Member-only story
Toxic Parents and Absent Parents Produce the Same Kind of People
Children inherit the work their parents don’t do
I grew up in a community where you were raised to thank God for your parents, no matter how unworthy they may have been. Because no matter how toxic your parent turned out to be, things could have been worse — they could have chosen to be toxic away from you.
I recently came across a thread that was dedicated to a discussion about which type of parent did the most harm: the absent kind, or the toxic kind. I read through people’s justifications of their parents’ shortcomings and realized that we have been conditioned to view our childhoods through a lens of what our parents lacked. This leaves little-to-no room for the side of the discussion that centers around the needs of the parented.
The more engaged in the debate people became, the more evident it was just how few of us knew what we, as children, actually needed. We were all familiar with basic physiological needs like food, clothing, and shelter. But when it came time to display awareness of our varying psychosocial and psychological needs, the conversation bordered on backward.
Not only do children have needs that extend way beyond the dinner table, but these needs exist regardless of the parental willingness to meet them…
