Family Issues Archives

Get Rid of the Guilt!
By Benjamin D. Garber, Ph.D.

Guilt has no place in parenting.
Anger? Yes.
Sadness? Sure.
Fear? Daily.
Happiness? Wherever you can find it.

Coping with the powerful emotions that come with parenting is a constant challenge. Keeping a healthy perspective despite the ebb and flow of pride and rage, disappointment and hope, terror and joy is both a key to every parent's well-being and a critical example for every child. As important as it is to acknowledge and constructively express these healthy feelings, it is at least as important to get rid of the guilt.

Guilt is distorted anger and sadness; a confused and confusing mix of self-blame and self-pity and remorse. Left unchecked, guilt gets in the way of good decision making, cripples self-esteem and can play a role in developing anxiety or depression, or both. For you as a parent, guilt should be a warning sign that something emotionally powerful needs your attention before it can undermine your judgment, your caring and - most of all - your child's security.

Single Parent Guilt

When day-to-day pressures become overwhelming, something has to give. All too often that something is the fuel that keeps our kids going, your time and attention. Cuddles at bedtime. A smile from the bleachers at the next practice. Help with a tough math problem. It’s easy to rationalize missing the big game or the band concert or the school meeting when a co-parent (spouse or other parenting partner) is there to pick up the slack. But single parents have to do it entirely on their own.

Single parent guilt is about feelings of inadequacy. It’s about what the kids don't have or could have or should have, if only they had another parent. It’s built on your anger toward your missing co-parent, on your grief over his or her absence and on your self-doubt, your feeling (regardless of the reality of the situation) that your children are being cheated so - damn it all! - you're determined to make it up to the kids.

Single parents, parents who travel extensively and non-custodial ("weekend") parents can all fall into this well-intentioned but misguided trap. Guilt over your own absence for days on end, a wish to compensate for what you see as the kids' other parent's failings and/or the pain you fear the marital separation has caused makes you into a push-over parent. Later bedtime? Extra dessert? Video games all day? Maybe if you give the kids what they want, they'll seem happy and your guilt will go away.

Wrong.

What children want and what children need are often very different. The more chaos in their lives, the more they need the reassurance of predictability and consistency; Routines. Rituals. Bedtimes. Curfews. Limits and consequences. Much as these things may invite power struggles, they build security. You mustn't let the guilt get in the way.

Disability Guilt

When children suffer illness or injury, limitations of body or brain, learning or development, when the inadequacies of the system and the imperfections of the sciences seem to heap one pain upon another, parents feel guilty. It’s natural to curse the world and the God that could allow suffering and your own inability to protect your kids perfectly. This kind of guilt is laced with sympathy and frustration and, as deeply hidden as it is natural and expectable, resentment toward the child and the circumstance no matter how much it is out of his control.

Anything from asthma to epilepsy, from learning disabilities to a broken limb can elicit this kind of guilt, a guilt that grows in proportion to the duration and degree of a child's distress and is magnified by the indignities they must suffer in the process of diagnosis and treatment. Add to this the professional community's tradition of blaming concerned parents for either exaggerating a child's symptoms unnecessarily or neglecting a child's condition until it worsens, and disability guilt becomes all that more easily understood.

No matter how well-founded your feelings, no matter how real or imagined your responsibility for your child's pain, guilt still has no place in your parenting decisions. Your healthy parenting decisions are based upon your child's changing physical, intellectual and emotional needs, tempered by your love and compassion and administered with a drop or two of sympathy.

But not guilt.

Now that he's sick you might decide to buy him that special toy, allow him to watch television longer or stay up later, but base these decisions on your understanding of his needs. Do it because you want to reward his patience in the doctor's waiting room or his bravery during the CAT scan or his persistence with the therapist. Do it because it might help him smile through the discomfort or make the medicine go down smoother. But don't do it because you blame yourself, you should have known, you should have been there. Apologize if that's what's needed, talk it through with your spouse or a friend, the doctor or a therapist. Whatever you do, get rid of the guilt.

 

Parenting Pointer

On Professionally Endorsed Parental Guilt

As if our own guilt weren't bad enough, the professional community has a long history of guilt-inducing parent-blame. Even now, there are still teachers who will blame a student's academic failure on you, the parent. There are mental health professionals who will readily blame everything from bed-wetting to attention disorders on you, the parent. There are medical professionals who will tell you that you are over-reacting to a child's symptom when that symptom defies diagnosis, and then later call you neglectful for allowing the same symptom to go untreated. Either way, the weight of blame rests firmly on the shoulders of you, the parent.

It’s your job in each instance to determine what responsibility you may realistically have for a child's distress or dysfunction so that you can make changes for the future, without buying into the guilt. There's nothing gained by kicking yourself or losing sleep over past mistakes. Get your child healthy first, then figure out how to replace parent-blaming professionals with other, more compassionate and empathic helpers.

 

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