in Parents Under the Influence: words of wisdom from a former bad mother (63,64) considers it important to clarify the basis of a choice to spank: if it is not a “malevolent impulse” or cause “lasting pain” it may be fine. For her it is quite another matter if it is regular and the ‘go-to’ response to the child’s behavior. Leaving long term negative consequences, it is abuse.

Dave and I were a couple born in the traditional parenting era, and now in our own middle years, we were coping with a daily experience more often the purview of a young couple (a common experience for adoptors), and parenting a child with limited communication experience in English and very new to developing a sense of secure attachment to parents.  This is not a ‘poor-us’ plea. We simply knew we had to begin the process people in Recovery refer to as Live Life on Life’s Terms.  We were going try something more appropriate, wanting to do the ‘right thing’, again based on what we had picked up around us about disciplining.

My only spanking experience up to this time had come when I was in my mid-twenties, still unquestioningly believing in “Spare the rod, Spoil the child”. I was babysitting for a couple who were raised, like me, in a traditional and religious society and who regularly turned to spanking to rein in their active adoptee. Being left with the responsibility to ensure that this four or five year-old child was not ruined while the couple were out of town, I kept the lid on anything I understood to be an infraction according to the couple’s set of unacceptable behaviours. And I spanked away each of these misbehaviours as heartily as they did.  One such infraction unfortunately, in the short term, but rewarding in the long-term for me, occurred one morning when friends were visiting.  The child misbehaved; I carried him into the bedroom and between whacks, screaming and crying filled the household. After all was returned to quiet and smiles, the woman visiting commented either directly to me or to another friend, “It seems to me that people are harder on children who are not their own.” That observation struck hard against a firmly unquestioned belief.

Sensitivity to the comment was still there twenty years later to rattle my ideas about disciplining Yasik.  ‘Time Outs’ seemed to be bandied about among knowing parents we were in touch with as the ‘done thing’. Dave said that was how Dennis the Menace was disciplined, sounded like a good recommendation I guess. We embraced it as a discipline we could admit to among our circle of friends and anyway we had a child’s wooden chair as yet unfulfilled in its destiny.  One afternoon in our couple-only period we spent an afternoon shopping antique shops on Main Street.  We bought the little chair for family who were expecting, not thinking it might be a hassle to carry home on a plane.  They side stepped the gift and now we had a reason of our own to use it.  We swung it into a corner of the hallway, getting into position to do battle.  I remember experiencing less emotion or stress when disciplining was simply the smack. Now we were starting the disciplining process with a tussle to get him on the chair as he and we were still amped up. Next was the stand on guard to keep him on the chair. Dave would very firmly place him on the chair and I would smack his bottom when I couldn’t get him to stay on the chair. Once he even said, “Ouch”.  At least once each we let him knock himself over in his fight to resist the chair. But he did acquiesce, even if at times with tight-lipped giving in that could be read as ‘I will bid my time until I am bigger’. Other times it was hard to keep a straight face. When once he had to give in, he would turn to us to humbly plea, “No look,” before he stood up and went off to do what we ask. There was also the time I held him in my lap until he gave in and sat on the chair quietly and then he slipped over to me and we kissed and hugged. Wish I’d done it that way more often. In fact, most of the time he responded well to this discipline and moved on, affirms the journal.

And miracle of miracles, in short order just the threat of the chair was enough to get compliance. Check that method off and move on.  It seems we still were not giving discipline a meta perspective.  A couple of cases in point: one evening after work, I was tired, impatient and would not wait for him to play in the tub. Yasik was finding endless wonders in the tub.  I wanted the bed time routine over so I could turn off and tune out.

“Come on Yasik, bath time is over. Now get out of the tub and come into the bedroom to get your pajamas on.”

Playing sounded like it was slowing down, and silence was taking over. Yasik had shown shyness about being naked, suggesting the way things might have been handled in the orphanage. But I was not trying to understand his no show in the bedroom.

“Come on Yasik, get in here.”

And now there was a wail. Yasik was sitting in the tub, alone and crying in real anger. Sighing in self-pity, I was about to drag myself off his bed and into the bathroom to scoop him out of the tub.  That self-pitying tiredness now curling at the edges with anger. Yasik did not want to run naked from the tub to the bedroom, a stretch of maybe 10 feet.

Dave must have been hovering near by, for he magically appeared at the bedroom door.“Don’t!”, with a warning eyeball.  Getting a 5-year-old to sprint naked from the bathroom to the bedroom was what we expected. We were not going to cave. He was going to obey. He was going to sprint naked from the bathroom to the bedroom.

Yelling, “No look!” Yasik snuck to the door to see if I was looking before running to the bed. Again it was hopeless not to see the funny. I popped out a “Boo!” and we both laughed.

And here I interject a piece from The Adoptive Parents’ Handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child by Barbara Cummins Tantrum who notes (18), “[It] could be that the abuse [being discussed] happened at bedtime or in a bath (common for sexual abuse), it could be that it feels vulnerable to try to turn their brain off to sleep, and it could be that Mom and Dad feel far away“.

Another time, when he was a bit older, Yasik and the other two in his bestie triad had been to Roger’s Arena to watch moto-cross races. The races were exciting, the treats soaked in sugar and the night hours sleep-deprived. By the time he was dropped off mid-morning, still high from the fun, he was likely more spent than he knew. The interaction may have gone something close to the following, though when I read it to Yasik while writing this piece, he was a tad scornful, not buying that he would have talked like that.

My rendition then:

While Yasik was still wrapped in the high of his overnight, Dave and I were not finishing off a fun night but rather into the demands of our day. Yasik came in the back door and dropped his bag.

No give him a moment to slump on a chair.  No “Hey kid did you have fun? What did you do?” Instead, we turned from doing the dishes to offer a smile, “Hi.” We are after all trained in the graces to some extent. Yasik didn’t smile back. “I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat?”

Tuned to a different wave length than he, we dismissed this.“Just put your bag away.  It’s too close to lunch anyway.”

“I’m not showering. I gotta eat.”

“Uh, uh….  No, get cleaned up.  Then I think you still have homework. And you definitely have piano practice.”

“Aaaggh. Noooo. That’s all I ever do. Piano, piano, piano. Homework, homework, homework.”

“Yasik. Just do it and get it over with. You have to do it before you can be on the computer anyway.” Yasik was downright snarky the journal says.   What did we expect?

Had we become complacent or tired of what corporeal punishment or its more politically correct cousin, ‘Time Out’ demanded? Or did we honestly think that having experienced spanking and the chair that Yasik was only needing the reminder of such consequences or some threat to the things he loved? Whatever our awareness, we now slipped into threat mode at signs of eruption.  Predictably I suppose, if we had not taken the time to think through what we were hoping for or how best to get there.  It could backfire.

One morning as usual we running late to drop Yasik off at his school. Checking for lunch box and bag, I noticed he hadn’t quite finished his homework. That was a BIG no-no to a couple, one teaching high school with the expectation of homework, the other finally getting a chance at higher-ed and both wanting to keep up appearance as parents who have their parenting together. With minutes to spare before we really, really had to go, we went into threat mode: “You won’t be going to T-ball tomorrow if you don’t hurry up and just do this last page!”

The wail seemed to deflate his entire body.  Taking the high ground against this outburst, we brooked no argument, “Yasik, you gotta do your homework.”

“Whhhhy? NOBODY in my class has to do homework?”

(True enough, being second language, or whatever the current term is, and struggling with reading, Yasik did have a heavier homework burden than his classmates.) Nonetheless, in my best no-nonsense voice, I carefully enunciated: “You. Won’t. Be. Going. To. T-Ball. Tomorrow. if you don’t get it done.”  Dave backed me up with a ‘No debate’ nod.

He failed to do so. Following through on our threat is always considered admirable. We didn’t take him to the game. He felt the pain for disobedience all right.

Thing was, we had the date wrong.  It was two days away and he got to go because he’d already gone through the wailing and missing-the-game pain the day before. I kind of think he could hardly wait to get home that evening to say, “Hey you guys, the game is tomorrow night, James said.” I looked at Dave. Dave looked at me. “What can we do? We got the days screwed up and he got the punishment.”

Yasik also got the last big grin.

And so the first couple of years went; learning effective anything takes a while I would observe at this juncture. Yasik’s school had a huge park across the street but had no indoor gym; it was a little community school which meant going off to another school for indoor physical activities. Two years into our parenting, encouraged by school staff, one morning, I went with Yasik on the school bus to help him get involved in gym as through the first year, he’d merely been watching rather than taking part. We chose not to push him to join in gym play the first year as most days there were so many other firsts in his life. Now just like deciding to take the worn training wheels off his bike and pushing him to try biking without that support, we decided to push him to join in the activities in the gym period.

We stepped into the gym, kids running ahead of us, teachers taking charge, me thinking I must look in charge too. It is what competent mothers exude, right? Slipping into this vibe, I tried to get him to do things just because magically I was along.  But my presence did not hold the weight I was assuming. He wouldn’t budge from his chosen place near the door. We were in a room full of kids he played with at the park, teachers who assured us he was doing well. Translation: I can’t have anyone thinking something might not be working as it should appear but neither can I take any action that would look or sound out of control. That is the possible beauty of threats. They can be whispered with what appears like a calm (read repressed anger) interaction.  So I started to whisper threats. “Get out there and play right now or there goes today’s computer and TV.”  I gave a hint that if he waited any longer, tomorrow’s TV was going too.

And then what Gail?  But I persisted and he adamantly refused.  A teacher thoughtfully slipped over to suggest that I and Yasik go to the trampoline because she told us being on the boys’ team with Yasik’s more confident counterparts may be too hard for him. He may feel safer playing with the girls and they were on the trampoline.  He wanted to but wouldn’t.  Was he embarrassed about being relegated to the girl’s team, as well?

I continued to cajole and threat.  Finally, I promised a prize, ergo bribe, and he got on for the first time, smiling in shyness, still uncertain, because it was great.

Inevitably a few bounces in he fell and wanted down in a bit and then he wouldn’t go again.  This was a 6-year-old boy who was struggling with processing failure. I was responding by telling him I was proud of him and a prize was coming his way. But that fall overwhelmed him. When it came around for his next turn, he refused to climb back up on the trampoline.  I who had not thought that perhaps let it be was enough, or perhaps there was a private trampoline somewhere that he could test out before the next gym outing, threw out the bribes and went back to dire threats of returning to spanking.  And I could have managed that because there was a convenient bathroom off the gym.

And in the moment I won. Yasik gave in and got on the trampoline. I saw a mix of shy enjoyment and a struggle with fear for between the 1^st and 2^nd attempt there were tears on my neck. As I watched him get up and try the trampoline again in front of peers who babied him still, I had to fight tears too. Yet he conquered the worst of it.  He was on his way. I was proud of him and of his stubborn refusals too.  He wasn’t going to follow blindly, I note in the journal.  But the question remains about how I handled my role in his struggle. I hope I at least followed through on the prize.

Dave too holds memories of times he is concerned about how he shepherded. As I have mentioned several times, not only did Dave look forward to sharing his own love of the computer with Yasik as we prepared to adopt him, but in a very short while, after we returned from Russia, Dave and Yasik were poking the keyboard, learning that Yasik believed he had come from the moon and seeing that very quickly and steadily Yasik was becoming proficient at working his way around the internet.  An excitement at a son’s quickness gradually U-turned into a concern about what his child might become exposed to.  To ward off danger, Dave secretly set in a path from which he would maintain control. Of course, sensible parents applaud, but Dave voiced concern over his handling of his control, secretively rather than in open discussion with his son.

Yasik is visiting this weekend. In preparation I have written down a couple questions on my clipboard to tease out some input from him that might be triggered by the definition of Authoritarian parenting style.  He hasn’t yet come up with specific examples but he said he definitely remembers times I handled interactions with “Because I said so” or “Don’t ask questions, just do it!” expectations.  I hope I tried for slightly more subtle language.  Yasik also remembers discovering Dave’s computer controls and working around them, but without any discussion on either side.

Defining Authoritarian

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to underline the following characteristics you identify in the narrative.

Δ   Cold: low responsiveness, aloof and distant, affection is given sparingly, if at all; boundaries are maintained between parent and child.

Δ      Demanding/Unbending: strict, making non-negotiable rules, not considering the child’s needs or desires, “My way or the highway”, accompanied by harsh criticisms on making mistakes, or the more PC, emotional manipulation.  The child’s strong will must be broken.

Δ     Control: to foster obedience and implement discipline.  Parents monitor child’s behaviour, activities inside and outside the house.

Δ     Punitive discipline/highly negative consequences often justified as “tough love”: threatening, beating, spanking, thrashing, pulling, pricking, kicking, punching, and emotional punishment like neglect, yelling, scolding for not doing things “right”, silent treatment, stonewalling.

Sites referred to for the definitions:

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a26987389/types-of-parenting-styles/

https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

https://www.parentingforbrain.com/4-baumrind-parenting-styles/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK568743/

https://publichealthpost.org/health-equity/authoritarian-parenting/

Distilling Authoritarian Parenting

We may have begun to parent a child already brewed in Authoritarian parenting. We do not know what Authoritarian parenting meant on a daily basis for Yasik but the article I include in Post 13 Intro suggests it is possible Yasik was being nurtured with “toughened attachment” which seems another label for Authoritarian parenting style. We do know that when meeting us for the first time in the little waiting room of the Yaroslavl orphanage became too stressful for Yasik, he turned to the sweet doctor and folded himself in her arms, arms that willingly accepted him, letting him sob into her neck. But did that moment speak to the orphanage’s daily parenting style? Did Yasik know it was safe to turn into the little doctor’s shoulder as a security he knew he could trust or was the moment meeting us so overwhelming he took the first outlet available. Certainly the woman at the desk and the woman who brought Yasik into the room were not stepping in: out of shyness, uncertainty or the expectations of ‘toughened attachment’?

Whatever parenting he experienced, he would have learned ways to respond. If his early experiences of parenting were traumatic or at least authoritarian, then the way he expressed his frustrations to our discipline may have been techniques he had learned to defend himself when receiving ‘toughened attachment’. Or maybe his responses were defenses against what his imagination understood about having a mama and papa.  He was told that evening after meeting us that now he had a mama and papa.  Did that mean to him that life would be different from life in the orphanage; he need not suffer discipline and insecurity anymore? Or, as the honeymoon period receded into the hurley-burley of everyday life, did some of our parenting seem to him just like ‘toughened attachment’?

Russia at the time argued for this style of parenting because in the shifting time of the 90s it was the more well known, and therefore, more dependable style for orphans. The Soviets/Socialists were working on making a ‘new man/human’, answerable to society, not encouraged to be independent, the Soviet way or the highway.  Religions have been trying to do the same for a very long time, operating from the stance that people are sinners and needing harsh redemption via authoritarian leadership, Hobbesian style. And we, even in the West, do not remain immune from it.  Traditional parenting or ‘Trad parents’ check off authoritarian definition boxes above.  It starts with the assumption that small children are capable of manipulating their parents – a sign, I guess of the evil that resides within – and that effective disciplining must incorporate some pain. https://generationcedar.com/2024/03/05/gentle-parenting-vs-traditional-parenting-a-word-to-todays-young-mother/   or  https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/overindulgent-helicopter-styles/

To quote a response to that one: “The truth is that children aren’t capable of manipulation until adolescence, because to be able to manipulate, you need a more developed prefrontal cortex.”  The Adoptive Parents’ handbook: a guide to healing trauma and thriving with your foster or adopted child, Barbara Cummins Tantrum   (North Atlantic Books,2020, 105).

It is also seen as a wise choice among working class parents who know that to be good employees, children need to know how to be obedient and develop a strong work ethic.  Some also see that at times Authoritarian parenting helps when children are falling into bad company and making choices that will hurt their future.  It might also be an interventionist tool when a child veers off course, choosing friends that take the child on a path away from education and healthy lifestyle choices. But studies have shown that a meta view of the outcomes of authoritarian parenting produce children with low self-esteem and self-doubt, turning to peers for guidance and sometimes acting out behind their parents’ backs or struggling to take on adulthood’s need for internal direction. https://openpress.usask.ca/lifespandevelopment/chapter/parenting-styles/

A voice that seems to support Authoritarian parenting, Dr. Gordon Neufeld and Dr. Gabor Mate say in Hold on to your kids: why parents need to matter more than peers    (Knopf Canadian Publishing, Vintage Canada, 2013, 60)

The first business of attachment is to arrange adults and children in a hierarchical order.  When humans enter a relationship, their attachment brain automatically ranks the participants in order of dominance…. that divide roughly into dominant and dependent, care-giving and care-seeking, the one who provides and the one who receives.

But, of course, having read the entire book, I know that he brings this aspect of authority in as opposed to the empty and often disastrous peer-oriented authority.

A voice that seems to questions Authoritarian parenting, Born for Love: why empathy is essential—and endangered by Maia Szalavitz and Bruce Perry  (Harper Paperback, 2010,313)  says,

Needless to say, spanking or any other form of harsh discipline does not and cannot encourage empathy: empathy is learned by having the experience of being treated kindly, not by being made to suffer…. most bullies do have the experience of being victimized – and it makes them want to get even, not help others….

Research shows that children who receive corporal punishment are more aggressive, more likely to be antisocial as teenagers …. Ninety percent of the research on spanking shows negative effects.

A voice that finds a middling spot on the spectrum of parenting is Jean Mercer in her book, Thinking Critically about Child Development: examining myths & misunderstandings,3^rd ed. (Sage Publications, Inc., 2016 ,206). Research has shown her that spanking (“as properly defined, not to blows with a paddle or other physical punishments”) is not ineffective in the short term but “questions remain about its long-term effect.”

Some explanation is offered in Great Myths of Child Development  (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015) put together by Stephen Hupp and Jeremy Jewell to those who believe God has endorsed physical punishment as a loving thing to do. My father certainly believed ‘Spare the Rod, spoil the child’ was a direct message from God to guide his parenting. Taking us to the bathroom, sitting himself down on the edge of the tub, “Spare the rod, spoil the child” was Dad’s invocation, followed by a confusing excuse, “This hurts me more than you” to set our bare bums on alert as we lay across Dad’s lap. According to Hupp and Jewell, modern translations of the proverb say the ‘rod’ was more likely the symbolic shepherd’s staff for guiding, as a shepherd guides a sheep (Myth #40).  Relying on older translations, some leaders of the church, supported its message of the pain route to obedience. https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/overindulgent-helicopter-styles/

Myth #41, also in Great Myths of Child Development addresses ‘Time-outs’ showing that brief time-outs are usually too weak to help decrease real behavior problems and may also teach children what not to do, and without positive ‘Time-in’, does not teach the child what to do.

They also tackle the gender question of parental discipline. Data shows that mothers use corporeal punishment or spanking as often as fathers (Myth #47). And they visit the argument for letting babies ‘cry it out’ when being put to bed (Myth # 13). Reviewing the various arguments for and against, they conclude “… so long as the child is over 5 or 6 months old, safe and well-cared for, it’s reasonable to stop responding to cries to be held or rocked during the night, allowing the child to develop self-soothing skills”.

Others’ parenting experiences, speaking to at least some aspects of the Authoritarian parenting style

The book, Hunt, Gather Parent: what ancient cultures can teach us about the lost art of raising happy, helpful little humans by Michaeleen Doucleff  (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2021)

Mom Feels Like A ‘Failure’ After Spanking Her Daughter By Nia Tipton Feb 04, 2024  https://www.yourtango.com/family/mom-feels-failure-after-spanking-daught

A mom has admitted to feeling incredibly guilty about the way she handled her unruly daughter and is seeking advice on how to not react the same way in the future…. the young mother explained that she had been cleaning the bathtub when her 3-year-old daughter wandered in. Concerned for her safety, she calmly told her daughter to either leave the bathroom or stand by the door since she was using bleach and their bathroom was quite small.

…. With her daughter continuing to not listen, she picked her up and began carrying her out of the bathroom herself.

However, while carrying her daughter, the little girl began throwing a tantrum…. At this point, she immediately put her daughter in a time-out, sitting her on a chair in the corner of the room.

The time-out didn’t work though, and her daughter began to run around the room. Fed up with her daughter’s behavior, she grabbed her and spanked her. As soon as she did it, the young mom admitted to feeling incredibly “low” and a “failure” as a parent….

“What could I have done differently in this situation? I couldn’t leave her in the bathroom to calm down because I had chemicals in the tub. Maybe the best solution is not doing things that she can’t help with when she’s awake, I guess.”

[Readers responded] “Give yourself some grace. Try hard not [to] do it again,”….

“Also, try to lower your expectations just a little bit. She’s a kid …. it won’t turn her into a monster. Pick your battles.”

Another user added, “… You didn’t beat her or anything. You spanked her.”

…. At the end of the day, no parent is perfect, and there are moments throughout child rearing when certain things don’t go to plan.

The Atlantic, (July/August issue 2022, 87-89), speaks to fathers and the liminal space they find themselves in as fathers today, once filling the understood role of administrator of discipline was theirs, still confronted by children acting out of control, and no longer sure how to proceed.

Detachment: an adoption memoir   Mierau, Maurice   (Freehand Books, 2014, 152-4)

Peter who is 8 and Bohdan who is 7 had been adopted by Maurice and Betsy Mierau three years earlier.  The Mireaus were well into their own parenting style with the boys.  One winter afternoon, Mierau took the boys sledding, armed with hot chocolate. Because of copyright protection you will need to read the story for yourself, an incident that checks the boxes for Authoritarian, although overall, the memoir shows that this couple work hard at being warm and supportive Authoritative parents.

Lesbian and Gay Foster Care and Adoption by Stephen Hicks and Janet McDermott   (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016, 230) recount an interview with a counselor and social worker couple, both working with children and families. At the time of the interview for the book they had been adoptors for 12 years. The children were a brother and sister whose early lives were traumatic, and before being adopted, the children had been in a “difficult” foster situation. This is how they end their interview:

We’ve ended up being much stricter parents than I ever expected we would be, which has been a bit of a downside in some ways. I end up being somebody I almost don’t know, as a parent of adopted children. You don’t recognize yourself. If somebody had told me this was the kind of parent I’d be I’d have said: “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to be like that, I’m going to be my liberal, fun self.”

But that had to change. I think all parents probably have that fantasy. I remember my dad saying he couldn’t believe how I was with the children – my sister called me Attila the Hun! But after a while my dad said I had been right to be tough. But it didn’t come easily to either of us.

I have just started listening to the audio book, I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Seconds into the book, I am hearing notes of Authoritarian parenting though, checking out a summary of the book, I already know that this memoir is about much more than parenting style, still … it checks off some of the boxes, even if the control is more often achieved with PC emotional manipulation.

Post #13   Introduction to Parenting Styles

Before heading to Russia, as I have written about in earlier blogs, we set up our idea of a child’s dream room and downloaded computer games, indulging in a parental fantasy that has never entirely dissipated. In fact, even to the present day, we keep running ahead of each future possibility with fantasies.  Dave would say, “Speak for yourself.” But…

When we returned to Canada, we took him here and there to show him off.  Dave bought him a glove and bat too big for him, convinced he had to learn how to deal with the real thing. Yasik couldn’t lift the bat.  When Yasik approached his teens, he and his dad made plans to fix up my little Civic when I moved on to a newer model. I imagined Yasik playing the piano and singing “O Canada” to open hockey games before his childhood buddy took to the ice to play goalie for the Canucks.

Of course, there is a ‘but’ coming. We may have been playing dollies with Yasik for the first day or two, dressing him up and bouncing him around like children with a Ken doll as they try to bridge the gap between fantasy and reality, but even while doing ‘tourist’ around Moscow there were indications that our priority was not the thrill of the art museum but that we must constantly watch this little sprite darting about. With all Moscow offered tourists, we were at MacDonald’s feeding Big Macs to the birds.

Could we have articulated what we wanted to do as parents? Was writing out goals part of the pre-adoption course we took? If it was, I don’t remember but we probably would have nodded enthusiastically to suggestions that we might want to deliver into adulthood a good and happy human being, stably independent and contributing to society, enjoying healthy relationships with others.  We were not even challenged to think about how we planned to parent by the social worker who did our post-adoption interviews.  We were asked about Yasik’s medical visits, physical and mental development, eating and sleeping habits, his personality, our child care plans and family adjustments but nary a question about how we were dealing with discipline and helping him with the character development needed to develop into a good and happy human being.

Could we have articulated how we would parent our little man developing into such a normal vision? Certainly, no manual was tucked into the non-existent bag sent along with Yasik as he left the orphanage. Nor did we expect one. If the local radio journalist who interviewed us outside the courthouse in Yaroslavl had asked us how we planned to parent, we would have planted a look on our faces that tried for “We’ve got this.”, hoping she didn’t look too deeply into our eyes where something less confident, somewhat quizzical was starting to show through. But the question never came up, everyone benignly assuming our son of one hour was in good hands because we would ‘just know what to do’.

And we did have resources. As noted in Post 12 Introduction, it doesn’t take a Google search to know that we humans parent like our parents parented us. Yes, we may have tried to update their technique or improvise in situations in which their methods were found wanting or because there were two sets of parents speaking to our parenting, maybe the techniques were debated, but our parents had up to 20 years to worm their techniques into our hearts and minds.  We may not have been able to easily identify what exactly they did that we now found ourselves doing, but try to find solid confirmation that their techniques had not found some ground in our methods. What is even scarier is trying to objectively recognize that this is what they did, even if as children we heartily disapproved, and then we went right ahead and reverted to as well.  They spanked, and yes, we spanked Yasik.  The time out chair was after their time.[i] We did it, but it is unlikely Yasik will continue that practice for it is not much more acceptable now than spanking.  Now there is “time in”.[ii]  We fought to have meals together as was regular with my parents and siblings, but scheduling and television often lured us from that technique.  We helped Yasik with homework, put him in sports.  Our parents could not easily afford sports nor had much homework help been modeled for them in their homes (and my grandmother was a school teacher!). That is not to say that they didn’t try to help or at least hope that we could manage.

Other resources were at hand as well. The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life dedicates a whole chapter, Chapter 5, to presenting their study or “adventure” in “Why Parents Parent the Way They Do” or a study of “intergenerational transmission of parenting”.[iii]

Parenting is multiply determined. In addition to a parent’s own child-rearing history, parents’ health and well-being, their occupational experiences, the quality of their intimate relationship, and the social support they secure from friends, neighbors, relatives, and co-workers may all influence how parents parent…. too … how children themselves behave matters when accounting for why parents parent the way they do.

I am including the infographic below for it is a good summary of how expansive the considerations for a child’s setting are.[iv]

Gabor Maté goes further, assuring us that “all of us, by virtue of being human, are endowed with a natural drive and talent for child-rearing…. Both men and women have latent child-nurturing circuits in their brains, …”  Maté was referring to “the body’s natural opiates – all of which awaken in parents nurturing habits that are essential to the survival of the young.”[v]  That is a relief.  Parents come equipped.

Adopters too?  Yes, although we may not have dramatic hormone changes, bio-fathers, adoptors and other consistent care-givers “show bonding to the same degree as biological mothers” which “awaken in parents nurturing habits that are essential to the survival of the young”.[vi]

Gordon Neufeld points out that by the time of our adoption there was lots of research and information available, as well, had we thought there was a need to go beyond our naïve confidence in our readiness to parent.[vii]

It is beginning to look like we came into parenting with some juice in our brains to vitalize a motivation to parent and we came into parenting with input from the worlds we inhabited, a quite expansive setting for Yasik’s set of development or journey into his life.

I am going to interject here, because I have heard it so often, that if anything should not work out according to the fantasy, adoptors have a nice little ‘escape hatch/cop out’ from responsibility for their parenting, especially parents of older adoptees, should they accept it: the tsk, tsking of onlookers who intone, “Well it’s in the blood”, or those who shake their heads in commiseration to remind us, “Well those first 3 years are the most important.”

Bruce Perry appears to agree: “Since much of the brain develops early in life, the way we are parented has a dramatic influence on brain development. And so, … a good “brain” history of a child begins with a history of caregiver’s childhood and early experience.”[viii]

As recounted in earlier posts, Yasik’s parenting began first with his bio-parents and then a hospital staff followed by the orphanage so that for the first and crucial (they say) four years we and our styles can be absolved from responsibility for outcomes, right? Yasik was not quite 3 months short of 5 when we entered his life.  By the age of 3 a child’s brain is 80% developed.[ix]    Well what can a hapless adoptor do about that? Everything has been sewed up before they even start. Can’t fault their parenting styles.  But it looks like Perry has more to say: The adoptors need then to recognize the delay in development or the hard-wiring in place and work not with the chronological age of the child but with the child’s actual stage of development.[x] We are not off the hook. Our parenting styles matter. To turn a quote from Gabor Maté around: “no, [parents] did not create the world in which they must parent [their children]. Yes, parents are responsible for their children;”[xi]

As the very long page, Orphanage Risk Factors, has made me quite aware, the world of adoption has spent time reporting on the conditions and the effects of the orphanage ‘alloparenting’.  What world did Yasik, who was in orphanage care in Russia from 1993 to 1997, come from? I asked Google a specifically Russian orphanage parenting style question. An article written by Rachel Stryker in Global Studies of Childhood, Volume 2, Number 2, 2012 called “Emotion Socialization and Attachment in Russian Children’s Homes”  (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/gsch.2012.2.2.85) notes that Russian children raised by their biological parents are usually raised in the authoritative parenting style. Children raised in orphanages in the 1990s, the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union with its socialism guided parenting and the time of economic struggle, were raised in what was called “toughened attachment”, considered necessary to preparing them for the harsh world they would be turned out to at the age of 18, toughened enough to deal with the economic struggle and the need to get along in such a world.

[The article] argues that … detdoma [orphanage] workers’ … [prioritized]… 1) [socializing] children’s attachment in an attempt to establish economic and emotional security for children in uncertain times after the fall of the Soviet Union; and 2) [shaping] children’s understandings of attachment within transnational contexts….

Orphanage workers thus understood that children raised in detdoma during perestroika and the years immediately following led very liminal lives…. that state of being between caregivers as well as between economic and political systems – justified a particular form of attachment socialization referred to in the orphanages as ‘toughened attachment.’… [The] philosophy of toughened attachment is characterized by the understanding that the best forms of attachment behavior are non-responsive. The rationale is that non-responsive care trains children to be resourceful and thus increases their chances for survival in bleak times…. -namely, a relationship whereby children from an early age could be taught to best maximize opportunities in resource-lean environments. In particular, detdoma workers encouraged children with very limited economic prospects to make multiple, flexible, and peer-based relationships with others….

In 1996 then, ‘toughened attachment,’ or purposely non-responsive infant and child care, was thought to instill in children a more practical approach to relating to others in uncertain circumstances. The concept of toughened attachment had much of its basis in the traditional practice in Soviet-style childcare collectives of ‘toughening’ children’s bodies in institutions – for example, … systematically exposing children to cold air and cold water so they develop resistance to winter weather…. Orphanage workers believed that just as one could toughen children’s bodies to make them more fit to survive the natural elements and disease, so could toughening children’s understanding and expression of attachment aid them in the challenging and uncertain times after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Such attachments were socialized in a variety of ways, including swaddling (thought to encourage self-soothing), delaying responses to child crying, encouraging children to ask peers rather than adults for help when they had problems, or telling children in consciously cheerful or humiliating ways, to discover the answers to questions on their own somewhere in the orphanage. Throughout this process, those children who were compliant and cheerful about such interactions were rewarded verbally or by being given some important status or role in the orphanage, although not with touch. Those children who did not comply and expressed anger, sadness, and despair were discouraged using the socialization techniques… mentioned in this section above.

Not aware of how Yasik had been parented in his first world, did not as Gabor Maté says let us off the hook.  We were still responsible to parent him in way that gave him a good start to life in our world.  Accepting that responsibility as we understood it, how would our parenting be judged by those who have studied parenting and what can be learned from our parenting journey?  The judging is based on the work of Diana Baumrind, a developmental psychologist who began her research in the 1960s, providing three of the basic parenting styles. In the 1980s, Stanford researchers, Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin added the fourth style.[xii] These four styles are Authoritarian, Neglectful/Unengaged, Permissive and Authoritative. As is evident by the list of styles mentioned earlier, these four shots are only the ‘opening volleys across the bow’ of the discussion on parenting styles.   Depending on how we come packaged into parenthood, in these times, we can choose to parent from a buffet of styles. An article in The Irish Times, which I accessed through my library’s online data offerings, provided a list of styles parents might choose: Helicopter, Drone, Lawn Mower/Bulldozer/Snow Plough, Free Range, Tiger, Dolphin, Koala, Jellyfish, Lighthouse, Gentle, Crunchy/Silky/Scrunchy, Concierge or as noted above, Conscious.[xiii]  Seriously.

Howevvver, I am not going to fill my plate from that buffet.  The 4 original styles will satisfy.

I know it seems facetious exploration to go over well known and likely self-help level material but Jean Mercer brings forward these considerations. After reminding readers that the adoption process is stressful for many, but not all, children, she goes on to say “The effects of adoption depend on three highly significant factors that may be quite different for different adopted children: the child’s age at separation, the circumstances surrounding the adoption, and the care-giving abilities of the adoptive parents.”[xiv] On with the judging of our parenting styles.

As an appetizer/mood setter/ tension builder, I have included a little quiz I found and indulged in, based on the four parenting styles. If you are a tad curious for yourself you will find the quiz (one of several on Google) at the end of this post.

But be aware: because both parents must be considered for their styles and input,[xv] I appealed to the better angels of Dave’s nature, getting him to take the quiz just after I completed it.  Maybe it was nearing suppertime and I was fogging over; whatever, I managed to add up the numbers each of us chose for each question instead of the number values given to each. And then I spent the next 24 hours angsting over the designations these numbers offered.  One of us was borderline Neglectful and the other, Permissive.  Maybe Permissive could be met with a bit of a shrug and giggle, but Neglectful?  That one elicits, at the very least, a grimace and groan.  I wanted to delete the quiz, shoving the results under the rug, but I also want to honestly explore our parenting.  In the morning, I went back over the quiz looking for a way to ease it into my determination to be open and honest in my search and, whew. I saw my mistake and I recounted.

For some of the questions I was on the fence, thinking it depends on the situation, choosing the middle option, #3. And while Dave did not stay on the same fence for as many question responses as I, we came out with exactly the same scores, barely inside Warm in the first set and barely inside Demanding for the second set. Whew again! We managed to raise Yasik according to the nice sounding parenting style – Authoritative.

But I cannot ignore the impact of my emotional response to the three negative styles and what my image of myself and Dave would have had to acknowledge had we landed in any of these styles that are less than admirable and certainly not trending currently.

The following infographic provides definitions of each of the parenting styles.[xvi]

The following infographic provides a chronology of the trend in parenting.[xvii]

And remember, If you are in danger of taking all this too seriously check out this address:  https://www.verywellfamily.com/parenting-styles-from-around-the-world-4162019

Add it all up and our parenting styles come from all that is swirling about in our brains, bodies and emotions, the parents who parented us, the times and the environment in which that parenting played out, and our values for, as is the habit of values, they take shape influenced by this mix of nature and nurture.  And we are off, skipping along the yellow brick road, off to ask the wizard what kind of setting we provided for Yasik.

 This address will take you to the parenting style quiz Dave and I worked through.

Practical Psychology  “Parenting Style Quiz (Free Test + Instant Results)”  Feb 1, 2024 https://practicalpie.com/parenting-style-quiz/.[xviii]

To make some sense of the designations Warm, Cold, Demanding and Undemanding the site the quiz is taken from lists Authoritarian as Cold and Demanding, Permissive as Warm and Undemanding, Neglectful as Cold and Undemanding and Authoritative as Warm and Demanding.

Please also note though before you do so that there is a caveat: although provided for another context, Bruce K. Alexander reminds his readers in The Globalization of Addiction: a study in poverty of the spirit “clinical assessments are not hard data, even when dressed up in numbers.  Furthermore, it is difficult for clinical researchers to prove…. Human motives are always mixed and at least partly concealed, hence, endlessly arguable”.[xix]

Footnotes

[i] “Time-out (parenting)”  2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-out_(parenting) 

[ii] Holden, George, Tricia Gower, Sharyl E. Wee, Rachel Gaspar, and Rose Ashraf  “Is It Time for “Time-In”?: A Pilot Test of the Child-Rearing Technique”  Pediatr Rep. 2022 Jun; 14(2): 244–253. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9149873/

[iii] Belsky, Jay, Avshalom Caspi, Terri E. Moffit, Richie Poulton.  The Origins of You: how childhood shapes later life.  Harvard University Press, 2020, 110.

[iv] Lang, Diana and Marissa L. Diener  “Influences on Parenting”  2020  https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/influences-on-parenting/

[v] Maté, Gabor MD and Daniel Maté   The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture.  Knopf Canada, 2022, 160, 165

[vi] Mercer, Jean. Understanding Attachment: parenting, child care and emotional development. Praeger Publishers, 2006,  74

[vii] Neufeld, Gordon, PH.D. and Gabor Maté, M.D.  Hold On To Your Kids: why parents need to matter more than peers  Vintage Canada, 2004,  5

[viii] Perry, Bruce and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook.  Basic Books, 2017, 89

[ix]Brain Development 2024 https://www.firstthingsfirst.org/early-childhood-matters/brain-development/

[x]Perry, Bruce and Maia Szalavitz  The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: and other stories from a child psychiatrist’s notebook  Basic Books, 2017, 250

[xi] Maté, Gabor with Daniel Maté.  The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture.  Knopf Canada, 2022, 179

[xii] “The Psychology Behind Different Types of Parenting Styles”  https://jessup.edu/blog/academic-success/the-psychology-behind-different-types-of-parenting-styles/

[xiii] The Irish Times “Helicopter? Free-range? Concierge? What kind of parent are you? How do you parent? There’s a meme for that amid the modern obsession with dissecting and defining parenting styles”  July 18, 2023 July 18, 2023 https://www.proquest.com/central/docview/2838432152/3D22720E0AA34700PQ/10?accountid=48753&sourcetype=Newspapers

[xiv] Mercer, Jean. Thinking Critically about Child Development: examining myths & misunderstanding. Praeger Publishers, 2016, 246

[xv] Francis, Richard C.  Epigenetics: the ultimate mystery of inheritance.  WW Norton, 2011, 72-73

[xvi] Zeltser, Francyne  “A psychologist shares the 4  styles of parenting – and the type that researchers say is the most successful”  Jun 29, 2021 https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/29/child-psychologist-explains-4-types-of-parenting-and-how-to-tell-which-is-right-for-you.html

[xvii] “Parenting Styles and their Evolution: Old, New, Recent Studies and Recommendations”  Oct 17, 2023 https://www.consciousmommy.com/post/parenting-styles-and-their-evolution

[xviii] Practical Psychology  “Parenting Style Quiz (Free Test + Instant Results)”  Feb 1, 2024 https://practicalpie.com/parenting-style-quiz/

[xix] Alexander, Bruce K.  The Globalization of Addiction: a study in poverty of the spirit.  2008, p. 154

Preface

A hair stylist tipped my head back and told me ever since she was six, she wanted to style hair.  Apparently it would surprise us to know how many people become aware of their life focus/purpose quite early in life. My desire to become an adoptive parent, as I have written earlier, began with a childhood dream.  Reaching adulthood, I, still at the teething stage of maturity, tried chewing like any curious puppy on a couple of what might have been initiations into the world of adoption.

One of the winters I lived in the Canadian north I shared a 2-room squatter’s log cabin with a school teacher teaching elementary children who spoke little English outside the classroom. I, with a higher calling of course, was ‘doing God’s work’, financed by a religious community back home receiving from them something north (a blatant pun) of $100.00 per month which to me, in the seventies, seemed enough for food and the roof over my head. Who knows how much my roommate was covering.  I in financial naiveté never noticed.  I was the protestant fundamentalist equivalent of a hippie, though so otherworldly that while for others free love was more physically vigorous, mine was, like I said, otherworldly.

One afternoon while I was going through the motions of language study while my roommate spent the day addressing the needs of 40 clamouring, Chipewyan- speaking children, I was interrupted by a knock at the door.  A man, maybe in his twenties, stood in the porch; in one hand, he held a baby girl under one year old and in the other, a baby bottle. The baby was wrapped in a blanket: thank God for little mercies. The man, her father, held the baby out to me, telling me her name was Gladys. As I absolutely unhesitatingly took the baby from his arms, I did have the presence of mind to ask how long he wanted to leave Gladys with us.  “Oh, a day, or a week, a year…”, he squinted as he slipped back out the door.  This was a Friday afternoon. My roommate with  plans for a child-free weekend, came home to find me dragging a dresser drawer out on the floor next to the kitchen table, turning it into a make shift cradle – ‘enthusiastically’ she quite generously observed.   Finances, wherewithal, and most seriously, legalities never given a moment’s attention, I was fussing over what to do with a name like Gladys.  Gladys’ young mother had her priorities more clearly in order.  Within a couple of hours, she came to the door to ask if we had her daughter; with hardly another word she walked over to the drawer on the kitchen floor and lifted Gladys into her arms.  In a small town, word mercifully travels quickly.  The aborted first attempt to follow my dream summed up by my roommate: “Even you were relieved you’d dodged that bullet.”

A few years later I was visiting someone who lived above the market in a provincial town in the Philippines. A visitor came to the door who may have heard an ‘Americana’ was visiting.  My coping skills in the language, Tagalog, were not enviable, but I could pick out enough words to know the person in the doorway was asking if I would like to buy a child.  Buying a child was doable in those years, with apparently little legal difficulty within the local community.  It was quite another thing for an expatriate on a work visa.  Maybe my prefrontal cortex was by then in the final stages of development or I had heard some scary stories for I had sufficient good sense to say, “Salamat po, pero hindi naman”.  (“Thank you, but not really.”)

What you know of me so far is that I was at best comfortable with no stable income or clearly articulated reason for actually living a life on earth – something Joe and Josephine Normal think is foundational.  I had daydreams but played out each day as though only life after death had value.  I felt like a hapless bystander to life active around me.  Generously you might call me a late-bloomer.  OK.

‘In the fullness of time’ as it says in Galatians 4:4 of the old King James Bible the finances, wherewithal and legalities began to fall into place, and I could now begin to present myself as a viable candidate for adoption and could begin to act on what seemed to me to be simply what I must do, rather than continue to dance around a romantic notion.  I secured sufficient financial independence and I accepted a date with a good man, Dave. The poet and Instagram personality, Yung Pueblo, encourages people to find “a partner who supports your dreams”, not an essential in adoption, but wow for lots of reasons, a very good thing. Jessica O’Dwyer, writes of her process in adoption in Mamalita: an adoption memoir. For O’Dwyer menopause arrived at 32.  In time, she decided to adopt.  The last sentence of Chapter One: “But first, I wanted a husband.” I agree!  We started planning for adoption quite literally on the first date and so we took the next steps together.  For most, these steps are paperwork, orientation and about two years of aborted adoptions; a few possible adoptions fell through before we were offered Yasik.

I am writing this post to preface the story of our adoption as family, a story I will write on the template of Joseph Campbell’s interpretation of the ‘Hero’s Journey’.  Even the vague and naïve experiences above can be seen as part of a template for such a journey.  The Hero’s Journey is extrapolated from ancient stories as an explanation for why people have human experiences.  I chose this common outline for many myths as a template because I embraced the Hero’s Journey as the way I want to understand why I am on earth: hopefully I am working my way toward becoming a person who can live a life I am at home with.  As I understand the human experience as interpreted by myths like the Odyssey and many others, we as humans encounter shipwrecks, monsters, deep sleeps on some island and conflicts in our search for home, a stable life or to learn how to be human. Maybe as was Odysseus’ experience, many of us for a vast variety of reasons, do not take the most direct route to return to our homes or places of maturity.  Perhaps I took the slow boat to find what I wanted to experience in my life.  In Book 3 of the Odyssey, Athena puts Odysseus into a deep sleep in a cave.  I too may have gotten stuck on some island and put into a deep sleep.  I do know I certainly have always felt I didn’t fully awake or fully begin to experience life until I began taking realistic steps toward adoption.  I once heard a preacher say we better get our lives together because by 45 we are set in our ways as surely as if we’d been poured in concrete.  We now know we are not hardwired; our brains, minds, even our bodies are rewiring, changing throughout our lives.  We continue to evolve on our human journeys.  We can become the people we want to be, may even have planned to be as we set out on our human journey.  Sidebar: research done by Dr. Daniel Gilbert found “… over a ten-year period of time, you’re not going to be the same person” (Personality Isn’t Permanent, Benjamin Hardy p 37).

(Wendell Krossa, my brother, would add to Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey by suggesting that the purpose of our journey is to develop our capacity to love.

Ken Ring in Lessons From The Light notes the near death experience of one person who said that on meeting God, they discovered that God focused on one primary concern while helping that person to evaluate their life story (i.e. the “life review”)- Did you learn anything about love? Do you know how to love? Did you love? …

If the hero’s quest is fulfilled/accomplished when we conquer our inner monster by orienting our life to universal or unconditional love, then every person has the equal opportunity to succeed at that supreme success or achievement, to achieve greatness in those terms. I am referring to Joseph Campbell’s point that we attain human maturity when we orient our lives to universal love. I would use unconditional love as the more encompassing term. “It’s coming on Christmas…. singing songs of joy and peace… Oh, I wish I had a river to skate away on…”Posted on October 17, 2024 by Wendell Krossa http://www.wendellkrossa.com/)

An abundance of myths worldwide give weight to this explanation of life on earth. Why we find ourselves on earth and taking such a journey is less substantiated.  I may have slipped the bonds of sanity, but I have decided to go with the assertions made by Natalie Sudman in The Application of Impossible Things: my near death experience in Iraq (2012).   Sudman had a near death experience when her convoy drove over a bomb in Iraq. I use the word ‘assertion’ as her perspective.  I have not had an NDE so for me it can be no more than a belief.  Sudman said the experience revealed to her we choose the experiences we enter into when we come from another place.  It is assumed by many Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” So maybe.  Kate Atkinson in her 2002 Not the End of the World collection of short stories has one called “The Bodies Vest” about a man, Vincent, who has observed death up close and personal: his father, his first wife and her father. On the last page of the short story (192), the narrator says as he lay dying himself that he wants to assure his two sons for whom he wanted better things he had come to realize   “… everything was all right but he couldn’t speak and besides he had no logical evidence on which to base that belief.” I have no ‘logical evidence’ either.  It just works for me to choose to believe we are spiritual beings who have come to earth to have a human experience.  That I might have dreamed up a plan to come to earth to deal with adoption and soon after I arrived, I was reminded of my purpose in a dream works for me. Whatever.  At best we can say we are here. What do we do with that reality?

All this to say I approach my search to understand the world of adoption from the perspective I may have come to earth to experience a journey in adoption, hopefully continually learning a better way. Though for Dave and I there will be no more opportunity to personally test a better way, perhaps what I am coming to learn now will be something I might share with those who are considering becoming, have become and are still in the middle of being birth parents, adoptees, and adopters, or are like myself, looking back to seek understanding.

I go as far out on a limb as I can to find support when I seek to show it is not just the Luke Sky Walkers, Harry Potters or those we deem highly successful in the non-fiction world who are on a hero’s or heroine’s journey, but also birth or bio parents, adoptees and adopters who struggle with the baggage of adoption.  And to be even more specific, I am not only talking about those who begin life in institutional care, become adopted and go on to international success like Russian-born, American-raised, Jessica Long, but I am also hoping to make a case for the seven-year-old boy sent back to Russia by his adoptive mother, and of course, my son, Yasik.

The plot line for the ‘Hero`s Journey’ is a three-act play: separation, initiation/disintegration, return/re-integration.  So simple a plot outline must surely allow for liberty of detail: is the main character the only one who gets a full-on hero’s or heroine’s journey? Odysseus was noble born and secure in a family, with a loving wife and son.  What of the crew members who died when Zeus decided to pin cocky Odysseus’ ears back a bit? Are they merely stock characters or foils summarily drowned off, or are they too on a journey with different purposes in their human experiences, finishing equally as well, yet not registering on our mainstream scale of success?

In his interview with Bill Moyer, Joseph Campbell makes clear the hero is not limited to our ideas about a classical hero but is for all of us the path of maturation all evolving humans follow. If Campbell is right, Odysseus’ crew too were on a hero’s journey.  The young fellow who dies early in a freak accident or in an act of gun violence, or someone one’s cherished daughter who dies of an overdose on her first experiment with drugs, or the child who languishes in institutional care: have they too not come to have a human experience on a hero’s or heroine’s journey?  What about the child caught in an abusive foster home until self-worth has died?   What gods came to her rescue? Yet Campbell says the hero’s journey is for all of us. In Ernie Crey and Suzanne Fournier’s book, Stolen From Our Embrace, he shares details from the life experiences of two of his siblings who were taken from their families and put into foster care. The following is the piece about the life journeys of two of his sisters.

Frances and Jane had fared no better in their foster homes [than others among his siblings].  The fundamentalist Christian foster parents [they were placed with] exerted strict “discipline” through whippings, psychological terror and heavy farm labour.  The girls were told if they didn’t submit to discipline they’d burn in hell along with all the other pagan Indians.  As adults, my sisters told us with tears flowing down their faces about their foster father’s favoured punishment.  For any imagined infraction he’d march the girls in the middle of the night down to the poultry barns to shovel out chicken shit until dawn.  Both Frances and Jane carried deep shame throughout their lives about being Indian and a lot of anger towards white adults.  After Frances began drinking heavily as a young mother, her baby daughter, Roberta, was apprehended by social workers, again without any notification of family members.  The loss of a second generation of Crey children was well underway.  It seemed like nothing could ever repair the abandonment and grief Frances felt, and her guilt for failing Roberta.  In the late 1980s she died of a heroin overdose.

 As an adult, Jane told me of being sexually abused by her foster parent’s son, who was never charged and is now a Christian missionary in Africa.  In her late teens, Jane gave birth to a son who was adopted…. Jane now spends most of her time on Vancouver’s meanest streets in a methadone- maintenance program but receiving no psychiatric care or counseling to help her cope with the immense losses in her life (42,43).

I think I will add here that the foster father (if it is decent to use the word ‘father’) was an ‘upstanding’ member of the church I grew up in.

Just now as I update this post I am listening to ‘The Daily Show‘ being moderated by D.L. Hughley (1/30/23).  He is interviewing Ben Crump, a lawyer, after the death of Tyre Nichols.  In talking about how Tyre Nichol’s mother is coping with her son’s death, he told Hughley that the mother said, “I believe that my son was sent for an assignment and now he’s back in heaven with God because he’s completed that assignment.  That’s the only way I can cope with this tragedy.  A greater good is going to happen with what happened to my son.”

There has to be more to understand about the Hero’s journey and how the end goal of maturation is understood if each of us is truly on such a journey.  I choose to hope there is a story with more widely open arms, being careful not to massage the story to fit the Hero’s Journey plotline nor ignore what “essential paradoxes” are at play (Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books (86) by Azar Nafisi)

An Update:

June 6’20, a Saturday morning.  Translation: in no rush to get out of bed, time to run a finger over my tablet snooping for Trump gossip and slipping passed Covid tracking graphs. It wouldn’t have entered my head to check for any activity on my website.  Just days before Dave had installed a spam blocker on my site. Within minutes my ego which had been swelling in wonder at the numbers of hits I was getting on my site was a spurting, sputtering balloon. Not one real hit remained.  OK, so I really am writing only to myself, not just pretending to journal my way to a personal understanding of adoption.

But Gmail, yes.  I check it daily.  A tap on my Gmail and there was a little surprise. Gmail had alerted me to a comment on my website.  The comment, you can check it – as of Feb 19’21 it is still the only comment, reiterating ‘in your face’ how non-existent traffic to my site is.  It reads, “I believe we adopted Yaroslav’s older sister, Svetlana!”

For me this is one of those ‘time stops’ moments. I had given some thought over the years to Yasik’s ‘bio’ family, wondering how we might help him get in contact with them if he ever showed interest in finding them.  He had not yet expressed interest, at least to Dave and I.  Sometime in his later teens, I asked him if he wanted to look for his mother whom I believed must have cared for him enough to have taken him to a hospital, returning to visit a couple of times.  His response, “She never cared about me, so why should I care about her.’” I think that was a flat statement, not a question.   Still, we had the parents’ names and from time to time I googled them.  We had lost the one paper in Russian with a list of Yasik’s siblings’ names.

That morning I showed no restraint hitting articles on Trump, yet now I was restrained.  I rolled over and with eyes in full stun mode looked carefully at the alert, trying to comprehend that I even had one.

“Daaaavve, look at this.” I opened the website to pull up the comment.  And there it was.  Yasik might have a sibling trying to get in touch with him.

Restraint again.  What if this was just another way in for spam?  A Nigerian prince wanting us to rescue him as he drained out our bank account?

We let this electrifying comment hover over us all day like a drone trying to see if we were going to respond, waiting for or taunting us to get over our silly cautiousness and deal with it.

Meanwhile the sender of the comment was on “pins and needles” so certain was she of her message.

You see I had started putting out posts from my journal about our adoption experience.  In Journal Entry #1 I provide Yasik’s full birth name, Yaroslav Guerin Nicolavich, and the name of the city he was living in at the time of our adoption, Yaroslavl.  The comment sender, Cherie, had been looking for her adopted daughter’s younger brother since 2000, shortly after their adoption and with the aid of a set of documents not provided at the time of our adoption.  Good ole’ Google – as obscure as my site is – found the match.  Cherie put in the comment and crossed her fingers.  On our end we dithered until the evening.  Finally, we returned the email with a tentative response.  She phoned.  And sent pictures of her daughter.  The evidence was in the pictures.    Svetlana is Yasik’s sister.  Turns out the other two, though half brother and sister to Yasik and his sister, look amazing like Svetlana and Yasik as well.

And this may not sound particularly PC coming from an adoptor rather than an adoptee from whom the observation usually comes, but as this discovery started to shift our thinking, I began to sense that in some hardly fathomable way, Yasik has some kind of fuller substance, is more substantial as a human being, a reality, a history with a bio family.  No longer a ghost as some adoptees describe feeling of themselves.   I don’t understand why this is and maybe it is an idea from societal constructs, still it impacts.

Next step: now we needed to get in touch with Yasik about this life–altering news.  Cherie says “our kids are complicated and guarded”.   And when Dave and I try to get in touch with him to share news that deserves a flashing Breaking News tag, we agree once again.  It takes nearly a month to finally get him on the phone.   I sent him phone messages, wrote letters –one letter was one sentence in bold, in caps, as tall as the page allows: IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN SOME LIFE-CHANGING NEWS … CALL THESE NUMBERS: numbers he knew well.  His sister and her family were getting as antsy as we were.

Near the end of the month, Dave and I had an optometrist appointment at Costco.  Dave went in first and I waited for my turn on a plastic chair alongside a busy aisle of product and shoppers.  With some finger twiddling moments to fill, my default brain mode in times of Yasik stress is to try twisting God’s arm to get him involved, never certain that I have his ear.   “God could you please get Yasik to call.”  In this very poor excuse for a waiting room, God may have done something. My cell rang.  I fumbled to find it and turn it off, certain it was a robo call in a foreign language.  I didn’t recognize the number. But I answered it: curiosity? boredom? auto pilot kicking in? a prompt from God? maybe, certainly not because it would normally have been a good idea.

A receptionist was on the line, calling from some medical office and wanting to know if we would be willing to offer our home address to give Yasik an address in order for him to receive MSP.

“Of, course. Our address is —.  And uhmmm, would it be possible for you to get a message to Yasik for us.”

“Want to talk to him? He’s right here.”

“Oh, yes.”

Fumble, mumble. “Hi, Mom.”

“Yasik, I don’t want to tell you now. We are at appointments.  But please, phone tonight. We have unbelievable news.”  Or something to that effect.

Yasik interpreted all this to mean that we were at a doctor’s office and Dave must be having some medical issue, having no idea that I was going to be telling him he has siblings.  One as nearby as the US.

I was so excited myself that I burbled to the receptionist, who was trying to prepare me for my eye exam, something to the effect that tonight my son was going to be finding out that he has a sister in North America.  In the most blandly receptionist tone possible, she responded, “Oh, that would be weird.”   Really?  This is some of the best news I have heard in my life time.  Cherie says Svetlana was over the moon at another point in their developing relationship.  I was over the moon at this moment. But like Dave says, just because it is filling your heart and mind, it might not be registering in quite the same way to a stranger…..   Duh.

Yasik called in the early evening.

“Are you sitting down?” I asked in announcer mode.

He thought Dave must be seriously ill.

“Yasik we got an email and pictures and everything. You have a sister and she lives in the US.” And whatever other details came bubbling up.

“So what do you think?”

With a chuckle, “That sounds interesting.” There was happiness in his voice.  But no “Wow! Holy Shit! You have got to be kidding!”  Just – “That sounds interesting”.  Interesting?  It’s mind blowing to me from a perspective that was nurtured from infancy to express emotions with the confidence that they would be acknowledged.   Again as Cherie noted, these two siblings are complex and guarded.  If from infancy, a display of emotions has been ignored or even discouraged, a guarded response is deeply ingrained.  Only the note of happiness in his voice was allowed to slip through.

Svetlana had called that afternoon.  Like Dave and I, she and her mom were barely holding their breaths as well.  She wanted to know when she could call Yasik and I said, “It just so happens…. He called just today.” We were able to let her know we had finally connected with Yasik and that he would be calling us in the evening.  She gave us her phone number stat.

I gave her phone number to Yasik.   He called her without hesitation later that evening.  Pictures were sent back and forth, pictures of Svetlana and Anya and Nicolai, that could have been Yasik at different times; especially in the younger pictures, the similarities are obvious.  Cherie and Svetlana also sent copies of the documents we had not been given.  Svetlana’s passport picture at the time of adoption could have been Yasik’s.  So begins a new chapter of their lives.

Post #12   Set and Setting Introduction

Yasik was now a Canadian Vincent.  It was time to move from his Russian nurture to his nurture in our family, not ignoring that he would be bringing his Russian-transferring-to-Canadian nature/nurture along.

Even though Dr. Spock said parents know more than they think they do[i], let me begin this group of posts about parenting by straight up saying Dave and I had the awareness of Donald Rumsfeld when we took on parenting; there were “known knowns” and “known unknowns“, but then there also are those “unknown unknowns”.[ii] The “known knowns” would be similar to what SNL suggested Kevin Federline might have known: 1. Always feed your children. 2. Children are ‘babe magnets’.  3. For the rest, Federline suggested parents should call him to babysit.[iii]

We didn’t have Federline’s phone number so that was a non-starter.  But like Federline, Dave quickly picked up on how much of a babe magnet Yasik was for women gave him their seats on the bus and fawned over Yasik.  So that was good. And we did know to feed our kid. But maybe for that one we were simply following the Golden Rule of ‘do unto others as you would have done for yourself’.

But from where did we know to do the other things we so quickly fell into doing? I ‘conducted’, or less pompously, ‘asked around’ about the assumption that we parent like our parents which perhaps more pompously is called the ‘intergenerational transmission of parenting’.[iv] The responses I got ranged from vehemently ‘Never’ to ‘Yes, my parents’ way worked for me’, but most also added on reflection, that ‘the times are different’. In the everyday details of life which have been part of our society for a century or two, Dave and I did things as our parents did:  maybe hugging was not yet a comfortable expression of love for our parents but feeding, clothing and sending us off to school was held as a daily routine; vacations were pilgrimages to visit the relatives with some relaxation.

Whether I was comfortable with it or not, I know for a time Yasik carried my little Bible around and sat with it on the couch watching TV.  He prayed with me at night – “Dear God”, named all his cousins and aunts and uncles, “Amen” and made us laugh.  It seems to me that was a holdover from my childhood and my own religious upbringing although, of course, perhaps Yasik went so willingly along with prayers and carried the little kid size Bible like a toy or icon because of some religious activities encouraged in the orphanage.[v]  Dave has always found a tool box to be a special kind of candy box, so whether he worried about his tools or not, he may have passed the toolbox’s wonders on to Yasik.  Or did Yasik come from a long line of mechanics?  It is hard to be definitive about where our inclinations have come from, but for both Dave and I some childhood experiences were valued and continued: eating the evening meal together (when work schedules allowed) was important for it was the time of togetherness and laughter.  Going to the lake or going for drives up the mountains were also important as were weekend get-togethers with family and friends.  Having parents equally involved in our home care was also respected.  If my Mom was working, then my Dad burnt the pancakes. Dave’s dad cooked with the salt and pepper shaker. In both families, gender did not dictate chore assignment; each kid was expected to wash dishes or mow the lawn.  Wearing hand-me-downs was a given; no noses got stuck in the air when we were offered hand-me-downs for Yasik. Interests were encouraged as far as the dollar could reach. Pets and bicycles were musts, even if it meant an opportunity to encourage sharing.  In my family, all four of us truly tried to ride our lone two-wheeler together. Dave’s dad bought a bike for each of his kids. Dave’s mom bought art supplies for him and even sent one of his cartoons into a drawing contest.  I still hear the Hallelujah chorus when I remember the day my Mom took me to the library.

Like it or not, consciously or not, we fall back on neuronal pathways well-trod unless the experiences associated are too negative or rendered useless by the march of time.  Gabor Maté in The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture, in a tone that sounds quite confident, says, “It turns out that our innate parenting instinct is perfectly calibrated to ensure the provision of the thing many “experts” would have us ignore: the child’s developmental needs”.[vi]  And Mate is backed up by Bruce D. Perry who says

The brain is an historical organ…. Our life experiences shape who we become by creating our brain’s catalog of template memories, which guide our behavior, sometimes in ways we can consciously recognize, more often via processes beyond our awareness…. Since much of the brain develops early in life, the way we are parented has a dramatic influence on brain development. And so, since we tend to care for our children the way we were cared for ourselves during our own childhoods, a good “brain” history of a child begins with a history of the caregiver’s childhood and early experience.[vii]

Cecile David-Weill, in Parents Under the Influence: words of wisdom from a former bad mother, will agree: “Our childhood continues to manifest and affect us as we get older, shaping our choices in every facet of our lives (24).

According to the Pew Research Center if we see categories of parenting, we would more easily recognize that we do indeed parent like our parents at times.[viii]

Dave and I were middle-aged parents who had lived in a variety of environments.  We had whatever our parents had taught us, and we had ample time to observe ways that other parents parent; as well, we must have had some trending input from reading or other media.  We had also taken the 9-week adoption prep required by BC’s social services: about all I remember from that seminar was information on the adoption process for domestic adoption and struggles adoptors may experience with special needs children.  I recently found notes Dave made at the orientation meetings.  Turns out we were given a basic overview of Attachment Theory. Perhaps though, abstract notes could not secure solid ground in our hearts and minds amidst the case histories of families with special needs adoptees or the boggling but potentially exciting procedural information for the adoption process. In the flurry of such an experience and despite the advice of adoption experts, “The adoptors who were most successful were prepared, had educated themselves, and had ties to support services”[ix], parenting as a life challenge I was about to engage in and more specifically, Attachment Theory, sounded like ‘news to me’ when I began reading in adoption years later. I also now know we were not the only not-so-super parents out there for Scott Simon in Baby We Were Meant For Each Other: in praise of adoption takes pains to note that some otherwise excellent parents showed neither interest nor made the time for books or support groups while raising their very happy child.[x]

But now I am taking a look backwards.  Recently I was taxiing the neighbour kids to the Dollar Store, a trip the neighbour, in the house between us and the kids, said they made sound like a trip to Disneyland. They range from 2 years old to 15.  On the way I asked them what they thought a parent was. The 11-year-old without hesitation listed off pretty much everything a Google search would offer: protect and provide.  The 15-year-old topped the list up with “and have fun”.

Google offers up numbers, letters and alliterated titles like 1,2,3 Magic Parenting, the 3 As of parenting: Authoritative, Attachment, and Acceptance or the 3 Fs of Positive Parenting: Firm, Fair and Friendly or the 3 Ts Parenting: Tune In, Talk more, Take Turns.   Actually 3 seems the favourite as it often is in many realms, for here is yet another 3, 3 Principles: Love, Limits and Latitude. The # 4 offers some competition with 4 Cs: Choices, Consequences, Consistency, Compassion or the 4 Rs of Parenting: Respect, Responsibility, Reciprocity, and Restraint in the process of raising children. Gentle parenting is built on 4 Basic Pillars: Empathy, Respect, Understanding, and Boundaries.  The 5Cs of Neurodiverse Parenting are Self-Control, Compassion, Collaboration, Consistency and Celebration.  And then there are the 6 Parenting Dimensions: Warmth, Rejection, Autonomy support, Coercion, Structure, and Chaos. And so it goes until at least 10 unless you consider Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life but only one of those rules is directly related to parenting: #5 – Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.  No, that is not true. # 11 also applies – Do not bother children while they are skateboarding.[xi] Is it all summed up in the Parenting Golden Rule: “Treat your child as you would like to be treated if you were in the same position”, which is apparently simple, straightforward, and effective? Ok, like the neigbour kids said, protect, provide, and have fun.

I heard Dr. Phil once say, in a context I may be misconstruing, that it (life/relationships) is all about perspective or perception.  It seems to me that life’s experiences have another and equal dimension. More specifically for this post, adoption has another and equal dimension. And let me say right here that this could get a bit messy as I worked this out in the middle of the night, but at the time it sounded sane to me so here goes.  Set, as in ‘mindset’, and setting are terms for a theory that refers to the psychological, social and cultural parameters which shape the response to psychedelic experience.[xii]  I would like to apply that thought to adoption as family with ‘mindset’ being both the genetics and the perspective or perceptions the adoptee brings to family and ‘setting’ as all that influences the development of the adoptee’s ‘mindset’: social, cultural, historical, political, physical, economic and spiritual environment that impact the relationship (even with a list like that I probably missed something). Or as I put it in Entry #11 (with help from Google) we as persons are physical and mental beings who develop networks of beliefs that sway how we calculate and think about our environment and social relationships, using reflection and language to make autonomous choices and engage in actions, with the right to be accountable for our choices.

To have a good psychedelic trip both mindset and setting must be taken into account. To have a good understanding of the way each individual handles his or her life journey again mindset and setting must be examined. Jerome Kagan, a developmental psychologist at Harvard, put the idea this way: “Genes and family may determine the foundation of a house, but time and place determine its form” for as Dr. Nicole Letourneau says on the preceding page, “Genetics may determine how easy it is to push a person’s buttons, but the finger that actually pushes them belongs to the early caregiving environment – how a person was parented.”  ” … regardless of who raised them“.[xiii]

Dr. Nicole Letourneau and Justin Joschko explain it as entwined in this way:

To divide traits into genetically determined and environmentally determined compartments is to misunderstand how genes work.  Consider hair colour, a trait that, on the surface, seems to be determined solely by a person’s genes.  A child’s hair is seldom a colour that does not have some familial precedent.  By contrast, the influence of the environment on one’s hair seems nonexistent.  Blonde Nordic children adopted by Chinese families do not spontaneously develop black hair.  However, this does not mean genes alone are responsible for a person/hair colour.  After all, genes can really only do one thing: instruct cells, by way of an interpreter called RNA, to create a series of amino acids, which then link together to form proteins.  Now, this one function is extremely, unbelievably important. Proteins are the body’s proletariat, the workers who carry out the myriad tasks which allow us, the society in which they dwell, to function.  But genes cannot on their own, dictate, the colour of a person’s hair.  Hair colour is determined by melanin, which is the end product of the amino acid tyrosine.  Now, genes do code for tyrosine, hence the genetic influence.  However, in hair the degree of melanin accumulation is decided in part by the concentration of copper to the cells producing that hair.  When that cell has more copper, the hair is darker.  Should the intake of copper be reduced to below a certain threshold, hair generated by the same follicle will be lighter than it was previously, when copper supplies were plentiful…. Such is the case with thousands of environmental factors we take for granted.  It isn’t until a radical change in the environment depletes once-plentiful resources that we realize how much those resources contributed to our development…

I guess all of this allows me to continue to use the set and setting metaphor. We have considered the world Yasik came from and how that was impacting his mindset, who he is as a person with his unique perceptions, and now we will begin to consider the world Yasik moved into with adoption, our family, with Dave and I as parents, the setting.  As we strove to parent in a way that we thought offered love and care to Yasik, what perception was he forming of family? When we took this person, Yasik, to the park to ride the teeter totter, he was a tidy little package of 40 inches by 40 pounds and whichever one of us got on the opposite side of the teeter totter that stood a mere 2 feet above ground was north of 3 times 40 by 40. Sometimes Yasik was in danger of being tossed into the air; other times he could be stuck on the ground as we and all that pertained to his new world of family strove to find a good experience on life’s teeter-totter. The parent-child relationship works for a balance with those dynamics. Riding together with tiny on one side and extra-large on the other can still be wonderful fun if extra-large is caring and responsible and the mechanism that holds the teeter totter together and the playground it has been set in are copacetic (a weird word Dave used to love).

I will look at our set and setting in the next posts by laying out our setting of family via adoption with the hopes of culling some awareness of the perceptions Yasik was developing.

Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire,

to know nothing for certain.

An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.

― William Least Heat Moon[xiv]

Footnotes at the end of Entry# 12C