Cécile David-Weill - Parents Under the Influence: Words of Wisdom from a Former Bad Mother

Who am I to say how we should raise our children?

To establish my authority in this matter, I might invoke the fact that Im a mother, and now a grandmother as well. And this alone could very well be justification enough for me to talk about parenting. Casually, I could add that I am French and American, and also partly raised my children in Asia, which gives me a rather unique frame of reference. But above all, my ideas on the subject come from an even deeper and more personal experience, namely, that I am a former bad mother who nearly missed out on the joys of being a parent and on raising my children well. In other words, my perspective on how we should raise our children comes from the mistakes I mademistakes I have since recognized and carefully attempted to correct.

It came as a total shock to me when I realized, fourteen years into parenthood, that my children didnt seem to be happy and thriving. Where had I been going wrong? What was wrong with me? I had always thought I would be a great mom and had been doing my best to live up to that ideal. But my decision to rely on a combination of love and instinct, hoping that this would be enough to overcome my struggles as a mother, wasnt working for me or for them. Half the time I would say to myself, Im terrible at this, but I dont care, affecting a blithe indifference that in no way corresponded to how I actually felt. The rest of the time I would feel guilty when comparing my behavior with other parents around me. In short, I was too caught up in myself to really take an interest in my children and create bonds with them.

Then I realized that it was not I who was doing the parentingmy emotions were. Complicated feelings left over from my childhood were confusing me, influencing me, and often contradicting my conscious intentions as a parent. I was under the influence of my childhood. And this baggage was undermining my decisions and behavior as a mother, preventing me from sticking to the parenting philosophy I had hoped to follow.

Since the parenting guidebooks Id avidly read, as good as they may have been, never really raised this fundamental question of the influence of my own emotional and familial history on my parenting, I came to the distressing conclusion that successful parenting was an impossibility and that no reasonable human being could claim to do it well. I felt this all the more when I realized, to my horror, that unresolved emotions stemming from my childhood had been driving me to actually reproduce my own upbringing, including the behavior that had hurt me the most. As a result, regardless of all my good intentions and the incredible energy I had devoted to motherhood, the way I interacted with my children often lacked judgment or reason and so didnt produce the intended results.

Of course, the notion of the unconscious mind wasnt new to me. But even though I didnt deny its influence on other aspects of my life, I never thought of how it might have an impact on how I raised my children. Is it because the very idea of the unconscious seems so irreconcilable with the maturity and discernment required to be a parent that acknowledging its influence on our parenting abilities is deeply unsettling? In any case, as a worried mother seeking reassurance, I had entirely avoided the question of the unconscious effects my own upbringing was having on the one I was trying to give my children.

Yet it only takes a minutes reflection to understand that it would be unreasonable to overlook this part of ourselves that keeps us from being consistent in our own parenting practices and, worse still, leads us unintentionally to harm our children. Over time I came to realize that I couldnt raise my children successfully without coming to terms with my own childhood.