Recently, some research on parental overvaluation created a stir by suggesting that treating our kids as “special” can lead them to develop narcissistic traits. You can take parental overvaluation quiz here.

I imagine most of us know of a parent who consistently expects special treatment for their offspring. I knew of one mom who insisted that other kids play the game her child wanted to play because her child was “especially sensitive.”

On the other hand, I am sure that most of us can relate to feeling that, at least at times, our children do deserve special treatment. Where we may have been passed over, ignored, shamed, or otherwise injured, we desire to protect our children from similar wounds. We see their precious uniqueness and want the world to honor and protect this.

Needing Our Kids to Reflect Us

Overvaluing our kids can leave them poorly prepared for their future, as the research implies. The fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin” provides us with an illustration of how we can hamper our children’s development by overvaluing them, leaving them cut off from their creative energies.

The tale begins with a miller and his beautiful daughter.

Now it happened one day that he had an audience with the King, and in order to appear a person of some importance he told him that he had a daughter who could spin straw into gold.

Impressed, the king has the miller’s daughter brought to the palace. She is placed in a roomful of straw and told to spin it into gold. If she succeeds, she will become queen. If she fails, she will be killed. She sobs in despair, and is rescued by an odd little man who spins for her in exchange for her jewelry – and the promise of her first-born child. The miller’s daughter indeed becomes queen. When the little man comes to take her child as promised, she begs him not to. He gives her three chances to guess his name – and she finally does so successfully, at which point he disappears forever.

Overaluing Kids Creates Unrealistic Expectations

Wanting to make himself appear more important, the miller boasts about his daughter. This sets her up for a situation in which she is bound to fail. Her life – and the life of her future child – are endangered by the outsized expectations the father burdens her with.

The miller’s daughter is like many children who have served as a narcissistic extension for a parent. Valued above all for their accomplishments, they have a weak sense of themselves as individuals – the miller’s daughter is never even given a name in this tale. (This is especially noteworthy given that this is a tale in which one’s unique name is shown to have such power.)

For the miller’s daughter, failure becomes a life or death matter. For many young people, parental expectations to spin academic straw into college admissions gold can feel like a life or death matter.

Parents who overvalue their children feel that they are validating their child’s exceptionality. In fact, they are likely failing to see their child’s full personhood because they are focused instead on an inflated projection of their own making. When we overvalue our children, we unwittingly foster unrealistic expectations in them about how the world ought to treat them, setting them up for a life of disappointment, shallow relationships, and emotional fragility.

It is normal for parents to see in their children the sacred, precious kernel of potential. Our children contain within them futurity, the implied continuation of ourselves, our ancestors, and even humanity. It is not an accident that the archetype of the Divine Child is a central image in many religions, implying the core sacred principle that must be safeguarded to ensure the future.

Inevitably, this archetypal quality will be projected onto our individual children at times. But that is a big projection to carry! Parenting requires that we appreciate what is exceptional and unique in our child, while at the same time accepting them as utterly ordinary.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term “shadow” to refer to all those part of ourselves we would rather not know about.

As children, we learn early on that certain qualities are not acceptable and need to be hidden from view. Aggression, selfishness, boastfulness, avarice, sexuality – these are all traits that we likely learned were forbidden. Depending on the values of our family or culture, we may also have learned to divorce ourselves from emotionality, creativity, or playfulness.

Shadow

According to Jung’s theory, we split these qualities off so that they are not quite conscious. This allows us to go about life identifying with those part of ourselves considered more acceptable.

While this process may be necessary, those parts of ourselves that get stuffed into the shadow are often full of vitality, authenticity, and untapped potential. Becoming curious about our shadow qualities can be an important part of psychological growth and development, especially in the second half of life.

Parenting is sure to put us in touch with those qualities we least like in ourselves, as we will certainly see them in our children. When our offspring displays our very worst traits, we are likely to be especially irritated with her. At the same time, such a display may offer us a chance to get to know a part of ourselves we haven’t been accepting of in a long time.

Tatterhood

The Norwegian tale “Tatterhood and the Hobgoblins” is a fairy tale that illustrates this idea. In it, a Queen gives birth to two daughters – one who is pretty and delicate, and the other who, upon coming into the world, rides around on a goat with a wooden spoon in her hand whooping and hollering.

The Queen is ashamed of her unruly daughter, whom she names Tatterhood. She tries to hide her away and keep her out of sight. However, one day a pack of hobgoblins attack the palace. It is Tatterhood who knows how to fend them off! The King and Queen then learn to value both of their daughters.

What is it that your child does that gets under your skin the most? That thing that you find most irritating. That thing that is most embarrassing. That thing that makes you feel like you want to crawl out of your skin.

Parenting

Alison is a woman in my practice who has a young daughter named Emma. Emma is very bold and courageous. She likes to take risks and be the center of attention. She is, in a way, a little like Tatterhood.

Alison struggles at times to deal with her daughter’s spirited behavior, as any parent would. But Alison comes undone when her daughter is boastful or draws too much attention to herself in public.

As we explored why she finds this behavior particularly mortifying, Alison admitted that she had been a bit like this as a child – but her parents had responded with harsh reprimands. “Being modest was definitely valued in my house growing up,” said Alison. “I learned that early on!”

She recalled one gathering where she had been singing and “putting on a show” for the adults, and her father had responded sharply that she was making a fool of herself. Alison felt ashamed.

As we explored this together, Alison gained a better understanding of why her daughter’s theatrical style bothered her so much. She was able to approach this trait in her daughter – and eventually in herself – with greater curiosity and acceptance.

Over time, she was able to support her daughter’s healthy desire to be seen and appreciated. She even grew to value her owe wish to be in the spotlight at times. When Emma started school, Alison indulged a long-time secret desire to take an improv class. Not surprisingly, she discovered she had a natural talent for it, and doing improv became an important interest for her.

What we learn to shove into the shadow is often the thing that, when rediscovered in adulthood, can bring us renewed energy and joy. It may be the thing that keeps us psychologically alive.

If we allow ourselves to be curious about those traits in our children that bother us the most, they may lead us to know ourselves more deeply.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Kathryn’s eyes filled with tears as she related to me how worn and spent she felt caring for her twin boys, now two. Kathryn’s own mother had been emotionally absent, pursuing one affair after another while leaving Kathryn and her siblings with a succession of babysitters.

Now, Kathryn strove to make sure she didn’t repeat those mistakes. She held herself to impossibly high standards, attempting to meet every need her two boys had.

As she related these feelings, the image of a sieve came to mind.

Carrying Water in a Sieve

It is a common task assigned to a heroine in fairy tales to carry water in a sieve. Trying to give to others when we ourselves are so depleted can feel just like that.

An American folktale collected by Zora Neale Hurston entitled “The Orphan Boy and Girl and the Witches” uses this image of a sieve being used to carry water to illustrate how profoundly depleted we can feel when we ourselves have been inadequately mothered.

We know from the title that the two children in the story have not received adequate parental care – they are orphans. Though Kathryn was not literally an orphan, she had been abandoned by her mother emotionally at a critical time in her childhood.

The boy and the girl in the folktale are cared for by a grandmother, but she is absent when the tale begins, and therefore the boy and girl are at the mercy of three witches.

The witches wanted to eat them at once, but they begged to be spared until their grandmother returned at sundown. The witches didn’t want to wait, so they said that they would not eat them if they would go and get some water from the spring. The children gladly said they would go. The witches gave them a sieve to fill with water, and told them that if they did not return with it at once they would be eaten immediately. The boy and the girl went to the spring for the water and dipped and dipped to try to fill the sieve, but the water always ran out faster than they could fill it. At last they saw the witches coming. Their teeth were far longer than their lips.

Later in the story, the grandmother returns, but falls asleep, and in the end it is only the dogs who save the children.

Permission to Care for Ourselves

Depressed and depleted, Kathryn could not connect with a sense of pleasure as she parented. Rather, she did for her children out of a sense of duty. She found herself dragging herself through the day, stumbling from one task to the next without any joy. She needed permission to take care of herself and make sure that she was getting some of her own needs met.

Over time, Kathryn learned to recognize when her own needs had been pushed aside for too long. Although it was difficult for her, she accepted that she did not always have to be flawless in how she parented. She could trust that her children would be fine even if she didn’t always respond to their needs perfectly. She began to trust herself as well, listening to the signals that came from her body and through her dreams.

Any one of us can become depleted when caring for children, but we may be especially susceptible to feeling drained if we were not properly mothered when we were children. This can lead to us feeling deadened and out of touch with a sense of pleasure and purpose in our lives. In such circumstances, we will likely have trouble listening to our instincts, which we need to care for both ourselves and our children.

In some fairy tales that feature sieves, the heroin learns to plug the holes with ashes or mud, and is then able to carry the needed water. When we recognize our depletion, we can take care of ourselves, patching the holes in our selves so that we have the inner resources to parent joyfully.

Hurston, Z. N., & Kaplan, C. (2003). Every tongue got to confess: negro folk-tales from the Gulf States. New York, NY: Perennial.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.

Christine was uncharacteristically upset when she arrived for our appointment. She had just gotten off the phone with Marni, someone she had felt was a good friend.

“Marni asked me whether I was worried about Josie being too busy and not getting enough sleep now that she is on the swim team,” Christine explained, referring to her 13-year-old daughter.

Though the question may sound innocuous, it stung Christine, who sat across from me tearing up as she talked. This is because in this innocent sounding question, she perceived – I believe accurately – a scathing judgment on her parenting.

Christine and Marni had met at a breast-feeding support group when their girls were babies, and had formed a quick friendship. Christine explained that it felt as though she and Marni saw eye to eye on most parenting issues.

“As the girls got older, we both felt it was important to give them lots of unstructured time. I suppose we judged the other mothers who were always overscheduling their kids.”

“If I thought she were doing the right thing, I’d be doing it too.”

But when the girls hit adolescence, Christine could see that she and Marni were no longer on the same page as often. Believing that physical activity was important for mental and physical health, Christine and her husband encouraged Josie to get more involved in athletics – and Josie responded enthusiastically.

“Marni’s daughter Katie didn’t do sports – Marni still feels sort of self-righteous about not overscheduling her. But now that she’s a teenager, Katie just spends her free time on social media. She’s gaining weight and seems depressed.”

Christine admitted that she was aware she was feeling judgmental of Marni’s parenting choices, just as Marni was apparently judgmental of hers.

“I want good things for Marni and Katie. But I suppose if I am being honest with myself, I don’t think she is making the right decision. If I thought she were doing the right thing, I’d be doing it too.”

Out in the Open

Our parenting decisions reveal our beliefs and values in a more public way than many of us would wish. If we disagree with friends or family on managing finances, practicing religion, or politics, we can usually count on some degree of privacy about these issues. If differences do become obvious, social conventions dictate that we politely ignore these in most cases.

But somehow when we parent, the choices that we make often wind up being on display for all the world to see.

And this can be awkward.

Another mother in my practice named Jeannie had ample experience with this. Her six-year-old son Daniel had significant sensory issues and became easily overwrought. When in this state, he could not be easily soothed and had even become physical with other children.

Jeannie had worked out a method of dealing with her son’s “meltdowns” that was effective and compassionate. She would withdraw with Daniel to a quiet space to make it clear that hurting others wouldn’t be allowed, but she would let him scream and cry until he felt better. The very noisy nature of these outbursts usually drew sideways glances from other moms.

“I know what I’m doing is right for Daniel,” Jeannie told me. “But boy is it hard to know everyone is looking at me wondering why I don’t deal with me out of control kid!”

Looking for Validation

Parenting decisions invite judgment not only because of their visibility, but also because mothers so often look to each other for validation. What endeavor has higher stakes than raising our children? And where in life is the “right” way to do it less clear?

No wonder we look to each other to be reassured. And no wonder we have such strong feelings when we see someone doing things differently – it raises the specter that we have been doing it “wrong.”

Living our Truth

Christine’s task was to become comfortable with her own parenting decisions so that Marni’s covert criticisms didn’t affect her so much. Becoming at home with our own preferences, opinions, and choices is part of the life-long task of sorting out what really matters to us. Parenting provides plenty of opportunities for us to learn about our own values, and stand up for them – even  in the face of other’s judgments.

Originally published on PsychCentral.com.