Parents Under the Influence: Words of Wisdom from a Former Bad Mother - Softcover

David-Weill, Cécile

 
9781590510568: Parents Under the Influence: Words of Wisdom from a Former Bad Mother
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1590510569 ISBN 13: 9781590510568
Verlag: Other Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Part American and part French, part memoir and part guide, this book offers a fresh, unique, and powerful perspective on the challenges of parenting and how to find a rewarding path forward for parents and children alike.

How should we raise our children? It should be a simple enough question to answer but in fact it is an intimidating and complex one. We often address it by deciding to do either exactly what our parents did or just the opposite. After that we rely on a cocktail of love and instinct, hoping it will be enough to overcome the difficulties ahead.

Far from having perfect free will, however, we are all under the influence. The child still within us confuses, influences, or undermines all our aspirations as parents and prevents us from sticking to the philosophy we initially hoped to follow. These unresolved emotions drive us to reproduce the upbringing we received, including the behaviors that have hurt us the most.

In Parents Under the Influence, Cécile David-Weill draws on her own parenting blunders and successes as well as concrete examples, case studies, and works of fiction to guide readers, helping them heal from the past and become effective, nurturing parents.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cécile David-Weill is French and American. She published her first novel, Crush, under the name of Cécile de la Baume. The Suitors, her third novel, was published by Other Press in 2013. Until recently, David-Weill was a regular contributor to the French news magazine Le Point, with a column entitled “Letters from New York.” She was born in New York, where she currently lives.

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Preface  
 
Who am I to say how we should raise our children? To establish my authority in this matter, I might invoke the fact that I’m a mother, and now a grandmother as well. And this alone could very well be justification enough for me to talk about parenting. Casually, I could add that I am French and American, and also partly raised my children in Asia, which gives me a rather unique frame of reference. But above all, my ideas on the subject come from an even deeper and more personal experience, namely, that I am a former bad mother who nearly missed out on the joys of being a parent and on raising my children well. In other words, my perspective on how we should raise our children comes from the mistakes I made—mistakes I have since recognized and carefully attempted to correct.
It came as a total shock to me when I realized, fourteen years into parenthood, that my children didn’t seem to be happy and thriving. Where had I been going wrong? What was wrong with me? I had always thought I would be a great mom and had been doing my best to live up to that ideal. But my decision to rely on a combination of love and instinct, hoping that this would be enough to overcome my struggles as a mother, wasn’t working for me or for them. Half the time I would say to myself, “I’m terrible at this, but I don’t care,” affecting a blithe indifference that in no way corresponded to how I actually felt. The rest of the time I would feel guilty when comparing my behavior with other parents around me. In short, I was too caught up in myself to really take an interest in my children and create bonds with them.
Then I realized that it was not I who was doing the parenting—my emotions were. Complicated feelings left over from my childhood were confusing me, influencing me, and often contradicting my conscious intentions as a parent. I was “under the influence” of my childhood. And this baggage was undermining my decisions and behavior as a mother, preventing me from sticking to the parenting philosophy I had hoped to follow.
Since the parenting guidebooks I’d avidly read, as good as they may have been, never really raised this fundamental question of the influence of my own emotional and familial history on my parenting, I came to the distressing conclusion that successful parenting was an impossibility and that no reasonable human being could claim to do it well. I felt this all the more when I realized, to my horror, that unresolved emotions stemming from my childhood had been driving me to actually reproduce my own upbringing, including the behavior that had hurt me the most. As a result, regardless of all my good intentions and the incredible energy I had devoted to motherhood, the way I interacted with my children often lacked judgment or reason and so didn’t produce the intended results.
Of course, the notion of the unconscious mind wasn’t new to me. But even though I didn’t deny its influence on other aspects of my life, I never thought of how it might have an impact on how I raised my children. Is it because the very idea of the unconscious seems so irreconcilable with the maturity and discernment required to be a parent that acknowledging its influence on our parenting abilities is deeply unsettling? In any case, as a worried mother seeking reassurance, I had entirely avoided the question of the unconscious effects my own upbringing was having on the one I was trying to give my children.
Yet it only takes a minute’s reflection to understand that it would be unreasonable to overlook this part of ourselves that keeps us from being consistent in our own parenting practices and, worse still, leads us unintentionally to harm our children. Over time I came to realize that I couldn’t raise my children successfully without coming to terms with my own childhood.
It took me fifteen years of research, reflection, and practice to understand where my problems lay and how to overcome them. I had to take real steps to turn around my relationship with my children. And the profound transformation that ensued allowed them to develop into who they are today: three individuals I would love to meet even if I weren’t their mother. I am so grateful for all I experienced and for how much I was able to change, and for who my children have become.

This journey has taught me that it is possible for us parents to let go of our childhoods and our pasts. It has also shown me that much of the work required to address how our own unresolved emotions may be affecting our parenting can be practiced daily while we interact with our children. The whole point of this book is to share the lessons I learned in the long process of changing my parenting.
I have to admit that I was initially hesitant to write this book. Because I am a novelist, I knew I could not offer a scholarly overview of parenting theories. I don’t know enough about the history of these ideas to retrace them exhaustively or academically from their sources, nor am I able to explain how they have evolved and changed from one theorist or therapist to the next.
But I saw that I could write a book that grew out of painful but important personal experiences and insights. So I took a leap of faith, hoping that this approach might help other parents also “under the influence.”
The result is a book I wish I’d had when I began raising my children: an empirical guide to parenting, supplementing my own experiences with concrete examples drawn from friends and acquaintances, as well as from case studies by therapists who trusted me with delicate information, and from works of fiction and pop cultural phenomena relating to the topic of parenthood. I have protected the privacy of those individuals who shared their stories with me by changing their names, and I have likewise protected my own children and their lives—a choice I’m sure many fellow parents can understand.

This book is aimed at all parents who find themselves under the influence—as I myself was, and sometimes still am. Indeed, I believe we are all under the influence when we don’t acknowledge the impact our childhood has on our parenting style, and when we haven’t developed the habit of questioning ourselves and setting constructive priorities for our children. My hope is that this book will help parents reflect upon their own unconscious assumptions and enable them to do the right thing for their children. After all, our parenting sets a template that, for better or for worse, stays with them for the rest of their lives.

PART ONE  

THE INVISIBLE CONNECTION BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN

1

Children Draw on Our Behavior  
For children are either a blessing or a curse according as they turn out; and they turn out according as they are brought up. 
— MARIA EDGEWORTH, “The Contrast” (in Popular Tales, 1817)
 
Just as each person wishes his son to be, so he turns out.
—TERENCE, Adelphoe (“The Brothers”), 160 BCE
 
The qualities I thought made me most prepared to be a mother paradoxically turned out to be the very ones  that caused my children the most harm. Just think about that for a moment. Could the same be true for you? How would you know? And if there were a way to know the answer, wouldn’t you want to? Before I became a mother, I remember people saying, “You’ll see, having children will turn your life upside down,” and I thought I was ready for this change. Far from conforming to what many French people still believe, that “you’ll have to watch out so that motherhood does not take over your whole...

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Verlag
Other Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1590510569
ISBN 13 
9781590510568
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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Verantwortliche Person
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