Parent Traps: Understanding and Overcoming the Pitfalls That All Parents Face - Softcover

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The Ties That Bind

Parent traps are the negative feelings and experiences, often buried in our subconscious, that are reawakened in us by our own children. They are all of the pain and unanswered questions from our own childhoods. Parent traps are often the replay of experiences that we have never psychologically and emotionally worked out and extricated from the negative patterns of adult behavior.

Parent traps are often unseen until you have a child. When you are a single adult, you often use childhood traps to protect yourself from deep emotional feelings. Traps can become a shield against unwanted involvement. When you have a child, you may fall into a pattern of conditioned behavior from your own childhood. These behaviors become magnified when you are a parent because of the intimacy created with our children. Once the shield comes down, you allow for a new kind of intimacy, which sets the stage for a new role. With your child, you create an extension of yourself--a physical, mental, and emotional extension. This small life becomesyour mirror. Most of us begin the parenting process with positive and loving intentions. But it is very difficult to prevent your early pain from intruding into your life with your child.

The early development of a child is a complex interactive process that shapes your child by her environment and your personal interaction. The way you respond to your child is in part determined by how you were responded to. Were you held? Cuddled? Allowed to cry? Abused? Yelled at? Spanked? Left alone? Unless you completely understand and come to terms with early pain, you will repeat past emotional patterns. As your child grows and you have to deal with other issues of childhood, you will continue to get trapped in parental misgivings--factors about values, physical attractiveness, intelligence, and athletic prowess. All these can be the catalysts for parent traps.

Awareness is the main step to avoiding a parent trap. You cannot change the past, but you can alter the future. You can bring up early pain, recall your feelings, and talk them out. By reliving past memories, you are able not only to remember what it felt like but also to think about your actions before you burden your child with any past negative pain.

 

Because the most emotional parent traps are the ones that we carry over from our own parents and grandparents, the generational and genetic bond is strong. What we were conditioned to believe usually continues from one generation to thenext. Although some of the parenting ideas from the past can be helpful and well-intentioned, others are old-fashioned and not applicable to raising a child in today's world.

How you were parented--and what you modeled--creates the framework for how you treat other people. Studies have shown that most children who were physically abused become adult abusers unless they have the opportunity to undergo therapy and receive help from outside sources such as friends, a spouse, or parent help groups. Children of alcoholics run a risk of becoming alcoholics if they don't consciously fight to break the alcoholic pattern. Depression can also be carried over from one generation to the next, as can eating disorders.