Trusting your instincts is how intergenerational cycles of abuse and neglect happen. If you were raised well, then yes, otherwise you have to work consciously to reject your harmful instincts.
Well, sure but I’m advocating to trust your instincts in terms of their general health and well-being. Abuse or gross neglect are entirely different matters. Abusive parents are probably not going to be online doing heavy research on what is the optimum thing to do as a parent. They probably just feel tired and bitter about their children, or worse.
A lot of modern, new wave parenting to me feels an awful lot like meddling in natural child development. Like too much of a good thing, helicopter parenting.
I'm talking about hardly visible emotional abuse and neglect, not some extreme criminal activity that only really bad people do. For example, not loving your child and going through the motions of looking after it without really caring. Or inconsistently responding to it with dismissal sometimes and kindness other times so it can't really trust you and feel secure. That can lead to harmful attachment styles as an adult.
This is a broader issue, one where it is so extremely unlikely that you will make progress you have to take a step back and think about what the realistic goals for you actually are.
That came out way more depressing than I expected and I'm not sure what conclusion I was going to arrive at.
Yes. I am a victim of intergenerational abuse. My grandmother consistently beat my father to force obedience. Then he and my mother consistently beat me and my siblings to force obedience. I even believed that it was the best way to raise children. Many years later, I realized it is abuse and a source of emotional problems.
Sorry to hear that. There were a lot of best practices just a couple of generations ago that we see as harmful today and I sometimes wonder how humans could have existed for 100,000 years and only in our lifetimes finally realized how to not abuse kids.
Perhaps they really were the best ways to get some kind of outcome like an aggressive man for fighting wars or protecting himself from violence or a hard worker able to tolerate tedium and not be too aspirational despite the personal emotional cost. Or perhaps even the emotional problems wouldn't exist if the rest of society was compatible with those ways?
