PEOPLE
Children
We love our children. They are growing up well: confident,
successful and happy. We are on good terms with them and communicate
perfectly. There is a perfect harmony. We can meet all their needs
perfectly. They are grateful for all we do for them. That is the
story. I know people for whom it has been true for some periods. But
it is a rare person for whom that is true all through life. The normal
family is one in which there will be difficult patches in different
ways and at different times.
The difficult phases may last for months or years. They may well
correspond to nothing that you remember in your own childhood, and are
not arising in your friends’ families. You feel you must be
getting it all wrong. In fact the chances are I will have met
something reasonably similar in some other family.
I suppose the root of many problems is the very closeness of the
relationship. Because our children are ours we can somehow feel that
this automatically makes them very similar to us - but frequently they
have very different personalities. We take things for granted because
of the closeness. We see our children through the coloured spectacles
of our hopes and expectations and therefore often miss things that an
outsider can see more clearly.
I have at times just talked with a parent about issues that have
cropped up, to put things into perspective. At other times I have
talked with a child to provide the kind of avuncular input that is
less commonly available in this age of small families with few uncles
or aunts. At other times it has been useful to talk things over with
both parties together to nudge things into better channels.
Another common pattern is some form of vicious circle: child is a
little annoying; parent gets angry; child gets more angry back; parent
shouts louder and decides on a form of punishment; child gets more
rebellious and truculent; parent gets even more alarmed and takes a
yet stronger line. In that case an outsider is in a good position to
detect and then defuse the power of the vicious circle.
But, as always, there are so many differences in the personalities
involved in a particular family that it is not surprising that a
different approach to each situation is called for.
