3 Surprising Ways Our Parenting Can Cause Terrible Damage to Children
Maybe they’re not so awful after all
None of us know what we’re doing. Even those of us who are not parents, have all had parents, be they present and caring, estranged, alienated, absent, neglectful, abusive, or unknown, and have both healthy lessons and often great and lasting damage from childhood we all need to learn to heal to grow from. This requires each of us, mothers and fathers and those without children, to understand how to parent either their own children or alongside what is often referred to as, “the inner child,” a term based on the Jungian concept of the “eternal child,” and examined by more popular psychologists such as Drs. Eric Berne, James Bradshaw, and Alice Miller.
Sometimes, things that surprise us do so because our long-held beliefs are simply wrong and rooted in misperceptions handed down unexamined for generations. We can learn to parent ourselves and others more effectively by examining some “surprising” common practices evidence now shows is not as accurate as we thought.
Practice #1: Don’t talk to strangers
In the wake of common, horrific violence against children, such as increased school shootings and gun violence, child sexual assault, and cyberbullying scandals, it can…
