If You Had Controlling Parents (5 page)

Next: Depriving Parenting

While Smothering parents engulf their children with too much attention, the next style of controlling parents, Depriving parents, do exactly the opposite. They emotionally abandon their children by withholding love, support, and attention, which gives them commanding power.

Key Characteristics of Depriving Parents:

• Control through withdrawal, disapproval, or banishment
  
• Become emotionally unreachable
  
• View happiness and good fortune as scarce
  
• See love as a commodity to be withheld when the parent is displeased
  

Potential Consequences of a Depriving Upbringing:

• Self-doubt
  
• Depression
  
• Lowered expectations and confidence
  
• Feeling unloving and unlovable
  
• Slowed development of social skills
  

Forty-year-old artist Samantha, a pretty, curly-haired blond in the throes of puppy love at thirteen, blushed when her eighth-grade boyfriend gave her roses, her first. Rushing home, she breathlessly asked her mother for a vase. Instead, she got a sour look and an order to put the roses in the
garage. For the next week, Samantha spent a good part of her days in the hot, dusty garage, watching her roses slowly wilt
.

Samantha's mother also became downright sullen when Samantha wanted something. At seven, on a daylong shopping trip with her mother, Samantha asked to go to the bathroom and was told, “Shut up. If you ask one more time I'm going to leave you behind in this store
.”

By age fourteen Samantha had become interested in spirituality and asked to go to a Christian summer camp. Her mother informed her that she couldn't go because of a family vacation that had already been scheduled. Yet the camp date arrived and nobody went anywhere. “When my mother didn't want to do stuff she'd say we had a family-schedule conflict,” Samantha remembers. “She just didn't want to inconvenience herself.”

 

Conditional love is the trademark of Depriving parents. As long as their children conform to their desires, these parents lend emotional support. But when they're disappointed, Depriving parents withdraw their love—remarkably, instantly, and utterly. This leaves children so unsure of their standing that they're desperate to please. They learn that love is ephemeral and erratic or contingent upon good behavior. They also learn that they have little control over whether they receive love. Whereas Smothering parents tell their children what they
should
want, Depriving parents tell their children simply
not to
want.

Children who grow up with Depriving parents vividly recall the experience of repeatedly losing parental love and support. “My mother had so much more power over me because of what I didn't get than because of what I did get,” Samantha confesses. “So I became even more dependent on her.”

Perhaps Samantha's mother repeatedly deprived her daughter because she felt personally deprived. Perhaps seeing her daughter happy made her aware of her own unhappiness and she found the disparity intolerable. Since she didn't know how to make herself feel better, she may have unconsciously tried to make her daughter feel worse.

Samantha remembers how her Depriving, Abusing mother's approval washed in and out, like the tide. She frequently threatened to disown Samantha if she didn't follow parental desires; and, in fact, Samantha's twenty-four-year-old brother was disowned for dating a Native American against parental wishes. As soon as the couple broke up, Samantha's parents began speaking to their son again. And, when Samantha's nineteen-year-old sister announced that she was moving in with a boyfriend, her parents again threatened to cut ties. The sister
backed down and lived at home for two more years until she married.

After Samantha graduated from high school, her parents commanded her to stay at home and make plans to become a nurse so she could take care of them in their old age. Instead, she left the state. Her parents did not speak to her for six years. Samantha finally returned for a visit, only to find that her room had been turned into a sitting room and her belongings thrown out. Her mother housed her in a trailer in the driveway, though a spare bedroom sat unused.

However, the worst deprivation Samantha suffered was the lack of parental protection: From ages nine to twelve, Samantha was repeatedly left with a grandfather who molested her.

Discounted Dreams

One of the major ways in which Depriving parents wound their children is by ignoring or discounting their future dreams.

 

David, a fifty-year-old highly successful salesman, was an only child of Jewish merchants in a small Mississippi town. He vividly recalls his elation when an aunt gave him a Brownie camera for his thirteenth birthday. David passionately wanted to be a photographer when he grew up, but his parents pronounced his career dreams impractical. “Photography is a waste of time,” they said. “Stick to what is familiar and take over our store when we retire.” To discourage his interest in photography, they refused to let him buy film. For months David pointed and clicked his useless camera for hours on end, eventually giving up
.

 

Children need affection, encouragement, and physical contact. When they're deprived of them, they can feel invisible. David cannot recall being hugged, kissed, or told he was loved by his parents. The only physical comfort he had was from “Mammy,” an African-American housekeeper who recognized David's needs and provided solace. On Saturdays she'd take him to a movie, where she was allowed to sit with him in the whites' section. He is convinced that, “If I hadn't had Mammy, I would have been in much worse shape.”

David longed for recognition for his good grades, but his Depriving, Perfectionistic parents rarely made even a comment. “I did everything I was supposed to but they never approved. They never asked me how I felt, they just told me how I should react. Rules were more important than feelings.” On family car rides, David's parents plunked him in the backseat and talked about him as if he weren't there.

While his mom kept after David to follow the family rules, his dad rarely spoke to his son. David remembers weekly drives to the big city with his father to take Hebrew classes for his bar mitzvah. During the two-hour trips not a word was spoken. While he felt thankful for his father's presence, he hungered for deeper emotional contact.

Looking back, David recognizes that there were some unavoidable reasons for the deprivation in his childhood. Both David's parents lost their mothers before age five. Because of those early losses, sadness lingered in his family for two generations. In addition, as Jews in the Deep South in the 1940s and 1950s, his family may have felt they needed to behave in a certain fashion. This may explain why David was told so often to be quiet and “proper.”

Regardless of the reasons, David paid a price. Successful he may be, but he still struggles with loneliness. Lacking an early experience of steady emotional warmth, he has yet to have a long-term intimate relationship. “If I'd gotten a few hugs and a few moments of conversation in my childhood, it might have changed a few things,” he muses. He can hardly bear to watch TV or movie scenes of fathers and sons. “It cuts me like a knife to see a father and son being close,” he admits.

One of David's few joys comes on vacations, during which he takes photographs—in part, to replace the photographs he couldn't take as a child because he wasn't allowed to have film.

Ignored Gifts

While some Depriving parents, like David's, discount their children's interests, others ignore their children's innate gifts.

 

Shari is a thirty-two-year-old marketing executive who'll never forget fidgeting on the stage at her junior high school when she was thirteen, scanning the audience for her mother. Shari had placed in the 98th percentile on national scholastic tests and was being honored in an awards ceremony. Her mother never showed up
.

“My mother's attitude was that it was expected of me to do well,” Shari comments wryly. “The most she'd ever say was, ‘That's nice, dear.' But if I didn't mop the floor perfectly, I'd get spanked.”

In grade school her mother tried to force left-handed Shari to write with her right hand so she would be more “normal.” When Shari asked “Why?” her mother taped her mouth shut
.

Over time, Shari's straight-A average fell. At seventeen, she dropped out of high school and got a high school equivalency diploma so she
could work. “I don't remember getting any sort of positive direction from my mother. She never told me what to do with my life. She just told me what not to do
.”

 

Shari was raised by a Depriving, Abusing, single mother. Now herself a single mother, she recognizes that much of her mother's control came from the demands of that daunting role. In addition, Shari, an African American, believes that some of her mother's harsh control had cultural and historical roots: “Black children grow up under a microscope. I think it goes way back to the slave days, when a black child could have been killed for acting too rambunctious around white people. I think black parents from my mother's generation and earlier felt a need to control their children so they wouldn't get negative attention.”

Regardless of what Shari the adult can see in retrospect, Shari the child felt unwanted. At nine, Shari was so upset she decided to drown herself in the bathtub. When her mother left for work, Shari wrote a will giving her toys to friends. She left the will on the kitchen table, filled the tub, and stuck her head in. “Of course my attempt didn't work,” Shari says, smiling. “I kept coming up for air. Finally I just went to bed and fell asleep.” When her mother came home and discovered the will in the kitchen, “She didn't seem concerned, just sort of sarcastic. My mother wasn't really there emotionally even when she was there physically.”

Shari's relationship with her mother has improved since Shari became a parent. But she still wonders what she might have become had her mother encouraged her: “I feel as if I have spent so much of my life just trying to heal from my childhood. Who knows what I could have been? I had the grades and the intelligence for even medical school, if only I'd had more support.”

Emptiness

Most parents of today's baby boomers grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Others, particularly recent immigrants, faced poverty equal to or worse than that of the Depression. These experiences often saddled them with a deprivation mentality they never seemed able to shake. As a result, some raised their children with a pervasive sense of emptiness.

 

Fifty-seven-year-old homemaker Roberta is thinking of sixth-grader Roberta walking slowly around the block of the Philadelphia
neighborhood shoe store for the sixth time—embarrassed to return a pair of patent-leather shoes
.

Earlier that day, her mother had sent her to the store with ten dollars to get new shoes. Roberta was captivated by a $9.49 patent-leather pair, yet, seeing them, her mother began screaming that they cost too much. Roberta meekly replied that her mother hadn't told her how much she should spend, but her mother angrily ordered Roberta to return them. After seven circuits around the block, Roberta mustered up her courage and drifted inside, telling the clerk, “I can't keep these. My mother says they cost too much
.”

Despite her family's relative financial security, every aspect of domestic life dwelled in the shadow of scarcity and regimentation: “We ate at six, eleven, and five and never deviated. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings we had cereal, milk, and half a glass of orange juice. Tuesdays and Thursdays we had a poached egg. Saturday was scrambled eggs. Sunday Dad made pancakes.” Every week. Every year. No exceptions. Snacking was not allowed between meals. Roberta wasn't even allowed to look in the refrigerator
.

 

With no allowance or job, eighth-grader Roberta began seeking ways to hoard money. Just before lunch, she'd go to the library and read something gory or upsetting—a regular was a description of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb—so she would lose her appetite and be able to keep the ten cents of lunch money.

Her childhood was barbaric. Her mother, distressed by changing diapers, toilet-trained her daughter at ten months of age. Then she took away daytime naps so Roberta would fall asleep for the night by six
P.M.
Roberta remembers lying in bed as a toddler struggling to keep her eyes open, humming Perry Como tunes, hoping she could stay awake until her father came home to kiss her good night. Most nights she didn't make it. On the rare nights that she kept herself awake long enough, her father often gave her only a quick kiss before rushing away, telling her, “Mom has dinner ready.”

Roberta now struggles with alcoholism and eating disorders. Unable to shake her parents' “severe Depression-era mentality,” she hoards food, eating only a bit of each meal, saving some just in case. For our interview, Roberta asked that we meet at a local bakery yet arrived with muffins of her own that she nibbled parsimoniously during our talk: “I'm still hoarding. My parents controlled me. I controlled my daughters. I control myself. I only wish my mother had once said, ‘Keep it. Splurge.'”

Why Parents Deprive

Parents withhold affection for many reasons. Some, with severely limited access to their feelings, have little love to give. Many controlling parents are emotionally disturbed or self-absorbed and can barely perceive others' troubles. Still others are so uncomfortable with touch and intimacy that they cannot allow their children near them.

Parental deprivation can be deliberate, but more often it is instinctive, unwitting, or unconscious. It's what the parents learned. It's how they were raised. Depriving parents often think they're toughening up their children to survive a hard, cruel world. For them, life is about prevailing in a hostile environment; emotional caretaking and closeness are low priorities. Other Depriving parents try to enforce a Puritan ethic. Telling their children not to hope for much may reflect the way in which the parents themselves deal with disappointment. They believe that if you don't hope for much, you won't be as disappointed when the inevitable losses of life occur.