Some of the most emotionally harmful forms of parenting don’t always sound cruel at the time, but they’re disguised as guilt or concern, maybe even love.
No door was fully closed
Everyone deserves some privacy. That’s a fact. But some mothers don’t seem to recognize that, and they’ll tell their kids, ‘You don’t need privacy from me.’ They’ll use the line to justify reading their kid’s diary and going through their kid’s messages.Â
Parents obviously have to keep kids safe, but there’s a pretty big difference between reasonable supervision and treating any private space as suspicious. Wanting a closed door shouldn’t have made you seem secretive or disloyal.
When care came with a price
Some mothers use the line, ‘After everything I’ve done for you,’ to end an argument very quickly. Now you’re not talking about what happened five minutes ago. Now you’re talking about school lunches and birthday presents. You’re talking about all the parenting your mother has done for you.
That’s just not right because it turns basic parenting into a running tab. Newsflash, your mother chose to be a parent. Hearing this line enough times makes you think that disagreeing was wrong, as though you owed your mother something. But you didn’t ask to be born.
Suddenly comforting her
Hearing the line, ‘I guess I’m just a terrible mother, then’ sounds pretty ridiculous as an adult. It works incredibly well on a child, though. You might be the one who was hurt, but that doesn’t matter anymore because you’re supposed to comfort your mother instead.
It flips the whole conversation, so that you end up giving comfort, rather than getting it. This line is a perfect example of what researchers call ‘emotional parentification.’ It’s where a child starts managing feelings that really belong with the adult, and that’s not fair in the slightest.
Tears became the problem
So many people repeat, ‘Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about’ as a joke nowadays. But it’s not a joke. Just think about what it actually says, as it’s usually spoken when the child is already upset. The mother’s telling her kid to stop showing their feelings or things will get worse.
She’s essentially mixing emotional dismissal with a threat, and that’s certainly no way to treat your child. It teaches a child to start swallowing tears fast. They stop sharing how they truly feel because they think their emotions are going to get them in trouble.
Her feelings became yours
It sounds simple. Many mothers tell their children, ‘You’re making me upset,’ so that they can calm the younger one down. But really, it puts a lot on a child. It’s making the child responsible for an adult’s emotions, and that’s never going to be okay.
A mother should be handling her own emotions instead of passing them off to her child. A mother who says this line causes problems, as it makes the child think they’ve got to keep their mother’s emotions in check. The truth is, no kid is responsible for a parent’s emotional state.
Sacrifice turned into debt
There’s no doubt that parenting does involve a lot of sacrifices. You have to give up money and sleep, as well as almost any opportunity for free time. But there’s no excuse to bring that up during an argument. A mother who says, ‘I sacrificed my whole life for you,’ is emotionally hurting her child.
She’s using her role as a parent to manipulate you into doing what she wants. Any choice you want to make has to involve her, too, because her sacrifices are apparently part of every decision. The mother’s child is no longer choosing for themselves.
The earlier version was better
Here’s a line some mothers say after their child starts doing things they don’t agree with. They’ll say, ‘You used to be such a good child.’ The ‘good’ version of the child may simply have been younger and easier to control, so the comparison is a false one.
It’s one that makes growing up into a personality defect. A mother who says this is trying to make their child think that doing things differently is somehow wrong. She’s trying to pressure her kid into doing what she wants. That’s definitely not what good mothers do.
Being her favorite confidant
The line, ‘You’re the only person I can talk to,’ might’ve made you feel special. It may have even made you feel grown-up, and that’s part of the problem. Mothers who talk like this usually end up sharing details about their marriages and other problems with their kids.
It’s healthy to talk to your child, of course, but it’s not healthy to put your child in the role of emotional support person. They’re only a child. It’s another form of emotional parentification, and it’s only going to make things harder for the younger one.
Pulled into an adult conflict
‘You’re acting just like your father’ is a line that can mean totally different things. It all depends on how your mother talked about him. She might’ve said it after every argument, and if that was the case, then she was using your father as a kind of insult.Â
She pulled you into her fights and was, essentially, getting you to take a side. Kids in these sorts of situations are usually left carrying part of an argument that started between two adults. That’s something that no kid should ever have to go through.
Something was supposedly wrong
What makes ‘I don’t know where I went wrong with you’ so harsh is that it doesn’t criticize one decision. No, a mother who says this is making her whole child into a failed project. Every decision the child has made is wrong, and they’ve become too different from what she imagined.
The simple act of disagreeing is wrong. That’s what she’s trying to make her child believe, and repeated messages like that fall into patterns of blame. Belittling becomes pretty common, too, and so does making a child feel fundamentally disappointing.
Gratitude came with conditions
Parents compare generations all the time, and that’s not necessarily an issue. What is an issue is when a mother says, ‘I never had these opportunities when I was your age,’ anytime their kid wants to quit piano or turn down something the mother valued.
The line makes it seem as though you’re wasting something she never got to have, so you start feeling like you have to be grateful. It doesn’t matter that you might not actually be. But it’s not your fault that your mother grew up differently than you did, so remember that.
Death entered the argument
There are quite a few mothers who love to guilt-trip their children into behaving a certain way. The line, ‘You’re going to regret this when I’m gone,’ is usually one of their favorites. Yes, it makes the argument jump decades ahead to death, grief, and future guilt.
It’s kind of hard to compete with that. A mother who uses it repeatedly teaches her child to simply agree with her, as the alternative feels cruel or frightening. It’s totally wrong. Turns out, making someone feel guilty so they’ll do what you want is a kind of psychological control.
Love became a comparison
There’s something almost comforting about the line, ‘Nobody will ever love you like your mother does.’ At least, it’s comforting at first, it becomes a lot colder when you hear it around boyfriends, girlfriends, close friends, spouses, or anyone else you start trusting.
It stops being love in those moments. It starts being a warning not to get too close to them, as they’ll never care about you properly. It turns loyalty into a competition, and that’s a strange thing to put on a child at any age.
Keeping everything quiet
It’s easy to think that your mom was trying to teach you basic manners when she said, ‘Don’t make a scene.’ Maybe sometimes she was. But it’s a different story if you heard it whenever you got upset or cried in public, maybe even when you disagreed with your mother.
It taught you that the bigger problem wasn’t what happened to you. No, the real issue was whether anyone noticed, and that may have made you think that you’ve got to look fine in public. You might start bottling up your feelings, just to keep everyone else happy.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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