There’s the kind of person who may appear to be over-invested in their child’s emotional health. Perhaps this investment appears unhealthy in itself; I’m not sure, being one of those kind of people, and lacking in enough perspective to see the situation clearly. But I keep forging ahead, trying to do what I think is right for my kids: filtering media content, sitting at the bedside of an anxious child, staying an extra five minutes at drop off for the nervous child, carefully choosing my words about diet to reflect health rather than image, making sure to validate feelings and separate them from behaviors and actions in both praise and punishment. I try not to helicopter, I try to encourage discovery and agency and initiative, to teach critical thinking as well as compassion.
The tricky thing is that I’m married to someone who is practical, pragmatic through and through, and has a very difficult time valuing the emotional realm, let alone acknowledging its existence. Through my lens, his insistence on things “making sense” and “being smart” above how things might just feel is myopic and puts us all at a disadvantage. To me, yelling at a child for having feelings he or she can’t work through appropriately on his or her own is tantamount to abuse.
So the question is, if I know I would immediately take the kids and leave a spouse who physically harmed them, first strike you’re out, why is it so much less clear when I feel like he sometimes emotionally harms them? Do I subscribe to his theory, that it’s a cruel world and they need to learn how to navigate it? Do I allow the generous excuse that his upbringing did not teach him how to have a healthy emotional life and he’s still working on it forty years later? What are my children learning from me, as I protest but don’t altogether stop the way their father speaks to them?
xo
It is very very difficult to figure out. In general, my feeling is that there are areas that are definitely physical abuse (striking someone hard across the face, for example) and areas that are definitely emotional abuse (calling someone worthless, for example, or saying it would be better if they hadn’t been born)—and then there are HUUUUUUUGE swaths of middle ground: the impatient swat on the butt, the unempathetic “Snap out of it!!,” the wince-producing “What’s wrong with you??”
What I sometimes do when I disagree strongly with the way Paul is handling something is to talk about it with the children privately. Not DEFENDING, not JUSTIFYING, and not taking their side against him as if it’s Us Against Daddy (I keep in mind how I’d want him to talk to them if he disagreed with the way I was handling something). Something in between. Sort of like: “I know. And I don’t think that was right. Different people think different ways, and that’s the way he sees things; he thinks this is the right way to parent you.” I would also add age-appropriate details about the other parent’s upbringing/personality if/when those seemed relevant.
I think part of the problem is that we don’t really know which things emotionally harm our children: two parents might both think it’s the other one doing the emotional harm, and they could both be right, or both be wrong. And even when we’re pretty sure something is harming them, we don’t know if that amount of emotional harm is enough to be worth the emotional harm of separating the child from a parent.
In short (TOO LATE), I think it’s kind of an impossible situation, and one of the worst parts of co-parenting.
I have no advice and no words of wisdom, but love what Swistle says.
I grew up in a one-parent home and (no matter how loved I felt, and I REALLY did) I know my mom did not understand how I processed things emotionally. It resonates that that can feel abusive, although I think that would be a harsh label to apply to someone who really was “doing the best they can”, as in my mom’s case. If someone had been able to articulate how we take these feelings and carry them around in our pocket as we grow older, I think my mom would have tried to understand. I still don’t know if UNDERSTANDING would have translating to ACTING. The flip-side: my mom did better than my dad would have and I am able to maturely understand that it was hard for her, too.
Mostly, I just wanted to say that I’m thinking of you and hoping for some peace for you.
xo