It’s all your parents’ fault

A person’s life is analogous to a slow-simmered stew, in which the first ingredients build its flavour profile. After all, a person is made by their upbringing and shaped by their experiences. Hence people often change, usually at a slow but steady pace, while retaining their beginnings. These beginnings, which stay throughout one’s life, must not be wasted by ignorant upbringing.

In practice, though, parenting tends to be ignorant or controlling, without a positive and meaningful direction that would make a person whole.This may be due to parental disinterest, lack of time or parental incompetence. For example, In India, traits like autism might be considered merely as individual or inherited “peculiarities”. The child may be forced to fit the mold of convention.This is due to lack of awareness of mental health and its significance. Similarly, Indian parents might make their children socially awkward “loners” by limiting their social life in favour of academics. Such preconceived notions and regressive methods are detrimental to parenting. Parenting builds up a child’s life, and must be done effectively with care. The Polish psychologist László Polgár is a famous example of a person who strongly held this notion. He strongly believed that people were made, and not born. He thus conducted an experiment widely considered to be a great success. He followed an upbringing regimen to shape his three daughters into world chess champions. This inspired books and garnered press, as it seemed to show that geniuses could be made if parents followed his example. 

Bad parenting leads to early trauma experiences that have a lasting psychological impact. Many psychological concepts stem from the emotional patterns that develop due to early trauma experiences. Children may grow to identify with things or patterns that once harmed them. Freudian ideas and the book, “Existential Kink” explore such trauma responses and psychological tendencies that often get overlooked or suppressed. People tend to enjoy the familiarity they feel towards the patterns that caused them pain. Reading up on these would help a person overcome related psychological issues.

The existence of self help should not undermine the necessity of deliberate upbringing. Prevention is better than cure, and it sure is easier on the child. One of the problems with parenting is that the line between deliberate upbringing and controlled upbringing is often blurred. Their differences must be clearly noted. Deliberate upbringing results in confident children with cultivated passions, who live whole and impactful lives. Controlled upbringing may be a result of parental expectations, societal norms and pressures, economic background, etc. Parents may not be aware of the long- term consequences of their parenting styles, or may even be indifferent to such a concept due a lack of awareness. They may even find it easy to raise children in a controlled fashion due to time constraints in their schedules, as well- directed parenting takes a lot more time and effort. Regardless, it leads to regressive psychological tendencies that harm more than help. Even good intentions, as seen in overly conservative parenting styles, backfire. Hence, it is of utmost importance to break this cycle of ignorant or controlled upbringing to give our successors a legacy of opportunity and greatness- as Polgár has done.

It is important not to enforce interests or to dictate rules without imbuing values. The concept of a psyche might be abstract, but the psyche of an individual is definitely mutable. Using psychology for improvement is the scientific approach to success, which must definitely be adopted in parenting.

A good parent cooks up a great child.