Dr. Nanika Coor offers ideas for pursuing your own life and giving your child the space to pursue their own life as well.
Sometimes your love for your child becomes so all-consuming that you lose yourself in parenting them. You lose sight of your own life and your own feelings, and you become increasingly involved in your child’s life—even taking on their feelings. In an effort to be a good parent, you find yourself profoundly preoccupied with and attached to your child’s happiness. In this episode, Dr. Nanika Coor offers ideas for pursuing your own life and giving your child the space to pursue their own life as well.
Project Parenthood is hosted by Dr. Nanika Coor. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Hey parents! You're listening to the Project Parenthood podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Nanika Coor, clinical psychologist and respectful parenting therapist. Each week, I’ll introduce you to the same respectful parenting practices that I use to help parents repair and deepen connections with their children. You’ll get tips for cultivating more parental self-compassion, more cooperation from your kids, and more joy, peace, and resilience in your relationship with them.
In today’s episode, I’m talking about being over-identified with your children, and ways you can begin to focus on yourself and your own happiness. Stick around till the end to hear how using a little curiosity can help you begin to change your parent-child dynamic.
Sometimes it’s like you don’t know where you end and your child begins. This is a common feeling in relationships that are characterized by a particular kind of emotional entanglement where the psychological boundaries between parent and child are permeable and overly diffuse. While a close relationship with your child is usually a great thing, there is also such a thing as being too preoccupied with your child—needing to be needed by them.
Your sense of self seems to hinge on your relationship with them. Your self-esteem rises and falls in sync with your child’s feelings, behavior, and overall well-being. You might be so attached to your child that you unintentionally (or at least not maliciously) exert a great deal of control over them because of how strongly attached to them you feel. Perhaps you even feel worried or anxious when you feel you don’t have control over your child—so you feel compelled to plan and manage their life.
Feeling responsible for your child’s feelings can lead to you trying to control your child’s feelings. You become overly involved in your child’s distress—such that their distress feels like your own—and you involve yourself in order to “fix” whatever is distressing them. Of course, all parents are uncomfortable with seeing their child in pain, but it can be boundary crossing when taken to the extreme. You might also be doing things for your child that are developmentally inappropriate—things they could be doing for themselves, like cleaning up after them—not just once in a while when they’re having a tough day, but all the time. You might find yourself being coercive or manipulative—acting in passive-aggressive, guilt-inducing, or shame-inducing ways in order to get your child to do what you want them to do or to get back at them because something your child said or did hurt your feelings or went against your wishes.
When your child has unacceptable behaviors, you might find it easier to just deal with them rather than to enforce boundaries and limits that may lead to your child feeling angry at you, and to you feeling rejected by them. Ultimately, your very self-esteem may be tied to your child’s happiness—if they’re happy, you’re happy too, and you're doing okay as a parent. If they’re distressed—you’re distressed too, perhaps feeling as if you’ve failed as a parent. You might even lean on your child for emotional support at times, or involve them in (or fail to shield them from) age-inappropriate adult matters.
Children have a basic developmental need for autonomy, competence, and relationships. When a child is the recipient of over-involved and directive parenting, their autonomy is often thwarted, and they may have low self-esteem and an underdeveloped sense of self-efficacy and competence. They may have trouble developing coping and problem-solving skills. As your child begins to expect things to be given to them and done for them by an ultra-involved parent, they can develop a sense of entitlement—like they deserve more and are entitled to more than other people are. This can look like a tantrum (even in a teen), extreme demandingness, or selfishness which can get in the way of relationships with peers and authority figures.
Providing excessive material goods, giving excessive praise, and not enforcing boundaries, along with overprotective parental behaviors, might mean that your child doesn’t have an accurate sense of their true capabilities, doesn’t get to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with experiencing and overcoming frustrations, and their authentic independent self doesn’t get nurtured. A parent and child can be so interdependent that the child becomes preoccupied with and particularly sensitive to parental or familial stress. All of these factors can impact a child’s present well-being and lead to interpersonal and mental health difficulties in the future, such as anxiety, depression, substance abuse, perfectionism, and unhealthy eating behaviors.
If you’re hearing you and your child in these descriptions, here are some steps you can take to support your child’s autonomy and (re)establish healthy boundaries between you:
As an over-involved parent, your focus tends to be external—on your child and their needs, rather than on yourself. You might even feel like you’re doing something wrong by taking time away from your child at first. Try to tolerate that initial discomfort, and remember that creating space for self-nurturing is nurturing for your child, as they’ll also get space to explore their own authentic identity separate from you. It’s important for you to focus on your own feelings, needs, and desires not only because it allows you to have more bandwidth for parenting, but because it also models and normalizes self-care for your child—your parental needs are just as important as your child’s needs.
Spend time exploring your own sense of identity and self-efficacy. Develop other healthy adult relationships, hobbies, and activities where you can experience facets of yourself outside of your caregiving role. Start seeing yourself as a unique and separate individual who has worth outside of being a parent. Your child may initially balk at this, having grown dependent on having your undivided attention most of the time. Their displeasure may ignite some anxiety in you—try to breathe through it. It’s okay for you to take time for yourself and it’s okay for them not to like it. You can both survive their temporary discomfort, and each time the two of you survive your child’s big feelings together, the more emotional tolerance you both build.
Your tendency to over-identify with your child might be something you learned in childhood—and if so, it probably helped you survive life with the adults who raised you. Relational fusion might have been the best way for you to feel safe and be safe as a kid. And if you experienced childhood abuse or if your parent had a serious mental health issue or was addicted to alcohol or other substances, that puts you at risk of ending up in all kinds of enmeshed relationships, including the parent-child variety. Working with a skilled and trauma-trained mental health clinician can help you process unresolved emotional wounds that you might be unintentionally playing out in your relationship with your child and others.
Trust that your child is a competent person that can learn from the experiences they have in life—you don’t always have to teach them explicitly how to think about something. Model your beliefs and values—be the person you want your child to be in your own life and your child will learn your values by watching you live your life. When they go out into the world and have diverse experiences with peers and other adults, they begin to build their own way of looking at the world that is influenced by your values, but with their own personal twist.
Trust that your child can tolerate the experience of strong emotions and that they will make it to the other side of those emotions. Make physical and emotional space for your child to come back to a place of equilibrium in their own time, and with your supportive presence. You may think they’ve been upset about not having candy for dinner for long enough, but they may still have some tears to cry about it—let them!
Show your child that you believe in their competence by acting as a facilitator and guide in their life journey—only offering your help if they ask you for it or when you need to step in to prevent people or property from being harmed. Trust that they will let you know if they need or want your help. Trust that your child can survive things like separating from you to go to daycare, school or college. Show confidence in their ability to move through discomfort they may have and enjoy their new experience. Trust that with your support, they can find their own solutions for their own problems and handle their own friendships.
Trust in your child’s ability to occupy themselves. You don’t need to entertain your child or make sure they’re involved in an activity every second they’re awake. Not only might you deplete your own internal and financial resources, but cultivating in your child a dependence on external entertainment encourages them to be passive rather than active during unstructured time or even in play. Relying on you for entertainment forecloses on their potential to self-entertain and use boredom to spark creativity.
Trust that even if you don’t do every little thing for your child, they will still know that you love them. Your love is enduring! They carry it with them all the time. And their love for you endures as well, even when your child is angry with you. It’s okay to set boundaries, it’s okay to say no or assert your own body autonomy—and it’s good modeling. You want your child to be able to assert their needs with others, not just do what someone else wants because they don’t want the other person to feel bad. So show them what that looks like.
The realm of over-parenting generally involves a lack of clear boundaries in a family system. Boundaries define each family member’s age-appropriate role. For example, parents take care of young kids and young kids are the recipients of care. Boundaries also allow each family member’s emotional needs to be taken care of in the appropriate subsystem. So the appropriate place for parents to get their emotional needs met is within the spousal or adult subsystem, and not in the parent-child subsystem. (Re)-establishing clear boundaries within and between family subsystems will support your child’s autonomy.
Another way to support your child’s autonomy—and have a positive influence on your child’s behavior, intrinsic motivation, prosocial behavior, well-being, and self-esteem—is by practicing taking your child’s perspective, offering them meaningful choices when you can, and omitting controlling language like “must” or “should.” Let your child initiate or explore what they are ready for, but don’t push them to do things that they are telling you and showing you they are not ready for.
Remember that your child’s emotions are not your responsibility, and your emotions are not their responsibility. It is not your job to fix, change, or induce emotions in your child. When your child is upset, your job is to help carry the burden of those difficult emotions for the moment, but you’re not taking on those difficult emotions because they belong to your child not to you.
You can support your child’s autonomy by learning to soothe yourself—it’s not your child’s job to soothe you when you’ve taken something they’ve done or said personally, for instance. Understand that your child’s “mean” comments come from a place of immature self-regulation. Instead of feeling victimized or retaliating against them in some way, model what it looks like to express emotion in an authentic but regulated way. Rather than trying to induce guilt or remorse by being critical and disapproving, tell them how you’ve been impacted and what you’d like instead. Remember that you’re modeling relational strategies to your child all the time. If you tend to use that kind of emotional manipulation to get your way with them, they will do the same to you—and to others.
As it is with all parents, there will be things you experienced in childhood that you wonder if and worry that your child will have similar experiences. Even if your child does have similar experiences, they are a different person than you were. You had a different parent who was parenting in a different context. Those similar experiences may not register with your child the same way they registered for you. It’s important that your child be allowed to have their own feelings and not be taught to feel feelings that are actually yours. The things you loved they may not love—or even care about. They may also have a whole different set of fears than you do, so try not to go down the road of: “Don’t forget to be worried about this!” There’s enough to worry about in a person’s life without parents adding to the list!
Choose curiosity over criticism. If you’re a parent who tends to over-identify with your child, you may be quite emotionally fused with them at this point. Your child may be so sensitive to your emotional state that they are good at pushing your buttons. This week, challenge yourself not to take that bait. Instead of retaliating or forcing apologies, take a guess at the feelings you sense are giving rise to their words or behaviors that are bothering you.
Focus on understanding yourself rather than changing your child. For the next few weeks, each time you have the urge to interfere with your child’s unique and authentic feelings, desires, likes and dislikes, interests and thoughts—resist that urge and direct your focus to yourself. Get curious about what feelings arise for you and what needs of yours you’re trying to get met by getting your child to think differently.
Test some of these ideas out at home and report back!
Your child’s feelings are their own, and your child’s problems are not your problems to solve. Sure, it’s hard to see them struggle, but that’s also how they learn to solve problems, to persevere when things are hard, and to be resilient in the face of challenges. So resist the urge to jump in to solve their every dilemma before you’re even needed. Of course, they’ll need your help sometimes, but try to help them only enough so that they can ultimately tackle the issue themselves. This way your child learns to know their own mind, their own desires, and listen to their own inner voice.
Even if you’ve historically been overly involved in your child’s life, it’s never too late to establish healthy boundaries with them. Start letting your child see you being your own person. Start taking care of yourself and your own needs too. Focus on building your confidence, autonomy, and authority as a parent, and let your child make age-appropriate decisions and hold their own opinions—even if they’re different from yours.
I hope that’s helpful! You can learn more about my work with parents at www.brooklynparenttherapy.com and on Instagram at BKPARENTS.
If you have more questions about over-involved parenting, or any other parenting questions or stories, leave me a message at (646) 926-3243 and be sure to let me know if it's okay to use your voice on the show. Or, send an email to parenthood@quickanddirtytips.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to Project Parenthood on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Catch you next week!