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Emotional acceptance of the child, parental love
Author: E.A. Savina
Emotional contact between mother and child is considered as a basic psychological model necessary for the development of the child’s personality. An accepting, loving, empathic mother, who responds in time to the needs of the child, forms the so-called secure attachment in him. Children with secure attachment are distinguished by confident behavior, they are not afraid of new situations, they develop a basic trust in the world, which determines the further attitude towards people and determines the characteristics of the child’s emotional experiences (Erik Erickson).
Erich Fromm pointed out that the main feature of maternal love is its unconditional character. Another type of love — paternal — is conventional and can be earned by being an exemplary son or daughter. According to E. Fromm, maternal and paternal love do not meet in its purest form. For the effective upbringing and development of the child’s personality, both of these types of emotional relationships must be manifested.
Karen Horney noted that a child can endure a lot of what is often related to traumatic factors (for example, sudden weaning, periodic beatings, sexual experiences), but all this as long as he feels in his soul that is desired and loved. The child has a very subtle grasp of whether love is genuine and cannot be deceived by any ostentatious demonstrations.
Acceptance and love develop a child’s sense of security, confidence, and contribute to the full development of personality. The child develops an internal position: “I am needed, I am loved, and I love you too”, which is concretized in the following children’s attitudes:
- I feel pleasure when I am with people close to me. I trust them and respect their point of view.
- My closeness to my parents does not infringe on my freedom. I am not required to constantly act in this way and not otherwise.
- The people around me trust me.
- I may be wrong, but that doesn’t mean I’m bad or stupid.
- When I am weak, I can ask for help and it does not humiliate me.
- Punishment does not mean that my parents stop loving me. This means that we did not understand each other or acted at the expense of each other. We must take into account the desires and interests of each other.
Such basic attitudes are a great achievement of preschool childhood. Children with these attitudes are distinguished by high self-esteem, self-confidence, good social contacts.
Emotional rejection
Emotional rejection is an ineffective parental attitude, which manifests itself in the lack or absence of emotional contact between the parent and the child, the insensitivity of the parent to the needs of the child. It can be explicit and implicit, hidden. With a clear rejection, the parent demonstrates that he does not love and does not accept his child, is irritated about him. Hidden rejection takes more complex forms — it can manifest itself in global dissatisfaction with the child (he is not so smart, skillful, beautiful), although formally the parent can fulfill his parental duties. Sometimes emotional rejection is masked by exaggerated attention and care; but it is betrayed by a lack of love and attention, a desire to avoid close (bodily) contact.
Rejection can be manifested in the following parental directives: “My eyes would not look at you”, “How much anxiety and deprivation you brought me when you were born.” Perceiving such directives, the child unconsciously feels that he is a hindrance in the life of the parent, his eternal debtor. According to Horney, the «initial or basal» anxiety that occurs in a child suffering from a lack of parental love is the source of personality neuroticism.
Rejection is often associated with inadequate parental expectations for the child. Most often, parents perceive their children as older and therefore not in need of much care and attention. Over-demanding parents, for example, believe that a child can be potty trained by 6-12 months, that he is able to talk by the age of two, and that children can help around the house from early childhood. Children are also required to take care of younger siblings. Without taking into account the individual characteristics of the child, parents are trying to «improve», «correct» the child’s innate type of response. Often parents create an ideal, fictional image of a child that evokes their love. For some parents, this is an obedient, comfortable child who does not bring much trouble. For others — active, successful, enterprising. However, in both cases, the fictional image of the child will not correspond to the real one.
Rejection is often combined with strict control, with the imposition of the only “correct” type of behavior on the child. Parents require the child to “be good”, “behave properly”, “be obedient”, but do not explain the essence of the required behavior. Along with strict control, rejection can be combined with a lack of control, indifference to the life of the child, complete connivance.
Fearing to «spoil» the child, parents do not pay attention to his urgent needs. Here are examples of children’s stories based on pictures depicting an adult and a child in various situations:
“… Mom came for the boy, and he played in the sandbox. He roared because he didn’t want to leave. Mom said: “There’s nothing terrible here, don’t cry, you’ll play enough tomorrow …”
“…Mom is standing, and the son is crying. Mom says: «It doesn’t hurt to go to the doctor.» — Son: «I’m afraid.» — Mother: «You will go anyway.»
“… The boy was offended in the yard, his mother took him away, crying, and punished him at home …”
In these examples, it is clearly seen that the mother ignores the emotional experiences of the child.
Emotional rejection of a child is often accompanied by frequent punishments, including physical ones. Moreover, mothers who reject their children tend to punish them for turning to them for help, as well as for striving to communicate with them. The following example illustrates this: “… The girl wanted to draw at home. But at home she interfered with her mother, as she climbed to her with questions. Mom kicked her out for a walk … «.
Parents who reject children and use an abusive style of interaction with them believe in the necessity and normality of physical punishment. Interestingly, the things that parents criticize their own children for, they did in childhood themselves, and this was criticized by their own parents. Often, disobedience or unwanted behavior is punished by deprivation of parental love, demonstrating the uselessness of the child: «Mom does not like this, she will find another boy (girl) for herself.» The consequence of this is the formation in the child of a sense of insecurity, fear of loneliness, abandonment.
Lack of parental responsiveness to the needs of the child contributes to a feeling of “learned helplessness” in him, which subsequently often leads to apathy and even depression, avoidance of new situations, lack of curiosity and initiative. The unsatisfied need for acceptance and love plays an important role in the development of aggressiveness and delinquent behavior in children. Although the neglect of a child and the rejection of his need for acceptance and love are important preconditions for the development of antisocial aggressiveness, not all children deprived of parental care become aggressive. For example, a reaction to the lack of maternal care and love may be withdrawal, overdependence, excessive readiness for submission, and deep anxiety.
It is also very important to what extent and at what age the child was deprived of maternal love and care. In cases where the child has not been completely deprived of maternal care and maternal love has sometimes been shown, the child can learn to expect some kind of emotional reaction from his parents. If this emotional reward was a condition of his obedience to parental demands, then under such conditions the child would develop anxious obedience rather than aggressiveness.
A rejecting attitude towards a child is noted among single mothers, in families raising adopted children, and also where the child was born “accidentally”, “at the wrong time”, during domestic troubles or marital conflicts. The extreme form of rejection is manifested in the fact that parents really refuse the child and place him in a boarding school, a psychiatric hospital, give him up to be raised by relatives (often grandmothers). For rejecting parents, an inversion of parent-child roles is often characteristic. Parents delegate their own responsibilities to children, while they themselves behave helplessly, demonstrating the need for guardianship and care.
The basis of the child’s emotional rejection may be the conscious, and most often unconscious identification of the child with some negative moments in the parents’ own life. The following personal problems of parents are distinguished, which determine the emotional rejection of the child:
- The underdevelopment of parental feelings, which outwardly manifests itself in unwillingness to deal with the child, in the poor tolerance of his society, a superficial interest in his affairs. The reasons for the underdevelopment of parental feelings may be the rejection of the parent himself in childhood, when he himself did not experience parental warmth; personal characteristics of the parent, for example, severe schizoidness; lack of a place for the child in the life plans of parents.
- The projection onto the child of their own negative traits — by fighting with them in the child, the parent derives emotional benefit for himself.
- The desire to eradicate the traits of an unloved spouse inherited by the child.
- A shift in the parent’s attitudes towards the child depending on the gender of the child. For example, if you want to have a girl, there may be an unconscious rejection of your son.
Rejection, rejection cause anxiety in the child because his need for love, affection, protection is not satisfied. Such a child can achieve praise, mother’s love with the help of exemplary behavior, success in activities. In this case, fear arises: “If I behave badly (badly perform any activity), then they will not love me.” Fear of failure causes anxiety, which, with real failures, is fixed and becomes a personality trait.
Those children who are ignored and whose basic needs are not met grow up insecure in themselves, in their abilities. In addition, they consider insults from their parents as normal behavior. The underdevelopment of the attachment relationship between mother and child is further transformed into a stable rejection of the child’s own «I», which in turn leads to a global rejection of the world of social relations.
Rejection of the child by parents leads to the formation of the following internal positions of the child: “I am not loved, but I sincerely want to get closer to you” and “I am not needed and not loved. Leave me alone».
The first position has two possible options for the child’s behavior. The child experiences a sense of guilt and sees the fact of being rejected by his parents as a punishment for his “badness”. The result of such experiences can be a loss of self-esteem and an irrational desire to improve, to meet parental expectations. The second variant of behavior is associated with the rejection of the family by the child. In this case, the child comes to the conclusion that it is the parents who are to blame for his rejection. With parents, such children behave aggressively, dismissively, it seems that they deliberately annoy their parents, taking revenge on them for their lack of love. Aggression is a way of responding to emotional rejection. The inability to fulfill their needs for love, security will encourage the child to seek their satisfaction in other ways. In particular, in situations of rejection, the child screams, fights, cries, seeks in any way to attract the attention of the mother.
The position “I am not needed and not loved, leave me alone” leads to a desire to get rid of the attention of an adult. The child demonstrates his stupidity, clumsiness, bad habits in order to “scare away” the parent from himself. This situation leads the child down the stage of social development.
The rejected child seeks to attract the attention of the parent at any cost, even with the help of quarrels, breakups, oppositional behavior. R. Sears called this behavior «the search for negative attention.» A vicious circle is formed: the more stubbornness, negativism on the part of the child, the more punishments, restrictions on the part of the parent, which leads to increased oppositional behavior in the child. The child perpetuates his immature, inadequate attitude towards the family, asserts himself with the help of defiant behavior. If the child becomes more and more convinced of his unlovedness, he may resort to a kind of childish revenge.
Emotional symbiosis
Symbiosis is experienced by the parent as a merger with the child, as a desire to satisfy all his needs, to protect him from all the difficulties of life. Symbiotic bonds with the child are characteristic of mothers whose love for the child is replaced by an affectively pointed concern for him. The parent constantly feels anxiety for the child, the child seems to him small and defenseless. The parent’s anxiety rises when the child begins to separate due to circumstances, as the parent never voluntarily gives the child independence.
Often symbiosis is accompanied by hyperprotection, that is, maximum control, restrictions associated with an underestimation of the real abilities and potentialities of the child. Anxiety-based hyperprotection acts as a set of obsessive actions that satisfy the parent’s need for personal security. This may also indicate the parent’s inner, sometimes carefully hidden, self-doubt, which, in turn, comes from the inconsistency of his personality, unstable or low self-esteem.
The parent seeks to control the child’s behavior with the help of the following directives described by R. Goldwing and M. Goldwing:
- «Don’t live your life, live my life.»
- “Do not grow up” is a panic fear of a child growing up, which is expressed in statements such as: “Do not rush to grow up”, “Mom will never leave you”, “Childhood is the happiest time of life”. Unconsciously, the child may find here an indication for himself: «I have no right to become so independent as to live without maternal support.»
- “Do not belong to anyone but me,” the parent sees the “only friend” in the child, in every possible way emphasizes the exclusivity, dissimilarity of the child to others, and in a positive sense: “You are not like everyone else with me.” As adults, such people will strive for the warm atmosphere of the parental family, the equal of which they cannot find.
- “Do not get close to other people” — suggestion to the child that no one but the parent can be trusted. The general meaning of this directive is: «Any intimacy is dangerous if it is not intimacy with me.» Adults who received such directives in childhood have serious problems in emotional contact with other people, they often experience difficulties in sexual relationships.
- «Don’t do it yourself, it’s dangerous, I’ll do it for you.»
- “Don’t feel good,” for example: “Although he is weak with me, he dug up a whole garden bed himself.” The parent emphasizes that the child’s poor health increases the value of any of his actions. A person given such a directive in childhood learns to think that the disease draws everyone’s attention to him, and begins to use the real disease for psychological gain. As a result, his condition worsens.
Symbiosis leads to the development of co-dependent behavior, paralyzes the child’s own activity, which leads to regression, the child’s fixation on primitive forms of communication in order to ensure symbiotic ties with the parent.
In the case of emotional symbiosis, the parental attitude does not meet the urgent needs of certain crisis stages of the child’s personal development, blocks the resolution of the basic motivational conflict of belonging-autonomy, internalizing, leads to splitting and destabilization of the image of the Self. independent solutions; he fears that something might happen to him (after all, it is not for nothing that his mother is so afraid of this). The child’s anxiety is caused by any unfamiliar and new situations in which he must make a decision himself, situations in which the child is left without a mother (kindergarten, hospital, etc.). The mother «attaches» the child to herself, makes him dependent on herself, and as a result, the child’s anxiety begins to manifest itself not only in the absence of the mother, but also in her presence. See →