Turning Off Your Parenting Autopilot . . .
Identifying and Dealing with Your Assumptions
About Being a Mom or a Dad

When a baby is born, parents can easily become so caught up in the details of managing a family and adjusting to the schedule of a newborn that they end up navigating their way through parenthood on autopilot, unaware of how or why they do things. As a result, their way of parenting may come from unexamined feelings and attitudes that they’ve developed over the years. (Big boys don’t cry. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Nice people don’t get angry.) Acting on such feelings and attitudes, without being consciously aware of what they are and how they may affect a child, can have unforeseen consequences to both the baby’s emerging personality and the parents’ own well-being.

Your basic personality and temperament influence how you react to and handle the challenges and responsibilities of being a new parent: Are you easygoing, trusting, depressed, shy, impulsive, somber, affectionate, rigid, angry or calm? In addition, how you were brought up will have a huge influence on how you interact with your child: Were you treated with warmth and affection or were your parents mean or cold? Are you determined to raise your children very differently than you were raised or are you in sync with what your parents did? In a sense, many different people and memories impact the interaction between mother, father and baby.

Becoming aware of these forces within you and how they affect your infant helps make you a smart parent, one who can tune into your child’s needs and individual characteristics. Your child has a great deal of potential to become a remarkable and delightful being, in charge of his or her own destiny. You can do a great deal to help make that happen.

What Is the Parenting Autopilot?

The “parent autopilot” is a part of your personality that is assembled from:

• your own lifelong experiences as a child (that’s right, not just how your parents were when you were young, but how they treat you now, too)·

• your expectations and fantasies about what makes a good mom and dad

• your expectations and fantasies about what makes a good child

• your own temperament and personality

These experiences, assumptions, expectations and fantasies blend together to shape how you act toward and react to your child. When unexamined, they shape your behavior “automatically.”

5 Parenting Awareness Topics
1. Reflect on your own childhood
2. What’s your advice for other parents?
3. What advice do you wish you could have given your own parents?
4. Ask yourself why you want to have children
5. Think about your fantasies about what your child is going to be like

Topic #1 Reflect on Your Own Childhood
The ways you respond to children are influenced in part by your conscious and unconscious patterns from your own childhood. Becoming aware of those memories and the feelings they evoke will help your understand and perhaps change the way you act and react to your child.

Take time, alone and with your partner or friends, to ask yourself: What did I like about how I was raised? What didn’t I like? What would I do differently? What would I do the same?

Then ask yourself specifically how your parents responded to your signals of distress, anger, fear, disgust and aversion to tastes or smells, fun, enjoyment, interest and surprise. Take anger, for example: Did your parents restrict it, ignore it, displace it, increase it, respond to anger with anger?

When Frank and Joan tried this exercise they stumbled over some pretty surprising revelations: “I asked my husband Frank to tell me what he didn’t like about how his parents raised him,” said Joan, the mother of two boys, six months and five years old. “He’s a very loyal son and it wasn’t easy for him to talk about it, but I thought it would help us. We had had a difficult time when our oldest was a baby. Frank was working all the time and when he came home he wasn’t very patient with the upheaval in the house. He would get angry when the baby cried or made a mess or interrupted him. He wasn’t really mean or anything, but it made me feel like he was criticizing me and it kept him from having a good time with the baby. It’s started happening again with this youngest child. When you mentioned this exercise to me, I thought we could give it a try.”

Joan reported that for a few weeks Frank seemed unwilling to really answer the question. When she pushed, he talked about how his parents did the best they could in difficult circumstances. They had lived with his mom’s parents when he was born and no one had a lot of privacy.

“One day I asked him how the adults got along and how they treated him,” Joan noted.

“I’d never really thought about it in those terms,” Frank says now. “I mean I was just a kid and I accepted what was around me. I knew my folks loved me and I never looked past that, I guess. But now that you ask, well, my grandfather was a very stern man, and he demanded that his house be run on his timetable and to suit his needs. When I interfered -- left my toys around, cried, and threw my food -- he would send me out of the room. A year old and my mom would have to take me into the bedroom, even if it was dinnertime. That punished her too. I did grow up feeling like my parents never protected me or stood up for me. No one would take my side. It’s funny but despite that I always was determined to run my house like Gramps did . . . but even more effectively. I mean, I figure if that’s what they thought was good for me, then it must be good for my kids too, even if they react -- as I did -- by being even more wild and irritating. I guess I’m determined to prove that they did good by me. But maybe they didn’t. Now that you ask me like this, I get to wondering if they weren’t a little unfair to me. And am I unfair to my kids, too?”

It may take a couple of months of tossing around the subject before either parent can really get down to talking about the innermost feelings about how they were raised. The results can be very revealing and may even change they way a parent relates to his or her child. And even if you or your spouse doesn’t get around to talking out loud about such subjects, you can think this through privately and come up with some important insights into how you feel about raising your kids.
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Topic #2 It’s Your Turn to Offer Advice
It’s always easier to give advice than take it. So for this exercise, imagine that a couple has asked you for guidance on how to become better parents. What would you tell them and what would you want them to ask themselves?

Sarah is a single mother: “My advice would be simple. Be prepared for how much time and attention and work it is to raise a child well. It’s not something that you can really do alone. You need help; emotional support for yourself. Advice. Someone to share the responsibilities. Find a way to build a support network or you’ll lose your mind.”

David, the father of a grown son and a daughter who is fourteen years younger, has another perspective. “Treat your infant like a whole person. Kids aren’t stupid or oblivious. Baby talk drives me crazy. Talk to the child like they have a brain in their head and they will have a lot stronger interpersonal and learning skills. I have friends who don’t really talk to their child. I think it is because they don’t think it makes a difference. But it does. To the parents too. If you don’t talk to your child using an adult vocabulary, you begin to feel like your own brain is going to mush.”
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Topic #3 What advice do you wish you could have given your own parents?
What would you like your parents to have done differently about raising you? What do you like that they did? If you are uncomfortable criticizing your folks about how they raised you, it may be because you are hesitant to fault them for some of your own shortcomings. But you don’t want to overlook the credit you deserve for your own personal achievements, perhaps in spite of some of the ways you were raised. You may also feel uncomfortable criticizing your parents because it feels disloyal or unkind, but having objections to certain specifics about how your parents treated you does not in any way discount their strengths and virtues as parents or people. We are all complex beings who exhibit qualities that are both admirable and objectionable.

Marsha was very blunt when asked this question, so blunt that she even surprised herself. “I hated it when my parents spanked me. They only used their hands, and swatted our bottoms, but it really hurt. They did it to us from a very young age, I mean I can remember being two, so I bet they did it when we were even younger. I don’t think our relationship ever recovered. We’ve always been very wary around one another. And that whole spanking thing is part of it somehow, I just know it. I turned out okay, and some credit goes to my mom, but much of it is just mine. I did okay despite a lot of the ways I was raised.”
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Topic #4 Ask Yourself Why You Want Children
Take time to think about what you expect your children to provide for you. Companionship? Help in your old age? Reflected glory? Prestige? Fun? A fuller sense of family and security? Love? Someone to need you? Do you want to have a boy, or a girl? Or do you want to provide grandchildren for your parents and get their approval yourself?

You might not be consciously aware of some of your motives for having children or having more children. However, if you can identify to some extent what functions you want your children to fulfill, you will be better able to avoid burdening them psychologically and the long-term outcome will be better for everybody.

For example, parents may get in trouble when their unacknowledged motive for having a child is thwarted by the child’s personality or behavior. A colicky baby is hardly going to fulfill a fantasy of having an infant who stars in commercials (and reflects her glory on you). A child with health problems may loom as a disappointment as much as a genuine worry. And an independent child may quickly destroy fantasies of having a companion who will stick by your side. Recognizing your fantasies allows you to handle whatever reality dishes up to you with less disappointment or anger. Your fantasies won’t disappear, but you will be less likely to make your child an innocent victim of them.
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Topic #5 Think about your fantasies about what your child is going to be like
Take some time to think about what you imagine your child will become. A model? A doctor? A math genius? A major league ballplayer? A truck driver? Quiet? Funny? Handsome? The first woman president? A couch potato with no future?

Notice if your fantasies are positive or negative. Do they have much to do with the child or are they projections of what you’d like to become or even of what your parents fantasized about you when you were an infant? Think about the positive and negative expectations that were placed on you as a child. Ask yourself if your fantasies about your child come from your own fears of failure or disappointment? Do you imagine your child’s accomplishments will exceed your own? Is this pleasing or threatening? Do you feel that you have to do and be better than your child?

It is not so easy to come to grips with what you really hope and fear for your child. Admitting disappointment and worries is tough; it can make you feel guilty, angry, scared. “My daughter Martha wasn’t any more than three months old when I began to feel that I was losing control of the situation,” recalls Anne, mother of now-three-year-old Martha. “I had been so sure of what my life with a new baby would be like -- how perfectly wonderful, filled with pleasure, even peaceful. In fact, that was what I thought it should be like. To me, anything else was simply a matter of sloppy parenting. But that attitude didn’t leave any room for a fussy baby or difficult breast-feeding, or family upheaval (my husband lost his job). I mean, I’m smart enough, and always thought of myself as practical, but when it came to becoming a parent, reality was not even a visitor. I don’t know what I was thinking. All I know is that when life with the baby turned out to be chaotic, and not very pretty, I was devastated. I thought I was a complete failure and, how I hate to admit it, I was mad at little Martha. I became impatient with everything! If she fussed while she was feeding, or, as she got older, threw her food around when she ate, it made me angry. I felt like she was rejecting me and so I rejected her. I missed the joy of watching her discover the world day by day because I felt like she wasn’t doing it right and neither was I.”

Anne’s clash between the reality of having Martha and her fantasies about what it would be like is not uncommon. Parents also get into trouble years down the road when they fantasize about what their child will be like as a teenager or young adult; that may be even more unpredictable than imaging what an infant will be like!

It is very helpful to see what pops out of your mouth when you answer the question: What is your most passionate hope for your child?
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Copyright © 2003 by Paul C. Holinger, M.D., and Kalia Doner

www.simonsays.com