Why parents are blind

This is a question that I regret having to present; I always want to question its legitimacy. But it has always proved valid: Why do so many parents of therapy clients fail to pay patient attention to their children’s feelings? It’s knee-jerk easy to answer: because their own parents didn’t care about their feelings. No one had empathy for them. That would be true, but it doesn’t explain the process of the passing on of this deficit.

 

Their son is angry with them and they aren’t solicitous of the reasons. They respond to it with greater anger and superiority. They don’t care why he wants to smoke pot or play video games for five hours a day. They reject that he wants to hang out with his “loser” friends. They don’t notice, or they prematurely soothe, their daughter’s vexation. They require their son to at least get C’s when he is getting D’s: They’re not interested in the reasons. They blame the pandemic shutting-in and school shootings and social media or another student's suicide for her suicide attempt, and they remove her bed­room door to “make sure she’s safe.” They are incensed about his aloof­ness and sarcasm toward them, his brooding silence. They don’t spend two minutes thinking about what their 15-year-old daughter feels when she’s conscripted to care­take her younger siblings. They will find their chil­dren’s emotional demands an imperti­nence rather than a world of passion or tragedy to explore.

 

The answer to this question can seem terribly difficult to find when we picture an adult who should know something about contemporary psychology (like their kids do), who isn’t a sociopath, who should be equipped with basic parental common sense, who can’t be as ignorant as “they didn’t know any better, that was what they experienced in their childhood.” But the answer is terribly easy to find when you consider the parents are still carrying the wounds of their own childhood. They are still suffering the loss of love, a loss that isn’t recoverable. They are carrying the burden of an adult body and life on top of a child’s waiting heart.

 

Why do parents not see their child? Because they are still children, and to care would be to feel, and to feel what's still burning inside them.