Dearest Distraught Child,
Since the beginning of time, children and parents have been in conflict—especially nearing the teen years of a child’s life. Knowing that this is no special circumstance to you is of utmost importance. First off, you are not alone in the struggle. Many have come and gone before you and experienced the same struggle. Many are experiencing it with you right now. It is not you, and it is not your fault. The troubles are not a product of your extreme ineptitude—they are a facet of life that necessarily builds up over time as we all learn and grow. It is how each of us respond to the situation that will make or break us.
To understand what is happening, we must understand our beginnings and our human nature to withstand only a limited amount of stress. We all start so terribly incompetent and unknowledgeable that we must all be taught not to drink our bathwater, not to pee on our faces, not to play in our poo, and to eat more than just ketchup. Every one of us started off this way with no exception. Parents must daily reinforce such obvious and simple facts of life—for years. Parents with multiple children may not get a break from reiterating that candy is not a sufficient meal and that we don’t hide cake under our mattresses all the way through adulthood of our oldest child. Years upon years of the most obvious of statements going unheeded beat upon the parents. Some parents find it whimsical that a child puts Perler beads in her nose causing a rush to the ER while other parents find it utterly exhausting after the fifth time it occurs. Consider how quick to anger you might be when a sibling or friend will not give something back after asking five times. Now consider the strength and resolve needed to ask your friend politely five times every day for ten years. What are the chances of success at keeping your cool? Welcome to parenthood. Without a doubt, you have been (and likely still are) that sibling or friend in more ways than one.
As children grow, the problems diversify and expand from wiping butts and eating food to brushing teeth, washing faces, and doing laundry or homework, but they are often just as simple to parents as the first lessons despite being so hard and confusing for a child. Apart from basic life and hygiene skills, there are also the obvious behavior skills a parent must teach and enforce. A child will complain that they wanted the orange bowl but their sibling took it. The child resorts to violence... again… Parents must deal with this day in and day out year after year and they become jaded to the same old stuff. An adult cares nothing for the color of a bowl and the average mature person cannot fathom why, in a child’s mind, this must result in so many tears. Like the steady drip of water on the forehead of a captured and tormented soul, the resolve of a parent wears thin with every year and every additional child. Patience in reiterating the same lessons grow thin, especially with the older and supposedly wiser children. Why, after 10+ years of reiterating does a child not understand something so basic as human decency? Instead of holding an hour-long conversation on the ills of watching TV or playing games all day every day for the hundredth time in hopes the child will understand, a parent grabs their boot of authority and simply turns it off. No more explanations given. They are tired. They are worn down. They are exhausted—just like any human would be after years of unsuccessful attempts to teach something.
It is human nature for child and adult alike to reject explanations that result in a loss of what we want. A child, however, with much less experience, is especially unlikely to accept the explanation of a parent as to why a decision has been made and is therefore extremely likely to argue with a parent who provides one. A child will complain if no explanation is given and perhaps vow never to treat their own children with such disdain (as did I), but they are just as likely to complain even when an explanation is given. A parent who explains, while perhaps kinder and more patient than one who does not, may instead make the situation worse. The child argues from emotion rather than logic and resolves to believe that the reasons of a parent are unjust for the mere emotional reason that it does not jive with what the child wants and they lack the experience to recognize the truth of what the parent says. They further learn to question more and ask more forcefully until a parent gives in or they go away angry at the parent’s “stupidity.” Many parents are then forced to fuel a fire with coal or to fuel it with wood, but rest assured that fire will burn. It is unavoidable as a child learns to question, and the burning coals are inextinguishable until the child reaches a more mature age to fully comprehend all that has truly transpired. But when that maturity occurs, will there be a relationship left to mend?
A parent who continues to argue and fight with you is a parent who still cares. This is crucial to understand. A parent who does not care about your well-being will forget any and all rules except for the ones that directly impact them. What does a bad parent care if you smell, get bad grades, lose your teeth, become obese, or derive no joy in life? The only thing a bad parent cares about is if you annoy them and if you make a mess of their things. The bad parent will not go out of their way to take you places or to permit extracurricular activities. They will not force you to brush your teeth, to take a shower, or to do your laundry. A parent who cares the most will likely (and foolishly) try to “help” you in every way possible. Such help, as you grow, is viewed as persistent criticism and demands.
As you feel more criticized and more demands are expected, you will perhaps lose confidence in yourself and lose respect for your parents which will further fuel the fire. If you cannot, or will not, see your parents’ efforts as caring, you will grow to resent them and demonstrate it in your every action. The parents, being resented for all their hard efforts, breed resentment in themselves as well. They continue parenting under the sting of responsibility, knowing that the relationship is diminishing, the friendship gone, and that you are at extreme risk of ruining your life with bad decisions. They hope and pray that you will succeed despite the pain, and they double their efforts of criticism and demands all the more fearful of what might become of you. Or perhaps they give up. Some conclude they weren’t cut out to parent and simply quit trying. Others conclude their child is unsalvageable and stop trying. Yet others might break down in confusion and despair over the plight and freeze with paralysis not knowing what will help and what will hurt. Disdain for parents will unavoidably make the problem worse.
I don’t write this to explain the answers or what must be done. I don’t know the answer or how to resolve a broken parent/child relationship. I just know that understanding it can help quite a bit, it is quite common, I am in this same boat currently, and I see the pattern which perpetually creates it throughout time. What could have, and should have, been an amazing relationship built on similar interests and perhaps a respect for each other’s ingenuity, has become naught more than an occasional glance or head-nod with a perpetual barrage of arrows, finger pointing, and pearls before swine. I longed for the day, since the day my son was born, that I could hold meaningful conversations, play games, and be creative together. I envisioned that we would be a formidable team of inseparable friends that shows the world how family is done. That day has not come and perhaps never will.
My son resents me and refuses to see wisdom in anything I do or say. Each day pours more venom between us despite our similarities. Perhaps our similarities are what truly drive us apart. And perhaps such similarity means he will be fine without me. I had never intended for it to become like this. I had never expected that with as much as I might care, with as much as I might have learned, and with as hard as I have tried, that the best I could muster would be a heap of burning coals and mutual disdain. With all my abilities and successes in life, I was never truly prepared to find the same struggle and failure plaguing me as with all those who came before me. I thought for me it would be different… just like everyone else… and just like with every other aspect of my life at every age.
I don’t know what to do or what to say to turn the tide. I don’t know what will stop the downward spiral and begin to build a bridge. There are just too many caveats to any one decision. I care too much to let anything go, and like Jello will find our relationship squished and broken on the floor as it squeezes through the tight grip of my concern. I can see I must let go, I must loosen my grip, but of what? I cannot allow hate and anger, I cannot allow a whirlwind of inconsideration for others, I cannot permit laziness, or any other slew of misdeeds that will lend one to a life of trouble. And yet, I cannot allow resentment or a festering wound, I cannot mend a crushed spirit with an axe, or build a house with a chainsaw. I feel I must disengage to let time do its trick, but at what cost? What lessons will be learned without me and how long will it take to learn? What bond can be made between us if I untie my rope and allow the currents to sweep him away? What will draw him to me if he breaks away from the shore with disdain as wind blows him in the whimsy of its own turbulent forces? How can he love him who released him to the wolves or watched as he walked off a branch above the viper’s nest before we knew he could fly? Whatever the case, and whatever the choices I make, it was always done out of love. Even I, however, am human, and my own love is a mere reflection of what became of me as my own parents struggled with how to deal with such a foolish child as I.
The path does not truly fork, and yet, it diverges both to love and hate by the mere crossing of the eyes of the traveler. At the end: glasses.
