I cannot remember the exact moment that I first remember stopping myself in mid-sentence realising that the words coming out of my mouth sounded so familiar! Oh my word, had we not promised ourselves, long before having children, that we would never parent in the same manner as our parents. However, here I am, two children later, sounding more and more like my parents each day.
It seems as if nature has quite a strange sense of humour because if memory serves all those idle threats did not work on me growing up. Why now would I expect it to work on my children? The most vivid memory I have is travelling in the car, behaving badly, my Dad promising to stop the car and sort the situation out. Did he ever carry through the threat, no, but I remember this happening quite often.
How often do we find ourselves saying things that we know are not plausible but it seems as if the wiring in our brain has been tampered with, because we say them anyway. My favourite was when I was misbehaving, my mother saying; “just you wait until your father comes home, he’ll sort it out”. Now for those of you who have tried this, it does not work and it just creates more problems. Who wants to come home and be faced with a monologue of how naughty the children have been and then having to deal with it.
The conclusion I draw from this is, regardless of how passionately we try and deny it, we do adopt a certain amount of our parents, parenting methods. Can we change this cycle of mirrored parenting? I think that there is a certain amount we can control but genes and years of habituation, make change fairly difficult.
We are after all “our parent’s children”.
Daddy’s Footsteps
~Author Unknown~
“Walk a little slower, Daddy”,
Said a little child so small.
“I’m following in your footsteps,
And I don’t want to fall.
Sometimes your steps are very fast,
Sometimes they’re hard to see;
So walk a little slower, Daddy,
For you are leading me.
Someday when I’m all grown up,
You’re what I want to be;
Then I will have a little child
Who’ll want to follow me.
And I would want to lead just right,
And know that I was true;
So, walk a little slower, Daddy,
For I must follow you.”
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