Parents Under the Influence by Cécile David-Weill

Author:Cécile David-Weill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

How to Respect Their Need for Independence?

What is independence? It has nothing to do with creating a busy schedule for our children, which often amounts to “getting rid” of them, either because we want time for ourselves after work, or because, having failed to establish a deep and real relationship with our children, we have no idea what to do with them, or because we simply decide that we have better things to do.

It also has nothing to do with taking our children to dinner with friends, only to stick them down at the end of the table with the other similarly abandoned children, all of us telling ourselves there is no need to worry about them since they are with their peers. The truth is that prioritizing our own love life, or social and cultural activities, at our children’s expense, amounts to telling them, “You’re worthless.” And the resulting low self-esteem, coupled with an intense feeling of guilt, will follow our children throughout their lives. By abandoning them in this way, we will have convinced them that they have done something wrong, or are inadequate or insufficient.

In fact, many of us parents indiscriminately invoke the concept of independence to ease our guilt when we are not taking care of our children. Let’s face it, the goal of parenting is undoubtedly to prepare our children to be able to leave us when the time comes. That’s what independence is. But the only real independence is the one children request, especially during adolescence. And even though this is a good thing, we often dread it because it inevitably plunges us into stress and anxiety, whereas the independence we expect young children to be capable of means nothing, and doesn’t do them any good. It usually only serves the parents’ interest to bring up the concept of independence early on in their children’s lives as a way to avoid taking care of them instead of saying, “Do what you want and leave me alone,” which would be far more honest.

More often than not, what such parents are after is not independence at all, but really a chance to abandon their children outright. It’s absurd to think, for example, that young children ought to know how to play alone and occupy their time by themselves. Nine-month-old babies can neither walk nor play alone. They need someone to carry them and play with them. Likewise, when they reach childhood, even if it’s possible to push them to be more independent, doing so means effectively imposing mental suffering, since they wouldn’t yet have the emotional maturity to cope alone. It can certainly happen, but at what price? It’s like pushing children to walk too early—they’ll probably walk, but they may end up with bowed legs. Similarly, there is no virtue in sending small children to camp until their parents are sure that they can handle being away from their family, which is rarely the case before at least the age of six or seven.

It is

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