Parent corrective #1: Respect

Parents who demand that their children respect them are sick. To require a feeling from someone should strike anyone as nonsense. “I demand you love me. I require that you fear me. I insist that you be sad. I demand that you be happy. You’d better be feeling grievous loss right now!” What could be more absurd? But regarding respect, such an expectation is part of many parents’ philosophy. What they need to do is look, or rather feel, inside themselves to find the weakness, neediness and hurt that demand succor from their children. What they are doing is calling a child’s deference or kowtowing, which soothes their latent shame and injustice, “respect.” A mother I know has made reports over the past year of her children being angels, then later being persecutory raging monsters, then loving and calm – flipping over and over unpredictably. It is obvious there are deep splinters, probably in their earliest years when the parents were screaming, fighting and divorcing, that breach the surface of the less substantial sweetness and happiness. Only a never-healed, internally bleeding mother or father would take these rage moments personally, would feel humiliation or contempt for their child’s pain and the sense of entitlement to be more important than it. I said to her: “Stop demanding to be center stage, to be respected. This is not about you. It’s about them.” Sheepishly, she replied: “I don’t like you.”

This will be an impossibly difficult lesson for many parents to learn. In fact, millions of them, similarly self-dwelling and lacking in empathy but with more anger, voted in the most destructive and incompetent president our nation has ever indulged, and will strive to do it again. Still, maybe there’s a wide choir I am preaching to.