Toxic parenting sets the stage for abusive adults and starts a cycle that is hard to escape. Thomas Fiffer offers 10 dos and don’ts to keep your parenting healthy and safe.
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Perhaps the worst thing a parent can hear from a grown up child is, “I want you out of my life. You’re toxic.”
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Perhaps the worst thing a parent can hear from a grown up child is, “I want you out of my life. You’re toxic.” It’s a death sentence for the relationship, spelling a long period of estrangement if not a permanent break. It may be the healthiest decision for the child, but it is a heartbreaking one that carves a deep wound in both psyches, making the road to reconciliation arduous and uncertain. No parent is perfect. We’re all human, and we all make mistakes, including some whoppers. But there’s a difference between screwing up while providing healthy love and presiding over a psychologically damaging childhood that will necessitate a lifetime of healing. The steps outlined below are for concerned parents who want to do things right and are willing to examine themselves critically. They presuppose a healthy degree of self-awareness and the desire and ability to make positive changes. They do not address behavior caused by substance abuse or serious mental illness. And they are only one man’s opinion.
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Step in with determination not to be right but to make things right between the two of you.
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1. Be the bigger person. You’re not only literally the bigger person, you’re the grown-up. Act like one. After the fight, be the one who breaks the silence, extends the olive branch, and works to restore healthy communication. You may have been right, but if being right is what parenting is about for you, you’re going to alienate your kid. Apply the advantages of maturity for good. Step back and process. Use your judgment. And step in with determination not to be right but to make things right between the two of you. Kids are much less likely to remember whether you won or lost a particular fight or argument than to recall exactly how you made them feel.
2. Don’t pathologize your children to cover up your own poor parenting skills. Labeling a child or using (or worse, seeking) a diagnosis, such as ADD/ADHD or a personality disorder, to explain and excuse behavior that you should be addressing—or that mirrors your unhealthy modeling—places a lead weight on your child that he or she will be eager to lift at the onset of adulthood. The same goes for blaming undesirable behavior on bad genes—meaning your partner’s. It’s one thing to be realistic about and treat an actual condition. It’s entirely another to indoctrinate your child with the inevitability of a limited, unhappy life due to inescapable deficiencies while refusing to address your own failings.
Don’t hang your emotional state on their emotional state or co-opt their experiences and feelings by making it all about you.
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3. Don’t make their drama your drama. Your kid gets the lead in the play or scores the winning run, basket, or goal in the championship game, or on the flip side, struggles with depression or endures a nasty breakup. Who’s triumphing or suffering? Who deserves the credit or the sympathy? Put the focus where it belongs—on your child—and keep it there. Sure, you have feelings. You share joy in your kids’ accomplishments and sorrow for their troubles. But don’t hang your emotional state on their emotional state or co-opt their experiences and feelings by making it all about you.
4. Understand the difference between criticizing and correcting. Children need guidance to stay on the right path. For many, discipline, self-control, and healthy habits don’t come naturally—they’re learned. Be a guide, not a critic. Don’t call your kid lazy or stupid. Teach your child a work ethic and help build his or her academic skills. Challenge and goal setting motivates people and makes them try harder. Personal insults break their spirit and make them want to give up. Criticism weakens, while correction strengthens and opens the door for positive reinforcement.
Learning how to contain your immediate reaction and formulate an appropriate response will stop you from saying and doing things you will later regret.
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5. Learn impulse control. We all get upset. We all yell. And at times, we all lose it when our children push our specific buttons or do incredibly annoying or obnoxious things. When this happens, we feel unheard, hurt, and disrespected, and tempted to strike back—with harsh words, severe punishment, or physical blows. Learning how to contain your immediate reaction and formulate an appropriate response will not only model balance to your child but also create a calmer dynamic and stop you from saying and doing things you will later regret.
Children don’t necessarily tell you when their feelings about you have changed.
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6. Remember that kids are vulnerable. We often forget this, because they’re so resilient. They cry, and then they stop crying. The next minute, or the next hour, their mood has changed, and everything is back to normal, at least on the surface. But if they’re integrating painful experience, it’s changing them, and if they’re denying it because it’s too painful to process, they’re looking at a crisis down the road and years, even a lifetime, of therapy. Children don’t necessarily tell you when their feelings about you have changed, when you have lost their respect or endangered their love for you. They may not even be consciously aware of their own breaking points, but they have them, as we all do, so handle with care if you want them to stay whole.
Guilt and shame are the sledgehammer and chainsaw in the parenting toolbox—one hits kids over the head, while the other cuts them to the core.
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7. Avoid using guilt and shame as consequences. Guilt and shame are the sledgehammer and chainsaw in the parenting toolbox—one hits kids over the head, while the other cuts them to the core. Don’t whine about your hurt feelings if your child doesn’t want to bake cookies or go to the ball game with you. Don’t spout about how embarrassed you—or Aunt Mildred—will be if they fail biology or don’t make the tennis team. And don’t threaten horrors—such as a life of poverty—if your child’s grades don’t improve. This type of behavior is incendiary and utterly unhelpful. It saps your child’s confidence and makes him or her dependent on you or others for approval. Instead, help them understand their choices and the real consequences of their actions.
8. Don’t smother and infantilize; encourage self-sufficiency. We love doing things for our kids to make their lives easier and to help them succeed, and it’s our job to set up a good life for them. But there’s a difference between providing assistance and enabling helplessness, between setting the table and putting the food out and cutting it up and feeding it to your kid. Don’t allow your need to feel needed—which may have roots in your own childhood—to interfere with your child’s need to become self-reliant and independent. And don’t hover, because ultimately you’re giving your child the message that he or she can’t make it without your help.
The child grows up vowing not to have the relationship they see you having and at the same time lacking the tools to avoid it.
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9. Master and model healthy conflict resolution with your partner. A toxic, dysfunctional dynamic with your partner will both impact your child’s ability to function in adult relationships and drive him or her away from your home. It creates a double-bind: the child grows up vowing not to have the relationship they see you having and at the same time lacking the tools to avoid it. If your own relationship is volatile or worse, violent, get help. This not only creates a safer environment for your children but also models the importance of solving problems instead of ignoring them or sweeping them under the rug.
10. Practice self-care. I’ve always believed that many of our worst parenting moments occur when we’re tired, stressed, sick, distracted or for whatever reasons, internally ragged. Taking good care of yourself—maintaining good eating habits, exercising regularly, getting out (hire that sitter), and making time to do things you enjoy makes you healthier both physically and psychologically and gives you more energy to deal with your children. It also prevents you from resenting your kids for the sacrifices you make for them. And resentment is the precursor to contempt.
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There are many different parenting styles, and in the absence of the instruction manual, we each find our own way. The advice here is intended to identify behaviors that are and aren’t beneficial to children and conducive to developing a healthy relationship with them once they become adults.
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Photo: iStock
This is great, and helped my heart. I am currently going through some of this with my mother, who all my life I have had problems with. Thank you!
On #7 when it talks about guilt trips, I find those mentioned to be materialistic, self centered. But what about expressing hurt over your child giving a card to a step parent who is abusive verbally and who guilt trips the kids often about not caring about her. I am their mother, I am a good mom. I’m there for them. And I do the want my children giving her cards addressed to “mom”. She has caused a great deal of damage and I feel those cards are I nitiated by guilt. So I expressed how I felt, my children… Read more »
I enjoyed your article, Thomas. It has deepened my understanding of the issue for the work I do with parents. Do you have a recommendation of a book for parents to change the toxic patterns with their own kids?
Thanks for this article. I have actually experienced much of this as an adult from a parent. While some of this was present during childhood, it intensified as I became independent and self-sufficient. My biggest struggle now that I am a parent is that I find myself slipping in to one or two of these occasionally. It horrifies me and I am constantly working to overcome these behaviors before they become habits. I’m not afraid to apologize to my children and work on improvement, when necessary. I want them to be loved and to love others well. The idea of… Read more »
Oh please! I am so tired of reading these ‘good patenting’ articles! Parents are human, they make mistakes, they do dumb things but as long as you love your kids unconditionally, all will be good. I am the mother of two wonderful young men. Along the way I made a million mistakes, did all the things your article mentioned at one time or another but my boys always knew how much they were loved and how they could always count on me in times of trouble. My own parents made mistakes but they did the best they could given their… Read more »
Debra, it’s wonderful that you had such a great experience as a mother, that’s lucky for your boys. Maybe consider then that this article is not aimed at you. Many parents ARE toxic, and as the people who are responsible for teaching a child how to be in the world, their poor choices can and do have lifelong consequences for their children, and through the well-documented cyclical nature of abuse, their children’s children. It’s fine to not have a problem and to be proud of that, but your response minimizes and belittles the experiences of people who have endured toxic… Read more »
This is a person in denial of their in childhood wounds. Accountability and acknowledgement goes a long way.
This also can apply to other relationships, not just parent-child.
This is wonderful. The only thing I would add is for this parent to make sure that their spouse has the opportunity for self-care too. Because if he/she prevents his/her spouse from self-care the spouse can end up resenting the kids and her spouse and that is really sad. Prevention can look like whining, guilt trips, silent treatment, yelling, or just always staying busy so their is no opportunity for a break. As well as a straight up saying “No”. So not only do you need to practice self-care, but also you need to stop preventing your spouse or co-parent… Read more »
I also think it’s a well-considered post, but just one thing… About #2: “Don’t pathologize your children to cover up your own poor parenting skills” in some cases it is in fact a situation that calls for intervention over and above parental guidance and attention. While I do believe we are in an hyper-diagnostic society that dispenses medication over time and attention in SOME cases which has had a very negative effect on those who actually NEED help, I can say from experience, my parents avoided and denied that there might be anything *wrong* with their offspring–whether it was shame… Read more »
Great points…. and we mustn’t forget that often why a parent does what they do came from their parents. So… finally we can see that there is some self reflection going on in the culture! Yay! And.. I would put #10 in the first slot… because I believe it all begins with feeling grounded… which so many parents do not… I also very much want to add… that we need to increase the minimum wage to a liveable wage to take economic pressures off of parents. Especially single parents… I mean we cannot deny that economics plays an important role… Read more »
Thank you Thomas for this article. I, like many of the people commenting here suffered (and still suffer) a toxic relationship with my father who scores 10/10 for acting against these steps. when you said, “You may have been right, but if being right is what parenting is about for you, you’re going to alienate your kid.” really hit home for me. My parents have had a verbally and mentally abusive relationship for as long as I can remember and I would often be caught in the crossfires. After lashing out in response to treatment which I thought was wrong… Read more »
Yep. I am well acquainted with all of these from my own childhood, and try daily to not bring any of them into my kids’ lives. That’s part of what is so hard about coming from a toxic household, knowing how to create a healthy one.
Wow. Perfect score, 10/10; my mother flunked every single one of these.
This is a brilliant article.
I do not now if you have kids but you make some very good points. I divorced my “parents” in order to survive and heal enough to arrest the cycles of psychological and physical abuse I suffered at their hands. I am glad you menioned that sometimes leaving is sometimes necessary.
If the “grown up child” is still economically dependent upon this toxic parent (which is true for an increasing number of adult children), he/she may not be able to disown that toxic parent so readily. It is probably harder to say “I want you out of my life…but keep sending me money” outside of a divorce court context.
Well – those are indeed 10 simple steps, and good things for all parents to keep in mind. However, let’s not kid ourselves into believe that lists like this will “stop toxic parenting”. I’ll venture that few people who do “toxic parenting” do it because they overlook these simple points. There’s likely to be deeper issues, substantial issues that the grown-ups are struggling with. In other words – if you have some empath, recognize children as small human beings, and are in reasonable control of yourself, the advice in the 10 points is fairly obvious. If not, then the 10… Read more »
I’m not so sure those 10 steps as simple as the headline implies.
my parents did all these things to my siblings and me – no wonder I chose to have nothing to do with them 🙂
awesome piece –
#5: “At times, we all lose it….”
Very frightening to see some parents do this in front of their kids….sometimes the parent’s personal drama is replayed with their kids as unwilling and bewildered participants….(I am still shaking my head in disbelief at what we saw…)
Awesome! Thanks so much for this, Thomas. Parenting is the #1 toughest job there is, and at the same time it’s also the most important job a person can have. Your advice is brilliant and straightforward. 🙂
Thank you, Kitti. It is the surely the hardest job. I hope this helps people do it better.
Spot on! (Which is a shame that I relate to it so well. I grew up with parents who fit every single of these points and I survived…with scars)
Kelly, Wow. I’m sorry you went through that and glad you have come out on the other side.
Same here Kelly, and sadly they still don’t see their faults.
And same here – but it’s because of their faults and the damage they caused, and the healing that had to and is following, that I don’t take any of my parenting skills for granted and have sought out what it is to be a good parent. I’ve had to learn how to give myself what I never had, and then I can do this for my kid. That list can only have been written by someone who has experienced the inverse of it. Good work Thomas, thanks a lot.
You and me both, Kelly. Solidarity. At least we know now we can survive a truckload of shit…