Having a newborn can put a lot of stress on a relationship. Understandably, most of your focus is on the baby rather than on your partner because newborns are totally dependent on attention and care.
You may be exhausted, overwhelmed, and getting hardly any sleep. It’s no surprise that many relationships start to experience difficulty after the birth of the first child.
Relationships tend to do best despite the physical and emotional challenges of parenting when BOTH partners are engaged and try to do the following:
1. Show love and respect to one another,
2. Help and support each other,
3. Willingly do at least half of the overall work rather than focus on making sure that the other person is doing his or her fair share,
4. Be patient with your partner’s irritability due to exhaustion, and above all,
5. Cultivate your sense of wonder, gratitude, and humor.
No matter what, it is important to be able to get support when you need it. The most effective way to ask for help is to make a positive, specific request rather than a demand, command, or complaint. Your request will be most compelling when you show appreciation in your tone of voice and wording. For example,
“I know you’re tired, but I would really appreciate it if you could feed the baby tonight. I’m just exhausted.”
Having perspective helps ease the stress of feeling submerged. Keep in mind the bigger picture, namely,
that challenges are part of life, that parenting is demanding but fleeting and rewarding, and that with a little bit of luck, eventually you get out of life and relationships what you put into them!
And if not, at least you can feel good about having done the best you could!
Having suffered rejection by your parent, it’s understandable that you would fear becoming a mean, rejecting parent yourself, and that you’d want to make sure your son knows that you love him.
Yet, your fierce desire to show acceptance and love may cause you to go overboard, and to lose your personal authority and ability to set boundaries.
When parents are unwilling to stand up for themselves and when their tone of voice betrays a longing for acceptance, children sense it and become burdened by it. Some will respond with appeasement, others with annoyance and anger.
Respect vs. Fear of Rejection
Most parents don’t want to be rejected by their children. Yet, when their fear of rejection is so strong that it outweighs their own self-respect — “I fear, more than anything, total rejection from my son” — they may cheat their children of the gift of having respect for their parents.
It’s wonderful to be loved by your parent. It’s also beneficial to have respect for your parent. They are not mutually exclusive. However, when you crave a child’s acceptance too much — at the expense of your own personal authority — you invite your child to lose respect for you.
Parent vs. Doormat
There is a world of difference between rejecting a child and rejecting rude behavior.
It’s important for children of all ages to learn to respect boundaries and to have some consequences when they are disrespectful. It doesn’t do anyone any good when you allow others to rage at you. You’re doing them a favor in cutting short their rudeness, because they generally will not feel good after being angry and mean.
They need to be called on their behavior with an “Excuse me?” or “It’s tough to talk with you when you sound this angry.” Or you can say, “If something’s bothering you, tell me, but be more respectful.” Your own tone of voice is highly important — be firm, without pleading. Be willing to end the conversation if they start battering you verbally by saying, “It’s unpleasant for me to listen to your berating me with this tone of voice. We can talk later.”
Not only will you curb your child’s rudeness, you will be setting an example of how to set boundaries firmly without being harsh.
More Space vs. Engulfment
Often, all that’s needed is a little more distance, a more impersonal attitude, and less inquiry. Just imagine a good cocktail waitress at a busy bar. She would be friendly, but not overly-personal and inquisitive.
By calling less frequently, asking fewer questions, and giving less advice, you can give your irritated adult child the room needed to feel independent and free of the parental umbilical cord. Often more emotional separation, rather than fusion, promotes appreciation.
Practice
Like rehearsing for a play, it’s very helpful to practice the demeanor and attitude you want to develop. If you have a partner and/or friends who are willing, have them listen to you practice speaking in a more impersonal way. Find examples on TV or among your friends who have the desired tone and approach, and emulate them.
Once you are able to pull back your yearning to prove your love as well as your tolerance of unacceptable behavior you will realize a grand pay-off, namely mutual respect — the very basis for a loving relationship. You’ll also feel less temptation to be mean, because when you stand up for yourself when there’s only mild disrespect, you can do so without big resentment and drama.
Your child is likely to come across all kinds of people in his future. Some of them will be abusive, narcissistic, or even antisocial (psychopaths.) In a way, early exposure to a dysfunctional “bad” parent will render your child better prepared to cope with them, more alert to their existence and chicanery and more desensitized to their abuse.
For this you should be grateful.
There is nothing much you can do, otherwise. Stop wasting your money, time, energy and emotional resources on this intractable “problem” of how to insulate your son from the other parent’s influence. It is a lost war, though a just cause. Instead, make yourself available to your son.
The only thing you can do to prevent your son from emulating the other parent is to present to him another role model of a functioning NON-narcissist, NON-abuser, NON-psychopath – YOU. Hopefully, when he grows up, he will prefer your role model to the other parent’s. But there is only that much that you can do. You cannot control the developmental path of your child. Exerting unlimited control over your progeny is what narcissism is all about – and is exactly what you should avoid at all costs, however worried you might be.
Parental narcissism, abuse, and psychopathy do tend to breed narcissism, abusive conduct, and antisocial traits and behaviors – but not inevitably.
Consider the narcissistic parent, for instance:
Not all the off-spring of a narcissist inexorably become narcissists.
The true, narcissistic parent does tend to produce another narcissist in his or her child. But this outcome can be effectively countered by loving, empathic, predictable, just, and positive upbringing, which encourages a sense of autonomy and responsibility. Provide your child with an alternative to his other parent’s venomous and exploitative existence. Trust your son to choose life over death, love over narcissism, human relations over narcissistic supply.
Many of today’s teenagers and young adults are smart and knowledgeable, but lack direction and self-sufficiency. Moreover, young adults who live at home often feel resentment toward their parents for enabling their dependence. With ambivalence, they readily take advantage of support being offered, yet feel resentful for being dependent. Even trust-funders of the super wealthy, who gladly accept financial support, often lack purpose and feel deficient as a result of their cushy dependence.
Initiative and Independence
In our Western culture, economic independence leads people to feel self-empowered and capable. It feels good to be able to rely on yourself, to take care of yourself, and to feel capable of pursuing your own goals.
Although parents may have the best intentions, they can handicap their children by over-protecting and coddling them. Teenagers who are given too much turn into adults who lack initiative and impulse control, often becoming under-achievers. They may act as though they willingly reject the ambitions of the mainstream, but often they are simply afraid of their own ability to persevere and to withstand failure.
The only way to learn perseverance and initiative is through experience, which usually occurs when you have no other choice. You get comfortable with the possibility of failing when you have to start trying and failing, and are no longer daunted by it.
Prefrontal Cortex Development
Until recently it was thought that the prefrontal cortex develops fully by age 20 or 25. More recent research shows that this part of brain development is not age dependent, but contingent upon experience, that is, the experience of controlling impulses, having to plan and use one’s judgment, and suffering the consequences for bad judgment. So children whose parents make all their decisions, and whose activities are limited to well-structured schoolwork and regimented sports, may have delayed prefrontal cortex development, despite high IQs and grades.
If our young adult children are living at home rent free, and we are cooking all the meals and doing all the laundry without them lifting a finger, they are missing out on developing their prefrontal cortex’s ability to plan, make judgments and develop the basic habits required for living on their own.
Moreover, the transition to moving out will be more difficult than if they have to pay rent, do their own laundry and contribute to shopping, cooking, and cleaning. In the latter case, the transition to live on their own will be quite easy, with only a few additional requirements such as signing a lease and paying utilities on time.
Increased Responsibility, Decreased Handouts
By making most of the decisions for our children, we weaken them. By allowing them to make decisions and requiring them to take responsibility for their actions, we strengthen them.
The least traumatic way to help children gain the habits of responsibility and self-sufficiency is through gradually increasing their responsibility and independence. Like anything we learn, progressive advancement is much easier than dramatic revolution. Running a marathon can kill us if we’re out of shape. Yet, almost anyone can do it if they take the time to train properly and continuously escalate their capabilities.
A loving environment at home that fosters independent thinking and appropriate decision-making and that encourages responsibility, self-sufficiency, and contribution, helps form children into capable young adults. Summer jobs are a worthwhile experience, and quite different from summer camp in that the child is not the client to be pleased, but the employee who needs to please the customers and the employer. Children learn the value of work and money when their parents pay for less and less, other than college tuition, and when they are responsible for contributing and for buying their own non-essentials as teenagers and most everything else as young adults.
Rather than projecting their feelings of inadequacy as resentment on their parents, self-empowered and independent young adults tend to feel gratitude and respect for their parents.
No parent likes hearing that their children are angry at them, particularly when they work hard to raise them.
However, it is healthy for children to experience anger and learn how to express it effectively. If the parent is overly reactive or retaliatory, the child does not learn how to deal with his or her emotions. When children have to suppress their feelings, or are made to feel guilty about having and expressing their feelings, problems begin to develop.
Most children will say things like “I hate you” a few times when they are quite young. The way a parent responds effects whether the child will continue saying such things. A parent’s response depends on the situation. Generally it is important to remain calm, not take it personally, and teach them a better way to express themselves.
Ways NOT to respond:
1. Act hurt and whimper. “How can you say that? Look at all the things I do for you?”
2. Use shame or guilt. “Well, I love you.”
3. Deny his or her real feelings. “You don’t mean that!”
4. Implement severe punishment, which merely causes more hatred and inability to deal with that hatred. It is also a bad example.
Ways to respond:
1. Stay calm, which will help defuse the situation.
2. Label the child’s emotions without judging them: “You seem angry. You really want to stay up longer.”
3. Find out why the child is angry, and then help him or her express it in a meaningful and respectful way. “Why are you angry with me?” After truly listening, you could also say, “Next time, tell me why you’re angry in a way that won’t make me feel defensive. When you say ‘I hate you,’ it’s not very effective in getting people to listen.’” By listening and responding to the child when he or she communicates without hatred, the child is encouraged to do so in the future.
4. Demonstrate how to handle your own anger effectively. For example, do not fly off the handle or express extreme views like, “I can’t stand him! What an idiot.” Instead, express that you are angry at someone’s specific behavior — “I’m disappointed and angry that he mislead me.” Be specific about why you are angry.
5. Find out how the child’s day has been and what is going on. It’s possible that something else is going on in his or her life.
Sometimes children mirror back a parent’s own issues. If the parent is angry, the child feels angry too. If the parent lacks self-respect, the child doesn’t respect the parent either. In these cases, it’s important for parents to focus on dealing with their own issues and anger and develop habits of self-respect. To deal appropriately with the child becomes a double challenge then, but twice as essential. You could even make a mutual pact or a game to remind each other when you are not using the right words or tone.
