I think parenting and child development "experts" were laying the groundwork for this long before gender ever entered the picture. My oldest child is 22 and I read every parenting book that came out because I was desperate to get it right. There was a message that kept showing up in these books that stressed me out so much. It was that just one mistake with your child, one unacknowledged emotion, just one time not paying enough attention, just one time saying the wrong thing could cause lifelong harm to your child and your relationship with your child. I had no idea how I was supposed to live up to that standard when the stakes were so high but the requirements were also impossible to meet. even as my children got older and I reached out for help with various parenting challenges the focus was always on not saying the wrong thing. I even started hearing that good, supportive parents could induce borderline personality disorder in a sensitive child for not realizing they needed a different type of parenting other than normal good parenting - that I could induce an emotional wound by calling out from a different room asking the sensitive child to unload the dishwasher rather than going directly to her and carefully wording my request. When families are repeatedly getting that message and now it's everywhere on social media, it's got to lay the groundwork for the patterns of going no contact and the reasons why that we are seeing now.
I have to wonder though what's going to happen to the generation of young adults cutting off their parents for minor in fractions they themselves become parents of teenagers who have different beliefs and different demands for how they are treated than their own? Will those parents who cut off their own parents for Not matching every belief they have and living up to every expectation give up everything they believe and want for themselves to meet every demand of their children and have exactly the same beliefs of their children? Or will there one day be news stories about the epidemic of parents going no contact with their children for not having the right political beliefs and having hurt their feelings with their unreasonable adolescent behavior?
There is a therapist I follow on Instagram who talks about building capacity. She says of course there are people who've had upsetting sometimes even awful things happen in their childhood but when we focus only on the idea that childhood struggles are the cause of our current adult struggles we Can miss how our current struggles may be due to a problem in our current environment that needs to be addressed. She also says we are not realizing that development and growth occur throughout adulthood and that our current struggles may not be due to something that happened in our childhood but a skill area in our adult lives that actually needs to be developed at an adult level. but the current script and trends of a arrangement and what constitutes trauma and blaming all current struggles on past experiences without looking at them in a more nuanced way combined with at least two decades of parenting advice that just one mistake can completely traumatize your child and cause lifelong harm to the parent child relationship and even create serious mental illness creates the perfect storm for this thinking to later get applied to affirmation and gender identity.
I completely agree with this! I’m a psychotherapist myself and I think the theory of attachment has been misunderstood (willfully) by a multi million dollar industry of “parenting experts” writing parenting books offering what pretends to be helpful advice but actually puts the fear of god into mothers that if they put a foot wrong they will traumatise their child. This expects parents to be perfect and children are seen as so fragile that they need to be hothoused and protected from any negative feeling. This is fundamentally anti development. All mothers need to be is reasonably attuned, love their kid and not be afraid to lose their marbles from time to time. Research on attachment shows that getting it “right” all the time does not create the attachment, it’s the ability to repair things when things go wrong, tempers are lost and missattunement occurs. Development grows from frustration not having every single need met.
Motherhood is hard; it puts us in touch with emotions so raw and so shameful and we don’t talk about these and support one another and I’m talking about hatred, rage, disappointment, shame, a sense of failure as well as joy, laughter and love that is so fierce it could make your heart burst. That’s real mothering, it’s a blood sport and it’ll take you to dark difficult places sometimes as well as bring such richness. It brings out the very best and worst of us and once you become a mother you truly have to stop kidding yourself you are a nice person. It is not this sanitised, fake and empty advice that sells the myth of perfection. Children can grow perfectly well in your ordinary garden with ordinary soil. They don’t need hothousing.
Maybe the coping strategies we adopted for child hood distress were inadequate or counterproductive any so we need to unlearn them add build our capacity with new ones.
I also refuse to erase history because I choose to remember my daughter's birth and the first 3 decades of her life. And because I am not participating in re-writing history, I am accused of erasing "trans" people, which is nonsense. The lost ability to talk about reality is disturbing.
I'm in the same boat unfortunately 😢 My only strategy at the moment is to convince her, through my husband who she still sees, that we can have different viewpoints and still be a family. I've tried to say that nobody is perfect, we all made mistakes, but she doesn't see that. I don't want to convince her of my views or argue the point. I'm not even asking for an apology for how she's treated me (although I deserve one!!). But this is not good enough, I remain the evil witch. What else can be done? How else can I approach it? I really have no hope of reconciliation, it's been almost 3 years. I've been told to move on, but I just can't, she's my baby 😢
Spot on. It happened to me, the mom, just like that. It’s sickening how other adults helped our kids ruin their young lives as well as their parents. Teachers and physicians included. I hope they all rot.
It is easy to become bitter. Few understand unless they have been targeted by not only strangers, but some family members and former friends. When people have no idea about your life and still feel comfortable engaging in defamation of your character and livelihood and celebrating the destruction of their actions, something dark has come over them. When relationships that had been solid for decades turn on you with blame and cancelling, it is hard to be cheery.
Here is an extreme example of the end result of alienating parents. (Read the linked news article.)The response from trans activists has been vile online abuse of the parents and multiple complaints to government bodies about the journalist.
All of this is so toxic. I highly recommend the book “Hold Your Kids Tight” by Gordon Neufeld. Somehow the book needed Gabor Mate to catapult it to fame, but I truly believe this is Neufeld’s work.
I can’t imagine that Mate would disambiguate on the trans issue, and this is of primary frustration for parents like me.
But the book explains the reasons why peer influence is threatening the parent child bond. It’s been at least five years since I first read the book. Now my children are 13, 15, 21. I am watching them watch their YouTube. We’re all in this boundary busting soup together. It’s quite unlike any other time.
I think parenting and child development "experts" were laying the groundwork for this long before gender ever entered the picture. My oldest child is 22 and I read every parenting book that came out because I was desperate to get it right. There was a message that kept showing up in these books that stressed me out so much. It was that just one mistake with your child, one unacknowledged emotion, just one time not paying enough attention, just one time saying the wrong thing could cause lifelong harm to your child and your relationship with your child. I had no idea how I was supposed to live up to that standard when the stakes were so high but the requirements were also impossible to meet. even as my children got older and I reached out for help with various parenting challenges the focus was always on not saying the wrong thing. I even started hearing that good, supportive parents could induce borderline personality disorder in a sensitive child for not realizing they needed a different type of parenting other than normal good parenting - that I could induce an emotional wound by calling out from a different room asking the sensitive child to unload the dishwasher rather than going directly to her and carefully wording my request. When families are repeatedly getting that message and now it's everywhere on social media, it's got to lay the groundwork for the patterns of going no contact and the reasons why that we are seeing now.
I have to wonder though what's going to happen to the generation of young adults cutting off their parents for minor in fractions they themselves become parents of teenagers who have different beliefs and different demands for how they are treated than their own? Will those parents who cut off their own parents for Not matching every belief they have and living up to every expectation give up everything they believe and want for themselves to meet every demand of their children and have exactly the same beliefs of their children? Or will there one day be news stories about the epidemic of parents going no contact with their children for not having the right political beliefs and having hurt their feelings with their unreasonable adolescent behavior?
There is a therapist I follow on Instagram who talks about building capacity. She says of course there are people who've had upsetting sometimes even awful things happen in their childhood but when we focus only on the idea that childhood struggles are the cause of our current adult struggles we Can miss how our current struggles may be due to a problem in our current environment that needs to be addressed. She also says we are not realizing that development and growth occur throughout adulthood and that our current struggles may not be due to something that happened in our childhood but a skill area in our adult lives that actually needs to be developed at an adult level. but the current script and trends of a arrangement and what constitutes trauma and blaming all current struggles on past experiences without looking at them in a more nuanced way combined with at least two decades of parenting advice that just one mistake can completely traumatize your child and cause lifelong harm to the parent child relationship and even create serious mental illness creates the perfect storm for this thinking to later get applied to affirmation and gender identity.
I welcome and appreciate that my article created this thoughtful response. There is much food for thought in your words. Thank you.
I completely agree with this! I’m a psychotherapist myself and I think the theory of attachment has been misunderstood (willfully) by a multi million dollar industry of “parenting experts” writing parenting books offering what pretends to be helpful advice but actually puts the fear of god into mothers that if they put a foot wrong they will traumatise their child. This expects parents to be perfect and children are seen as so fragile that they need to be hothoused and protected from any negative feeling. This is fundamentally anti development. All mothers need to be is reasonably attuned, love their kid and not be afraid to lose their marbles from time to time. Research on attachment shows that getting it “right” all the time does not create the attachment, it’s the ability to repair things when things go wrong, tempers are lost and missattunement occurs. Development grows from frustration not having every single need met.
Motherhood is hard; it puts us in touch with emotions so raw and so shameful and we don’t talk about these and support one another and I’m talking about hatred, rage, disappointment, shame, a sense of failure as well as joy, laughter and love that is so fierce it could make your heart burst. That’s real mothering, it’s a blood sport and it’ll take you to dark difficult places sometimes as well as bring such richness. It brings out the very best and worst of us and once you become a mother you truly have to stop kidding yourself you are a nice person. It is not this sanitised, fake and empty advice that sells the myth of perfection. Children can grow perfectly well in your ordinary garden with ordinary soil. They don’t need hothousing.
Thank you for this additional insight. Much appreciated.
Maybe the coping strategies we adopted for child hood distress were inadequate or counterproductive any so we need to unlearn them add build our capacity with new ones.
Love that insight
So true. This is also my reality.
I have tried reaching out many times. I am agreeable to having a relationship with my adult daughter where we "agree to disagree."
This isn't acceptable to her. I refuse to erase history. Her current reality depends upon people being willing to erase her past.
I also refuse to erase history because I choose to remember my daughter's birth and the first 3 decades of her life. And because I am not participating in re-writing history, I am accused of erasing "trans" people, which is nonsense. The lost ability to talk about reality is disturbing.
I concour. Agree to disagree doesn’t exist.
I'm in the same boat unfortunately 😢 My only strategy at the moment is to convince her, through my husband who she still sees, that we can have different viewpoints and still be a family. I've tried to say that nobody is perfect, we all made mistakes, but she doesn't see that. I don't want to convince her of my views or argue the point. I'm not even asking for an apology for how she's treated me (although I deserve one!!). But this is not good enough, I remain the evil witch. What else can be done? How else can I approach it? I really have no hope of reconciliation, it's been almost 3 years. I've been told to move on, but I just can't, she's my baby 😢
I suspect the culture has to change coupled with our kids maturing over time and widening their perspective.
I suspect you're right, but in the meantime, we lose ourselves, our families, time .... 😢
Exactly
“Told to move on”. Yes, friends and family say this. Hmmm. Wait until it happens to you, I say.
It can happen to anyone for a variety of reasons.
It is a kind of cradle robbing frequently by childless SJWs, isn’t it?
Yep
I’m so sorry you’re all going through this. The trans movement really goes after breaking the family and it’s particularly the mother who is targeted
Indeed
Excellent - you captured exactly what is happening
I'm living it, so it is fairly easy to write about it.
Me too actually
I'm sorry to hear that. Sadly, it is becoming common to blame the parents.
Spot on. It happened to me, the mom, just like that. It’s sickening how other adults helped our kids ruin their young lives as well as their parents. Teachers and physicians included. I hope they all rot.
It is easy to become bitter. Few understand unless they have been targeted by not only strangers, but some family members and former friends. When people have no idea about your life and still feel comfortable engaging in defamation of your character and livelihood and celebrating the destruction of their actions, something dark has come over them. When relationships that had been solid for decades turn on you with blame and cancelling, it is hard to be cheery.
Here is an extreme example of the end result of alienating parents. (Read the linked news article.)The response from trans activists has been vile online abuse of the parents and multiple complaints to government bodies about the journalist.
https://open.substack.com/pub/resistgendereducation/p/an-inexcusable-failure?r=24091f&utm_medium=ios
All of this is so toxic. I highly recommend the book “Hold Your Kids Tight” by Gordon Neufeld. Somehow the book needed Gabor Mate to catapult it to fame, but I truly believe this is Neufeld’s work.
I can’t imagine that Mate would disambiguate on the trans issue, and this is of primary frustration for parents like me.
But the book explains the reasons why peer influence is threatening the parent child bond. It’s been at least five years since I first read the book. Now my children are 13, 15, 21. I am watching them watch their YouTube. We’re all in this boundary busting soup together. It’s quite unlike any other time.
Yes, that book is on my recommended reading list. https://lisashultz.com