anything like me, you got to adulthood a little bit screwed-up by your childhood. I know that no one had a perfect childhood, but it’s important to understand that the way your parents speak to you as a child is the way you learn to speak to yourself as an adult.
I believe that the majority of parents love and support their children—but they can still make mistakes in parenting. This is why it’s so important to apologize to your kids when you mess up. Acting like you’re the authority of all authorities and expecting your children to blindly respect you even when you’ve hurt them is a recipe for you getting pissed-off when they finally stop talking to you in their thirties. Ungrateful brats.
No matter what issues you have as an adult, they are probably buried somewhere in your childhood. The way we experience life as adults is framed and experienced through the scripts we learned as children. When we are kids, we are absorbing and assimilating new information so fast. There is so much being learned, so constantly, it’s a wonder our heads don’t explode.
Unfortunately, we also learn coping skills through childhood traumas, and those things tend to stick with you well into adulthood. Sometimes they are beneficial, and sometimes they leave you wondering what is wrong with your damn brain. We grow up with the example of our parents as our barometer of normal, even when outsiders can see that our family is definitely not normal, for better or worse.
Here’s a delightful example: Georgia Moffett, daughter of actor Peter Davison (who played the fifth iteration of the Doctor in the British TV show Doctor Who), said in an interview, “My father, Peter Davison, played the fifth Doctor. I went to school with the daughter of Colin Baker [the sixth Doctor], so I was sort of under the impression that everyone’s dad was Doctor Who.”
This is a prime example of how children use their families as the measure of normal against other families. For this same reason, children of abusive parents may continue the cycle of abuse against their own children because they assume that it was normal behavior. Children of healthy families tend to be healthy and respectful in their own parenting practices.
In my case, I never remember seeing or hearing my parents argue, but I felt tension. Then they divorced when I was seven. In my marriages, I never wanted to argue or fight because I had never seen how that was done in a healthy way. I expected that you just lived with the tension until your breaking point, because that was how I witnessed the dissolution of a marriage as a child.
After our parents’ divorce, my sister and I moved to Texas to live with our father for a brief stint. I was around twelve years old. I remember telling my dad that I loved him, and he said, “You say that so much that it seems like you are trying to convince yourself of it.” I remember feeling like my stomach had been filled with ice, and I had an uncomfortable tightness in my chest. I felt slapped. And with that one offhand statement from a man who was under a lot of emotional strain and vented it at his daughter, I learned that my love cannot be trusted, it must be proven.
Before I figured this childhood issue out, I practically gave myself to death in romantic relationships, never wanting to give the other party reason to doubt my love or think I had to convince myself to love them. I became very easily taken advantage of and taken for granted because of how hard and deep I threw myself into making sure my partner knew I loved them. I never even stopped to notice if that love and attention was being reciprocated.
By the age of twelve, I discovered through constant reminders from my mother that I was fat, lazy, and worthless. My sister and I were put on diets from a young age and were shamed for being hungry, wanting sweets, or going up a pants size. I internalized the message that fat people don’t get loved, and I would never find a man to love me because I was fat and lazy: nobody wanted to be with someone like that. The objective of my life became to become pretty and find a man, because I equated that with happiness. So, as an adult, I often went along with whatever a man wanted to do because I didn’t want to be rejected.
Moral of the story: I am just as screwed-up as you are.
The bad news is that your childhood is over, and it happened, and you can’t go back in time and actually change it. The good news is that you can still work on healing your childhood wounds in order to become a healthier adult. For many, a therapist is helpful in these endeavors, particularly if you were abused by parents or others in childhood, either emotionally, physically, or sexually.
Sometimes, this healing involves cutting your parents or other family members out of your life. And this is one hundred percent okay to do. Even if it makes them angry or they write you out of the will or they say really mean things about you. Even if they say you are a disrespectful child and they don’t understand why you don’t respect your elders.
Pro tip from me to you: Respect is a two-way street, and you don’t owe anybody shit.
The Ways Our Parents Fail Us
I know what you’re thinking. How is childhood trauma a Millennial issue? It’s not—but we are the ones behind an “epidemic” of family estrangement. According to psychologist Joshua Coleman, “Parenting has changed more in the last forty years than it did in the few centuries before that… The principles of obligation, duty and respect that Baby Boomers and generations before them had for their elders aren’t necessarily there anymore.”9 (Shout out to my Gen-X friends who are joining us in this unsavory destruction of society.)
In a post on Bustle, writer Gabrielle Moss shares my difficulty in finding data to support this bubble of estranged Millennials who don’t call their parents to gab about their day like besties. She says: “We don’t want to raise our voices to say, ‘I didn’t get told I was special, I was told I was a piece of crap who ruined my mother’s life,’ because we’re afraid to find out that we really are wrong, twisted, different from everyone else.”10
It’s important to note that, while child abuse, neglect, and other traumas are being called out more publicly and freely than in generations past, actual rates of abuse are trending on a major decline. Consider the following excerpt from Millennials Rising, published in 2000:
In this new era of hypersensitivity, people have been alarmed by government reports that child abuse is on the rise. In particular, the 1996 National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect caused a great stir by reporting a huge jump of over 50 percent in the rates of most types of child abuse…between 1986 and 1993. Research by the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System shows the problem getting sharply worse in the early ‘90s and then better in the late ‘90s. All these scenarios are troubling: Is the rate of child abuse really going up?
The answer is: probably not. What the government numbers track is not the actual incidence rate, but the official intervention rate. And in the Millennial child era, experts suspect that rising interventions parallel a rising willingness by neighbors, teachers, nurses, and officers to report possible cases of abuse. As for the trend in actual incidence, the best personal survey data…point in the opposite direction: toward a dramatic decline of over 40 percent in the rate of parental violence against children from 1975 to 1992.11
—Neil Howe and William Strauss,
Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation
Millennials are not unique in having experienced traumatic childhoods. But when we are mistreated, abused, neglected, etc.—we talk about it. Hence, I’ll be exploring these factors of abuse in my book about Millennials, because we’re working to normalize and destigmatize talking about abuse. We’re not keeping the family secrets anymore.
Poor parenting has an infinite number of sources and explanations but often takes one of two main tracks in how it is inflicted upon a child: ignoring or engulfing. While there are myriad ways a parent or caregiver may inflict trauma and suffering onto a child, this chapter will deal more with emotional trauma from parents who fail to meet a child’s psychological needs for love, approval, affection, and more. The ongoing struggle of children who did not receive emotional support growing up can and will follow them into adulthood and impact their ability to function in the world, in personal and professional relationships,