Marital harmony in front of children?

[EasterJoy]

What is meant by parents “should be human” in front of their kids? Do we mean admitting when we are wrong? Of course we should. Do we mean letting a child using one parent to lobby the other or double-up on the other by “taking sides” with the child or children? I’m not much for that.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

What is meant by parents “should be human” in front of their kids? Do we mean admitting when we are wrong? Of course we should. Do we mean letting a child using one parent to lobby the other or double-up on the other by “taking sides” with the child or children? I’m not much for that.

I’d argue that it just comes with the package. While I do think parents have a role as guiding figures especially during younger years, there needs to be a point when they should stop kidding themselves (and their kids) about “Obey me because I am perfect/better.”

Sometimes it can mean pointing out the flaws of one parent over the other, sometimes it’s not. That’s the point when you interact with human beings instead of the typical, “Mama/Papa knows best.” dynamic. Your children will eventually outgrow that whether you’ll like it or not. There will come a time (or at least, there will always be that one chance) where children surpass their parents and even their grandparents in terms of ability.

Heck, at the risk of offending some of the old folk, I’d say physical fitness is usually a common pain point that puts us ‘young’uns’ at an advantage.

 

[rayne89]

My parents were not a united front, my mother has a personality disorder so causing division and creating chaos is her middle name. Thankfully at least the majority of the time when my dad witnessed her emotional abuse he stood up for me, which is a actually a rare occurrence when one parent has a pd. Usually the non pd spouse is an enmeshed enforcer. Because he did I learned to fight back. She saved her worst when for when my dad was at work. Seeing him stand up to her gave me confidence to stand up for my self.

My husband and I raised a daughter that’s now 19. We did have a united front but we also had a very safe environment where she could express herself and be heard without ridicule or condemnation. We also never fought in front of her. Her childhood was night and day from mine. She is very close with both of us and we’re very proud of the young woman she’s grown into.

 

[EasterJoy]

I’d argue that it just comes with the package. While I do think parents have a role as guiding figures especially during younger years, there needs to be a point when they should stop kidding themselves (and their kids) about “Obey me because I am perfect/better.”

Sometimes it can mean pointing out the flaws of one parent over the other, sometimes it’s not. That’s the point when you interact with human beings instead of the typical, “Mama/Papa knows best.” dynamic. Your children will eventually outgrow that whether you’ll like it or not. There will come a time (or at least, there will always be that one chance) where children surpass their parents and even their grandparents in terms of ability.

Heck, at the risk of offending some of the old folk, I’d say physical fitness is usually a common pain point that puts us ‘young’uns’ at an advantage.

Exactly what are you saying? Go ahead and argue in front of your children, because no matter what you do the day is going to come when they aren’t going to show you any respect just because you are their parents?

My son, take care of your father when he is old; grieve him not as long as he lives.
Even if his mind fail, be considerate with him; revile him not in the fullness of your strength.
For kindness to a father will not be forgotten, it will serve as a sin offering - it will take lasting root.
In time of tribulation it will be recalled to your advantage, like warmth upon frost it will melt away your sins.
Sir. 3:12-15

Yet if parents do not show each other respect even when they are frustrated or angry, the children will not discipline themselves and show respect to their parents when they have a frustration or a complaint to make. Likewise, as children grow the parents ought to make an effort to correct their children in private whenever possible, and avoid embarrassing them by pointing out the child’s shortcomings in front of other people when it is not necessary or in a way that is insensitive. It is all in one package in that way, yes.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

Exactly what are you saying? Go ahead and argue in front of your children, because no matter what you do the day is going to come when they aren’t going to show you any respect just because you are their parents?

I’m saying that there’s a point when the facade is only going to hurt, not help.

And yeah, being a parent doesn’t entitle you to as many creds as you’d like once your kid’s old enough to get a decent job, live on his or her own, and (according to the Bible itself) get married.

“For this reason a man shall leave [his] father and [his] mother

and be joined to his wife,

and the two shall become one flesh.” - Ephesians 5:31

Sorry Moms and Dads but really, the strength of your authority comes with an expiration date.

Sometimes I even wonder if they’re the ones who wish children never grew up. I know my mom can actually lean toward that sometimes.

Yet if parents do not show each other respect even when they are frustrated or angry, the children will not discipline themselves and show respect to their parents when they have a frustration or a complaint to make.

By this reasoning, the merits and morals you impart on children is not so much marital harmony but prudence. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just a different lesson you’re trying to teach.

If you want to show children to be respectful even to a disagreeable person, then show the respect. You don’t prove how the person isn’t disagreeable.

Likewise, as children grow the parents ought to make an effort to correct their children in private whenever possible, and avoid embarrassing them by pointing out the child’s shortcomings in front of other people when it is not necessary or in a way that is insensitive. It is all in one package in that way, yes.

I don’t disagree with this however, what I might disagree with is that the so-called parental right to criticize can be taken way too far whether private or public.

I grew up that way and for the most part, my parents actually regretted it. It took a while for them to realize that a nice chunk of their micro-managed upbringing resulted in a damaged, insecure, socially awkward young man. Thankfully, that was also the time I begun to put that behind and try to take more control over my life. Credit goes to them for supporting my decisions since then.

Parent or not, you can only criticize another fellow human being so much before you’re making cracks.

 

[recentrevert]

Honestly? I mostly remember it leaving me feeling helpless and worthless. I didn’t believe as a kid that my parents loved me, and I feel like that was one of the main contributors. It seemed at the time that it was more important to not have conflict than to actually care about me.

After all, I was in trouble all the time, and it didn’t matter to anyone, even people who could see that I was getting punished for things that weren’t my fault.

If one parent behaves badly towards their child, and the other ignores it or makes excuses, they take part in the sin. The other parent should at least acknowledge the mistake or sin of the other, and exhort the child to bear it patiently. Denying that there has been an injustice or lack of charity when there has been could easily cause the child to hate both parents and fall into sin. Some parents take the ‘united front’ to unreasonable levels, as if it were a moral absolute. Excusing the bad behaviour of the other parent might lead the child to believe that they must be utterly worthless as, apparently, people can treat them badly without doing anything wrong. This feeling of worthlessness would not be humbling, but would likely lead to a lack of self-respect, and a lack of self-respect often leads to a life of sin.

 

[DarkLight]

If the issue is a petty thing and your other parent is having a mood, he can coach you that sometimes we need to overlook the faults of others. Perhaps some time your parents will do the same for you, and later on he will explain that they looked past your bad day–not because you were entitled to it, but in the interest of the common good and the objective of not letting one person have the power to cause a lot of drama single-handedly.

In the worst case, a parent has a duty to separate, even with the bond remaining, in order to protect a child from abuse. Emotional abuse counts. A parent might be right to let their children learn to navigate the bumps and scratches of life without trying to step in and fix things for them every time, but they can’t stand by and watch their child be abused. That would be as bad as forcing a child to watch them be abused.

It’s the dichotomy here I struggle with. My mother did have abusive traits, that much is sure. What I’m calling “in a mood”, the times where it seemed like I couldn’t do anything right - I’d say these happened a few times a week, usually for a couple of hours each time. And of course a punishment from one of these times would often last a week or two.

The trouble is I’m in a position where I don’t feel like it would have been better if my mother had been out of my life, but at the same time it’s quite clear in retrospect that some things were very wrong. I was being put in a position where what I was learning was I was regularly in trouble because my mother was in a bad mood - usually for the rather nebulous crimes of “having a bad attitude” or “sass”. (To put things in perspective, at one point I had a stuffed up nose and was breathing through my mouth - I got in trouble for sass because I had my mouth open and my mother somehow decided this was deliberately mocking her.) And it was frustrating as a child; certainly no one outside my family would believe me. Who believes a teenager when she says her parents are unfair? And the one person who did see that things were going wrong wouldn’t do anything.

 

[Cat]

It’s the dichotomy here I struggle with. My mother did have abusive traits, that much is sure. What I’m calling “in a mood”, the times where it seemed like I couldn’t do anything right - I’d say these happened a few times a week, usually for a couple of hours each time. And of course a punishment from one of these times would often last a week or two.

The trouble is I’m in a position where I don’t feel like it would have been better if my mother had been out of my life, but at the same time it’s quite clear in retrospect that some things were very wrong. I was being put in a position where what I was learning was I was regularly in trouble because my mother was in a bad mood - usually for the rather nebulous crimes of “having a bad attitude” or “sass”. (To put things in perspective, at one point I had a stuffed up nose and was breathing through my mouth - I got in trouble for sass because I had my mouth open and my mother somehow decided this was deliberately mocking her.) And it was frustrating as a child; certainly no one outside my family would believe me. Who believes a teenager when she says her parents are unfair? And the one person who did see that things were going wrong wouldn’t do anything.

Your bad upbringing and the deleterious effects of this are not because of parental unity. Please don’t blame something good–it is GOOD for good parents to be unified. But your parents had some problems, and the “unity” was not good for them or for you.

Your mother sounds like someone who had (has) a mental illness. The use of the phrase “in a mood” makes it sound like perhaps she suffered from clinical depression.

Your dad was trying his best to deal with your mother’s illness. He probably didn’t recognize it as an illness. If he did, he was probably ashamed of it and/or denied it, and worked to cover it up. That’s why he “agreed” with your mother and didn’t come to your aid. He was trying to pretend that your mother was “normal” and that you were the problem.

It’s so sad and I’m so sorry that your childhood was like this.

Nowadays we encourage people with mental illness to seek treatment, real medical treatment. But it’s only fairly recently that people with mental illness have come out of the closet to go to a doctor and seek help!

And even today, many people are ashamed of mental illness and try to hide it by blaming their symptoms on “moods” and “ethnicity” and “food allergies” and “my hyper kids” and all kinds of other smokescreens.

It’s even worse in Christian families. Many Christians (Catholic and Protestant) don’t recognize mental illness as a true illness, and blame the symptoms on “sinfulness” or “not praying enough” or “Satanic oppression.”

And children are the casualties of these cover-ups. The failure to get mental illness diagnosed and treated has profound and devastating effects on the entire family, but children are especially warped by the abnormal family situation that they are helpless to change.

Please try to come to grips with all this. You have been hurt badly by your mother’s illness and your dad’s cover-up of her illness. You need to seek help yourself to be able to grieve your lost childhood, your parents’ agony, and the after-effects of the daily subterfuge. You must be able to get past the bad upbringing and be able to be happy and free of resentment and unafraid of your own future.

Your mother had an illness, and for whatever reason, didn’t seek help. That scenario happened and still happens in many families. It’s awful, but you can deal with it and be a strong person in spite of and even because of it. Please seek a counselor to help you.

 

[DarkLight]

Your mother had an illness, and for whatever reason, didn’t seek help. That scenario happened and still happens in many families. It’s awful, but you can deal with it and be a strong person in spite of and even because of it. Please seek a counselor to help you.

Sorry, been down that route plenty of times, enough to know I have no intention of ever going down it again.

 

[Xantippe]

Sorry, been down that route plenty of times, enough to know I have no intention of ever going down it again.

Get a better one when you have the resources to find and afford one.

I suspect you’ve been getting the bottom of the barrel, therapist-wise. There are better ones out there.

 

[DarkLight]

Get a better one when you have the resources to find and afford one.

I suspect you’ve been getting the bottom of the barrel, therapist-wise. There are better ones out there.

That is a rather long and complicated subject that I’d really rather not get into in public.

 

[Xantippe]

That is a rather long and complicated subject that I’d really rather not get into in public.

I just remembered something that might be relevant to you–one of my younger female relatives (a bit older than you, though) has just gone into a residential (and very expensive) PTSD program. I believe she’s supposed to be in for a couple of months.

If that works out, I’ll try to remember to tell you how it went.

Younger relative is a very complicated psych case (ADHD, PTSD, short term memory loss due to brain injury caused by severe abuse, a couple different kinds of substance abuse, and some other psychiatric thing that nobody can figure out), so she’s actually a fantastic test case. If the program helps her, it has to be really good.

 

[EasterJoy]

It’s the dichotomy here I struggle with. My mother did have abusive traits, that much is sure. What I’m calling “in a mood”, the times where it seemed like I couldn’t do anything right - I’d say these happened a few times a week, usually for a couple of hours each time. And of course a punishment from one of these times would often last a week or two.

The trouble is I’m in a position where I don’t feel like it would have been better if my mother had been out of my life, but at the same time it’s quite clear in retrospect that some things were very wrong. I was being put in a position where what I was learning was I was regularly in trouble because my mother was in a bad mood - usually for the rather nebulous crimes of “having a bad attitude” or “sass”. (To put things in perspective, at one point I had a stuffed up nose and was breathing through my mouth - I got in trouble for sass because I had my mouth open and my mother somehow decided this was deliberately mocking her.) And it was frustrating as a child; certainly no one outside my family would believe me. Who believes a teenager when she says her parents are unfair? And the one person who did see that things were going wrong wouldn’t do anything.

On the one hand, you have to remember the psychiatric definition of a dysfunctional family. A dysfunctional family is clinically defined as any family with more than one person in it. If you stop and think that the Holy Family–two perfect people and one of the greatest saints–went through the whole Finding in the Temple thing, you realize that every family is going to have its misunderstandings, and that there is not necessarily a sin where there is some measure of conflict or stress.

You haven’t had good luck with counselors–some people emotionally feel it to be an exercise in “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me”–but that doesn’t mean that you won’t profit from trying to reach the goals to which counseling is meant to aim you. The idea is almost always to identify the unreality that your experiences have put into your thinking and replace it with reality. Reality is a lot more positive than most of us think, so most of the time this is an exercise in training ourselves to think positively and constructively.

You may want to look at your childhood as Arnold Schwarzenegger did. His father was harsh, unrealistic, and opposed Arnold’s dreams at every turn. Yet Arnold has decided that his father was the way he was because he was carrying around scars of his own, and besides, Arnold made some good use of the pressure. You can’t choose your parents and you can’t control them, but you do have the power to make what you want to make of their efforts to mold you. That is another way of saying: With the hep of God, you can mold yourself. If you seek the will and wisdom of “your higher Power”–which is to say not a God you invent in your head but the true God as God has chosen to reveal Himself to you in prayer–you are not doomed to experience your parents in a reactionary way or in a way predetermined by them or by anyone else.

My point is that you can choose how to take your parents’ choices. You can choose how to direct the rest of your life. Even if your parents’ choices were meant badly towards you, you can choose “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” You can choose whatever fits the future you want, which of course we all hope is a future in which you know, love, and serve God, and spend an eternity with God in the bliss God intends for you. Keep your eye on that ball, and you will do well. It will allow you to say, “Mom, you harmed me, but I let that go. Be well, and may my forgiveness of your wrongs against me gain both of us forgiveness for all the wrongs we have committed, both out of ill will and out of ignorance.”

 

[DarkLight]

That’s very good.

I suspect that the parents who do the god-like thing are very unlikely to be dissuaded by having an underlined Catechism waved at them.

I am pretty firm with my kids when it comes to matters of duty (homework, school attendance, hygiene, etc.), but my big kids (12 and 9) have been pointing my foibles out to me for some time. I expect it’s good for me. And, on the bright side, I hope this means that I won’t suddenly fall from grace.

Pretending to be a god is a dangerous activity. (See, for example, Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.”)

And I Have PTSD in large part because of the psych system, but no one cares or ever does anything except force me to relive that over and over and over again, because I must be a stupid crazy chick every time I report it. No. I would rather live like this, in all this pain, than go back and be treated the way I have been. Even perfectly good counselors otherwise treat you like dirt.

 

[EasterJoy]

And I Have PTSD in large part because of the psych system, but no one cares or ever does anything except force me to relive that over and over and over again, because I must be a stupid crazy chick every time I report it. No. I would rather live like this, in all this pain, than go back and be treated the way I have been. Even perfectly good counselors otherwise treat you like dirt.

You’re not necessarily having the typical reaction of psychologist’s client with regards to the helpfulness of counseling or your perception of the universal attitude of counselors, but there is a saying that perception is reality. What matters the most is whether or not you feel counseling has been helpful. If you’ve been compliant, given the assigned work a chance and yet it makes you feel more stressed out and mentally upset than before you started, then maybe it isn’t what is going to help you. It could be just the thing for 99.9% of people in your position, and even that wouldn’t make you, the 1 in a 1,000 who is anything but helped, somehow wrong for not responding to the treatment in the same way that others did.

Let’s go back to your original question. You were essentially asking whether your parents were right or wrong when it comes to having no disagreements in front of you. In particular, though, you want to know whether or not you should have felt you were wrong for wanting to feel protected from your mother’s attacks, or whether being a parent essentially gave her carte blanche to attack you as she saw fit.

No, a parenting style is not “right” just because it is what some parent has chosen, but maybe the answer is that this is water under the bridge. When you are a parent, you and your husband are going to find your own “right” answer to this question. All of my siblings have great kids, we are told we have great kids, and none of us have had the same style of parenting as our parents, nor even the same style as any of our siblings. Our parents would (and on occasion did) tell us we were wrong about some things we did as parents. We all thought they were wrong about some things, although not the same things. Our kids think we have been wrong about some things. As adults, we think our parents were sometimes right when we thought them wrong and wrong when we had thought them right. If your parents were not “wrong” about this in light of how you choose to parent, they will have been wrong about something. Most parents, if we only known it at the time, have been* really* wrong about more than a few things. It is a tough road to navigate.

What matters is making the adjustment between how your parents formed you (whether intentionally or not) and what you intend to make of yourself in light of what you have come to know is God’s will for you. Nearly all of us find that as adults we want to change some of the things that formed in us in childhood. The secret to this is that you can do it without figuring out how you got to be the way you are and without blaming anyone for the fact that you have to do it. You can forgive your parents for the hurt you felt coming from them growing up without ever getting a conviction that it was their fault. Yes, it is nice when those who wrong us apologize, but unfortunately it happens rather rarely. The more serious the offense, I’d say the more unlikely that an apology is going to be made. We can’t shun everybody who owes us a big apology and isn’t likely to give us one. We have to hope that we will be forgiven, too, before we are aware enough or courageous enough to apologize and make amends. Forgiveness and healing from the hurt done to us is ours to seek out for ourselves, and even though others might be at fault for the work we have to do, we have to do it ourselves. If we don’t, we’re the ones who get to pack that luggage around alone. It is rarely our fault we have it, but it is our doing if we keep lugging it around after we learn that letting it go is within our power. The “bad news” is that no one else can do it for us. The “good news” is that we don’t have to wait around for someone else to give us the key. We have it. With the help of grace, a grace God is generous in giving, we can let ourselves out of the confinement of our past hurts.

If you want assurance that the treatment you received is somewhere between abusive and difficult, you have it here. You don’t have to put a definitive label on it. You can allow yourself to believe you have the right to leave it behind and interpret it very differently than your parents do or ever did. You don’t need them or even us to validate you in that. If it hurt you, then it hurt. The important thing is that you don’t let the hurts of your life cripple you or hold you back. It is important that you re-write bad scripts about yourself and others that run in your mind out of habit. How you re-write them, though, isn’t written in stone. It is possible to do it yourself. You can give yourself that permission and that goal, and it can be achieved with the help of God instead of the help of another person or with the help of a layperson instead of a professional.

You want out of the pain you are carrying from your childhood. You can let go of it. It is work, but you can do it, you have the right to do it, you are worth the work, and the freedom you will enjoy will be worth it for you.