by Dan Neuharth
Children who grow up with Depriving parents vividly recall the experience of repeatedly losing parental love and support. “My mother had so much more power over me because of what I didn’t get than because of what I did get,” Samantha confesses. “So I became even more dependent on her.”
Perhaps Samantha’s mother repeatedly deprived her daughter because she felt personally deprived. Perhaps seeing her daughter happy made her aware of her own unhappiness and she found the disparity intolerable. Since she didn’t know how to make herself feel better, she may have unconsciously tried to make her daughter feel worse.
Samantha remembers how her Depriving, Abusing mother’s approval washed in and out, like the tide. She frequently threatened to disown Samantha if she didn’t follow parental desires; and, in fact, Samantha’s twenty-four-year-old brother was disowned for dating a Native American against parental wishes. As soon as the couple broke up, Samantha’s parents began speaking to their son again. And, when Samantha’s nineteen-year-old sister announced that she was moving in with a boyfriend, her parents again threatened to cut ties. The sister backed down and lived at home for two more years until she married.
After Samantha graduated from high school, her parents commanded her to stay at home and make plans to become a nurse so she could take care of them in their old age. Instead, she left the state. Her parents did not speak to her for six years. Samantha finally returned for a visit, only to find that her room had been turned into a sitting room and her belongings thrown out. Her mother housed her in a trailer in the driveway, though a spare bedroom sat unused.
However, the worst deprivation Samantha suffered was the lack of parental protection: From ages nine to twelve, Samantha was repeatedly left with a grandfather who molested her.
Discounted Dreams
One of the major ways in which Depriving parents wound their children is by ignoring or discounting their future dreams.
David, a fifty-year-old highly successful salesman, was an only child of Jewish merchants in a small Mississippi town. He vividly recalls his elation when an aunt gave him a Brownie camera for his thirteenth birthday. David passionately wanted to be a photographer when he grew up, but his parents pronounced his career dreams impractical. “Photography is a waste of time,” they said. “Stick to what is familiar and take over our store when we retire.” To discourage his interest in photography, they refused to let him buy film. For months David pointed and clicked his useless camera for hours on end, eventually giving up.
Children need affection, encouragement, and physical contact. When they’re deprived of them, they can feel invisible. David cannot recall being hugged, kissed, or told he was loved by his parents. The only physical comfort he had was from “Mammy,” an African-American housekeeper who recognized David’s needs and provided solace. On Saturdays she’d take him to a movie, where she was allowed to sit with him in the whites’ section. He is convinced that, “If I hadn’t had Mammy, I would have been in much worse shape.”
David longed for recognition for his good grades, but his Depriving, Perfectionistic parents rarely made even a comment. “I did everything I was supposed to but they never approved. They never asked me how I felt, they just told me how I should react. Rules were more important than feelings.” On family car rides, David’s parents plunked him in the backseat and talked about him as if he weren’t there.
While his mom kept after David to follow the family rules, his dad rarely spoke to his son. David remembers weekly drives to the big city with his father to take Hebrew classes for his bar mitzvah. During the two-hour trips not a word was spoken. While he felt thankful for his father’s presence, he hungered for deeper emotional contact.
Looking back, David recognizes that there were some unavoidable reasons for the deprivation in his childhood. Both David’s parents lost their mothers before age five. Because of those early losses, sadness lingered in his family for two generations. In addition, as Jews in the Deep South in the 1940s and 1950s, his family may have felt they needed to behave in a certain fashion. This may explain why David was told so often to be quiet and “proper.”
Regardless of the reasons, David paid a price. Successful he may be, but he still struggles with loneliness. Lacking an early experience of steady emotional warmth, he has yet to have a long-term intimate relationship. “If I’d gotten a few hugs and a few moments of conversation in my childhood, it might have changed a few things,” he muses. He can hardly bear to watch TV or movie scenes of fathers and sons. “It cuts me like a knife to see a father and son being close,” he admits.
One of David’s few joys comes on vacations, during which he takes photographs—in part, to replace the photographs he couldn’t take as a child because he wasn’t allowed to have film.
Ignored Gifts
While some Depriving parents, like David’s, discount their children’s interests, others ignore their children’s innate gifts.
Shari is a thirty-two-year-old marketing executive who’ll never forget fidgeting on the stage at her junior high school when she was thirteen, scanning the audience for her mother. Shari had placed in the 98th percentile on national scholastic tests and was being honored in an awards ceremony. Her mother never showed up.
“My mother’s attitude was that it was expected of me to do well,” Shari comments wryly. “The most she’d ever say was, ‘That’s nice, dear.’ But if I didn’t mop the floor perfectly, I’d get spanked.”
In grade school her mother tried to force left-handed Shari to write with her right hand so she would be more “normal.” When Shari asked “Why?” her mother taped her mouth shut.
Over time, Shari’s straight-A average fell. At seventeen, she dropped out of high school and got a high school equivalency diploma so she could work. “I don’t remember getting any sort of positive direction from my mother. She never told me what to do with my life. She just told me what not to do.”
Shari was raised by a Depriving, Abusing, single mother. Now herself a single mother, she recognizes that much of her mother’s control came from the demands of that daunting role. In addition, Shari, an African American, believes that some of her mother’s harsh control had cultural and historical roots: “Black children grow up under a microscope. I think it goes way back to the slave days, when a black child could have been killed for acting too rambunctious around white people. I think black parents from my mother’s generation and earlier felt a need to control their children so they wouldn’t get negative attention.”
Regardless of what Shari the adult can see in retrospect, Shari the child felt unwanted. At nine, Shari was so upset she decided to drown herself in the bathtub. When her mother left for work, Shari wrote a will giving her toys to friends. She left the will on the kitchen table, filled the tub, and stuck her head in. “Of course my attempt didn’t work,” Shari says, smiling. “I kept coming up for air. Finally I just went to bed and fell asleep.” When her mother came home and discovered the will in the kitchen, “She didn’t seem concerned, just sort of sarcastic. My mother wasn’t really there emotionally even when she was there physically.”
Shari’s relationship with her mother has improved since Shari became a parent. But she still wonders what she might have become had her mother encouraged her: “I feel as if I have spent so much of my life just trying to heal from my childhood. Who knows what I could have been? I had the grades and the intelligence for even medical school, if only I’d had more support.”
Emptiness
Most parents of today’s baby boomers grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Others, particularly recent immigrants, faced poverty equal to or worse than that of the Depression. These experiences often saddled them with a deprivation mentality they never seemed able to shake. As a result, some raised their children with a pervasive sense of emptiness.
Fifty-seven-year-old homemaker Roberta is thinking of sixth-grader Roberta walking slowly around the block of the Philadelphia neighborhood shoe store for the sixth time—embarrassed to
return a pair of patent-leather shoes.
Earlier that day, her mother had sent her to the store with ten dollars to get new shoes. Roberta was captivated by a $9.49 patent-leather pair, yet, seeing them, her mother began screaming that they cost too much. Roberta meekly replied that her mother hadn’t told her how much she should spend, but her mother angrily ordered Roberta to return them. After seven circuits around the block, Roberta mustered up her courage and drifted inside, telling the clerk, “I can’t keep these. My mother says they cost too much.”
Despite her family’s relative financial security, every aspect of domestic life dwelled in the shadow of scarcity and regimentation: “We ate at six, eleven, and five and never deviated. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings we had cereal, milk, and half a glass of orange juice. Tuesdays and Thursdays we had a poached egg. Saturday was scrambled eggs. Sunday Dad made pancakes.” Every week. Every year. No exceptions. Snacking was not allowed between meals. Roberta wasn’t even allowed to look in the refrigerator.
With no allowance or job, eighth-grader Roberta began seeking ways to hoard money. Just before lunch, she’d go to the library and read something gory or upsetting—a regular was a description of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb—so she would lose her appetite and be able to keep the ten cents of lunch money.
Her childhood was barbaric. Her mother, distressed by changing diapers, toilet-trained her daughter at ten months of age. Then she took away daytime naps so Roberta would fall asleep for the night by six P.M. Roberta remembers lying in bed as a toddler struggling to keep her eyes open, humming Perry Como tunes, hoping she could stay awake until her father came home to kiss her good night. Most nights she didn’t make it. On the rare nights that she kept herself awake long enough, her father often gave her only a quick kiss before rushing away, telling her, “Mom has dinner ready.”
Roberta now struggles with alcoholism and eating disorders. Unable to shake her parents’ “severe Depression-era mentality,” she hoards food, eating only a bit of each meal, saving some just in case. For our interview, Roberta asked that we meet at a local bakery yet arrived with muffins of her own that she nibbled parsimoniously during our talk: “I’m still hoarding. My parents controlled me. I controlled my daughters. I control myself. I only wish my mother had once said, ‘Keep it. Splurge.’”
Why Parents Deprive
Parents withhold affection for many reasons. Some, with severely limited access to their feelings, have little love to give. Many controlling parents are emotionally disturbed or self-absorbed and can barely perceive others’ troubles. Still others are so uncomfortable with touch and intimacy that they cannot allow their children near them.
Parental deprivation can be deliberate, but more often it is instinctive, unwitting, or unconscious. It’s what the parents learned. It’s how they were raised. Depriving parents often think they’re toughening up their children to survive a hard, cruel world. For them, life is about prevailing in a hostile environment; emotional caretaking and closeness are low priorities. Other Depriving parents try to enforce a Puritan ethic. Telling their children not to hope for much may reflect the way in which the parents themselves deal with disappointment. They believe that if you don’t hope for much, you won’t be as disappointed when the inevitable losses of life occur.
Strikingly, more than half of those people interviewed, not just those raised by Depriving parents, wondered as children if their parents really loved them. Such deprivation can make children feel so unworthy that by the time they reach adulthood they expect abandonment in relationships or find commitment terrifying. They may become hypersensitive to signs that a partner might leave.
Self-Assessment
My parent(s):
Played “take away” with their love and approval
Gave me scarce praise or physical affection
Threatened to disown or disinherit me
Viewed good fortune as scarce or unattainable
Seemed cold or unfeeling
Next: Perfectionistic Parenting
The next style of parents, Perfectionistic parents, endlessly drive themselves and their children to be the “best.”
4
PERFECTIONISTIC PARENTING A Place for Everything (And Everything Had Better Be in Place)
We find fault with perfection itself.
—BLAISE PASCAL
Key Characteristics of Perfectionistic Parents:
Control through pressure to be perfect and the best
Mortally afraid of flaws, disorder, or uncleanliness
Driven and compulsive
Emphasize appearances, status, material goods, or what others think
Potential Consequences of a Perfectionistic Upbringing:
Emotional “bottled-upness”
Feeling valued for what you do instead of who you are
Compulsivity
Second-guessing and self-doubting
Depression
Twenty-eight-year-old Will is a teacher, but thirteen-year-old Will, his sandy hair cropped close for speed in swimming, was a sure bet to make his school’s junior varsity swim team. His father was insisting that Will bypass junior varsity and try out for varsity two years earlier than the normal age. On tryout day his dad drove him to school, unleashing a barrage of pressure and coercion. During tryouts, Will failed to make the team. Afterward, he recalled, “I got a two-hour lecture, with me in tears being grilled about why I let that happen.”
The next year Will did make varsity and became a champion swimmer. But when he barely missed qualifying for the nationals, his dad berated him for his shortcomings rather than acknowledging what he had accomplished.
Will’s father bore a trademark of Perfectionistic parents: the conviction that life is a performance and that anything short of perfection is failure. While most parents want good things to happen to their children, Perfectionistic parents insist that their children make good things happen: Will is convinced that, “My father’s life was filled with regrets. He felt he hadn’t become enough. He was trying to beat the game of life through me.”
As a child, Will played his father’s game devotedly: “I’d start out every school year saying, ‘I’m going to do it perfectly, twenty-six hours a day, and make them proud.’” By his teens, Will felt numb. “I had nobody I could talk to. I didn’t know what I wanted or what I felt. I remember looking at the mirror and feeling that the reflection had my soul.”
As an adult, Will has had problems with authority figures and has carried a hard emotional edge that has nearly precluded intimate relationships. A combination of twelve-step programs and martial arts has helped him begin to recover his soul from the mirror.
Pressure to Perform
Perfectionistic parents often pressure the most when their children most need support, such as during sporting, cultural, and academic contests or performances.
Elizabeth, a thirty-one-year-old travel agent, is haunted by an event that happened when she was ten. Clad in black leotards for a gymnastics competition, she was standing on the balance beam when she heard her mother say to her father, almost in a stage whisper, “God, she’s so awkward.” Within moments, Elizabeth fell from the beam.
“I knew how not to fall off but I lost my concentration after hearing her,” she says. “I have a picture of me that day. I looked so sad. After that, I didn’t compete.”
Just as Elizabeth suddenly lost her balance, children of Perfectionists often grow up feeling like physical, mental, or emotional klutzes. There are several reasons for this: They get little praise or constructive guidance from their self-involved parents; they are shamed for their failures, which makes it harder to try again; they live with anxiety, which makes it harder to feel at ease and perform well; and, for some children of Perfectionists, being less capable than their parents is a form of loyalty, allowing the parent to always be the one who looks graceful, brilliant, and in charge.
Elizabeth’s Perfectionistic, Using mother demanded perfect obedience: “When my paren
ts had company, my sister and I had to come curtsy good night to guests. We could help serve dinner but never be a part of it. It was like parading out pets. We were not valued for ourselves, but for being hers.”
Her mother drilled Elizabeth in every social detail. After rehearsing with Elizabeth how to say hello when answering the phone, her mother would leave and call her daughter, hanging up and ringing back repeatedly until Elizabeth’s hello was sufficiently “ladylike” and “friendly.” Insisting that to be a good cook Elizabeth had to develop a keen sense of taste, her mother allowed her only one taste of each dinner item, after which Elizabeth had to name correctly every ingredient in the dish before she could go on eating.
Elizabeth’s father practiced a different form of food control. He encouraged Elizabeth to cook desserts for him in home economics class, inviting her to eat the desserts with him. At the same time, he told her she was fat and that no boy would want to date her.
Elizabeth’s father rarely seemed to have time for her, and when he did, he was impatient. Once, while her father was building a deck, nine-year-old Elizabeth asked if he would teach her how to pound nails so she could help him. When she tapped too gently on the first nail and it fell over, he grabbed the hammer from her and told her to leave him alone.
Pressure to Excel
Perfectionistic parents apply heavy pressure on their children when it comes to choices of schools, hobbies, and careers. When I was sixteen, on the morning of my first college interview, my father was up early, sternly finding fault with everything I did: how I tied my tie, how long I took in the shower, how quickly I ate. By the time I arrived at the interview, I was a wreck.
My father, a man of great wit, ambition, charm, and self-discipline, had always run our family much like his large corporation. At home, as at work, he valued winning, discipline, and the absolutism of his authority. From outward appearances, we were a successful, happy—even model—family. But inside, we were troubled. My father’s love seemed of a strange sort, encrusted with tirades without warning, searing criticism, perfectionism, and ironclad rules. My mother, a sensitive soul, acquiesced to his domineering early on, and I was left confused about love, life, and myself. Like many controlled children, I second-guessed and self-blamed.