Many parents find it difficult to bond with their babies, often because they themselves were neglected as children.
Many parents are unable to give their children the attention and love they need.
They are unable to do so because they are overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed because they often have to wrestle with unresolved experiences from their own childhood.
Separation, parental death or illness, abuse or neglect: all of these suddenly come back when your own baby starts crying.
For many, this stands in the way of a secure bond between parent and baby.
Bad memories and experiences have to be broken.
These parents find it hard to give their children trust or security unless they get help.
Or even more: being overwhelmed can lead to overreaction.
In the worst-case scenario, parents shake their crying baby until he or she finally calms down – resulting in brain haemorrhage, disability or even death.
Parents with unresolved experiences need help, or they will pass on their own bad experiences.
British scientists Howard and Miriam Steele interviewed many parents-to-be.
Based on the surveys, they were actually able to predict whether they would later have a good relationship with their one-year-old child with a secure attachment.
Secure attachments are the start of a happy adult life.
People who don’t have them are more likely to withdraw into themselves, don’t ask for help when they need it, often have learning difficulties and have less self-confidence.
Little things set them off course.
When you have children, you often think back to your own upbringing and how it shaped you.
Some people find their childhood quite enjoyable and want to raise their own children in the same way.
Others, on the other hand, don’t want to pass on the big and small mistakes of the older generation to their children.
Parental mistakes happen again and again, especially in stressful situations.
In such situations, parents sometimes feel that the child is trying to evoke exactly this reaction.
In retrospect, when the stress has eased and calm has returned, as a parent you usually know exactly how you could have reacted differently.
Once you have a child of your own, many incidents, experiences and memories from your own childhood resurface.
Everyone’s idea of a successful upbringing is very different.
There are parents who, when their child is born, resolve never to act like their parents and want to do everything differently.
In many situations, however, you may find yourself falling back on old behavior and reacting as your parents taught you.
Of course, just like positive experiences, negative ones also influence basic attitudes.
It can happen that that “I’d never do what my parents did!” gets forgotten, and all resolutions and ideals are no longer taken into account.
Particularly in stressful situations, where long deliberation is not possible.
The next thing you know, you’ve forgotten your resolution, and you’ve let yourself be led into an ill-considered action.
It can be helpful to take a deep breath, suppress initial impulses and reflect on your values and educational ideas.
If you don’t want to raise your child the way your parents did, it’s usually a case of not making the same mistakes they did.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t make other mistakes.
An education without mistakes is not possible.
It’s important that you think about this again and again, and adapt your parenting ideas to the child and the situation.
What are role models?
Simply explained, a behavioral pattern is a form of behavior that serves as a model for action.
This pattern responds to rules that guide our actions in certain situations.
We generally act according to socially accepted guidelines that determine our behavior.
This is the pattern of behavior.
In other words, it’s the behavior we’ve learned from our environment that influences us when we act in certain circumstances.
It’s not genetic, like hair or eye color, but family-related.
There’s a proven tendency to repeat parental behavior patterns.
The why is understood by simple observation.
The theory as to why this happens is that we learn from our parents’ example.
Like the rest of the animals, we learn social behavior from our parents.
So it’s normal for us to repeat learned behaviors.
We act on our own instincts.
Is the repetition of these patterns necessarily harmful?
Not with positive role models.
However, when we have a depressive mother or an absent or obsessive father, it can be very damaging.
Both for us and for our children, if we repeat them.
Sometimes, you may even have certain fears or attitudes that you don’t understand yourself in certain circumstances.
It’s probably due to a learned behavior you weren’t even aware of.
Many of the phobias we have are behaviors we’ve learned by living with people who also have them.
These are the reasons why you may be afraid of repeating harmful patterns to your children.
What can you do to avoid repeating harmful behaviors?
The first and most important step is to recognize the existence of harmful behaviors.
This can only be done through a thorough understanding of yourself and your past.
You need to be very clear about what you don’t want to repeat and why.
You also need the humility to recognize your faults.
This will help you correct conscious or unconscious behaviors that are harmful to you and your children.
A good way to exercise this self-awareness is to imagine how you would behave in certain situations.
The exercise doesn’t have to remain at the superficial level of performance you imagine.
You should ask yourself why you would really do this, and how you think the other people involved would react to your behavior.
It’s really important that you appreciate other people’s reaction to your behavior, because that’s where you can judge whether the behavior is harmful or not.
For example, the situation is: “What would you do if you found a wallet with money bearing the owner’s identity and address?”
It’s important to put yourself in the wallet owner’s shoes, because just as you need the money, he may need it more than you do.
If you don’t get it back, you’ll feel like you’ve been robbed, and such behavior will set a bad example for your children.
Understanding learned patterns
This point is really a fundamental pillar of the previous point, but it deserves a separate mention.
As we’ve already said, knowledge of our own past is necessary to avoid the harmful patterns we’ve learned.
It is also important to determine whether they are harmful or not.
What’s more, you need to separate the motives that led the people who taught you these patterns to behave the way they did.
This is fundamental to understanding and therefore identifying whether they are useful or not.
It’s very likely that these fears stem from a reproach you hold against your parents for a behavior they had towards you that caused you harm.
You need to get rid of this burden, either by forgiving them or by understanding the reason for their behavior.
Always remember that your parents are people like you, with failures and successes; if you understand them, you’ll grow.