Loving Your Parents

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1. When you were a kid, what what your stance on loving your parents? Did you sincerely love them no matter what, or did you find something unsettling about loving people who have the power to punish you in any way they please? (I was somewhere in between. I appreciated the things they provided for me, but I only used the word "love" on really "good" days, when I managed to "avoid" all punishment.)

2. How did you reconcile the parental love and punishments for "bad" behavior? (I didn't need to reconcile; I just assumed that my parents loved me only when I was obedient. When I wasn't, punishments took place instead.)


Here are some corrolary questions.

3. Did you believe it when your parents told you, "grounding you is a lot more unpleasant for me than it may be for you" right before grounding you? (Biggest bullsh*t I ever heard.)

4. How did you feel about the phrase "I'm going to 'have to' punish you"? (What you mean "have to"!? They can choose to!.)

5. Did you believe that your parents got pleasure from punishing you? (Why wouldn't they? It works for showing power and ensuring obedience.)

6. How did you react when you first saw your parents crying or otherwise distressed? (I laughed out loud. Why would someone with the power to punish me need to feel sad?)


Post your replies to these questions on how you felt during childhood? Loving one's parents is a given among NT kids, but I think that aspie kids probably might take a more logical approach. I, for instance, always wondered how do love and punishment really fit together?

Last edited by Aspie1 on 13 Apr 2006, 2:16 am, edited 3 times in total.

Grounding you as a punishment is worse for your parents than it is for you because then they have to do the work of monitoring you inside the home when they could easily let you run wild in the streets while they relaxed or partied.

^^^Thats assuming that when your not grounded your out running around, what if your just playing video games in your house, then its equally hard before and after for your parents and harder on you.

I don't love my parents. I like and respect them, but I don't feel I have to love them just because they're my family.

I don't know about going back in the time machine (lol)- I'm in my 30's now with two kids of my own. I can tell you that it is more difficult to punish a kid because then you have to listen to them whine or or get mad at you. It would be easy to let them run wild and so some people do just that. However, we really don't do alot of punishing around here (more like discussing choices) - and my daughter sometimes complains about that in regards to her little brother. I remind her that we were patient with her and she came along and progressed but she is not all that empathetic. (She has microcephaly and my son has HFA). One thing I do not care for is lying - that is a big one here and you can get yourself off the hook by telling the truth so if you still insist on lying than that is deliberate.

Sad to say, I did not like my parents at all, let alone love them. I pretty much tolerated my family because I had to. I did not hate them but felt no real attatchment to them. This did not bother me either; although, I always thought that other people had a weird attatchment to their parents!

It's true, there are some parents who are abusive, of course. Some punishments are abusive. My mother's second husband was a violent alcoholic. He had really bizarre rules. As children if we were so much as two minutes late coming home for dinner we would not be allowed dinner, we would be thrown in our room with no food or even a drink of water or allowed out for the rest of the night.

I feel more attatched to my Routemasters, than I do my parents. I'm such a materialistic 60s' Type Mod.

I don't love my parents, and I wish they weren't so upset about that.

I was going to make a really long reply, but...I couldn't post it without writing an epistle that would go on for years.

Basically, it's taken me until now, college, to realize just how much my parents love me and have loved me throughout the years. Our relationship now is MUCH better than I could've ever imagined it being as a kid. A lot of it has to do with them understanding me. Some things they thought were just passing phases for me were really integral parts of who I am, and they can now see that.

When I was a kid, it was hard for me to break out of the mentality of "your parents' love for you is only as good as the worst thing they have ever scolded at you." It's taken a LONG time to get past that one, but once I did, it opened the door to a MUCH better relationship with Mom and Dad. And I don't think that breaking out of that mentality is something that can be taught. There are some things a parent can do to encourage it, but it would be long and hard to explain it. It kinda has to be grown into.

Just my two cents. Given inflation, it's not that much.

I don't live with my parents. I live in fostercare and have done for a long time. I feel very little connection at all to my biological parents and i just fell numb towards my foster faimily. I don't get how they can be so angery with me so much, when what they are doing is the silly ilogical thing.

Parents are too confusing!!

jammie

Unfortunatly kids do lie. They lie because they are afraid of punishment and they think if they tell the truth they will be punished anyways. So they see lieing as the only route out of trouble. A lot of parents project anger to their kids when asking them stuff like "did you do it?!". I think that maybe if the kids felt less hostile while being asked such questions they'll be much more likely to tell the truth. That's just my theory, of course I don't have kids yet.

Actually I didn't phrase that very well - I consider myself undiagnosed AS and as such consider lying to top the list of what I would consider a big offence -not that my kids lie alot. My son has HFA so he doesn't really lie at all unless he is being silly and then I wouldn't consider that a lie(more like telling tales). But, my daughter I consider more NT (even though she has micro) and so she has on occasion been influenced by peers who are NT because that is common behavior for many of them. I actually find it quite silly for parents to punish kids for telling the truth - it completely defeats the purpose of them having the ability to trust you if you were to ask them a question and then punish them for answering it truthfully. If you do that then you are only encouraging the very behavior you don't want. I can see though how I phrased my original post that I may have given a different impression.

When I was very young I lied to my parents about certain things because I was afraid of being punished for telling the truth. They projected a sort of anger when asking me such questions. So if I have kids I'll try and keep this in mind. I think that a lot of parents can become very inpatient with young kids to the point that they project hostility to the child which causes far more trouble. Although I can understand how raising a child can be tough. I wasn't exactly an angel myself when I was younger.

I'm amazed how true this is. Lying and the risk of getting in trouble go hand-in-hand. Here's how a kid would think, in a typical family: "If I tell the truth, I have a 100% chance of getting in trouble; if I lie, I have a 50% chance of getting in trouble". Since 50% is less than 100%, lying just makes sense. That's how it worked in my family; my parents were very strict, and punished me for any offense. It didn't matter if I lied or told the truth; it only mattered if I got caught. Lying sometimes helped cover it up, which meant I didn't get in trouble for it. But I guess I can thank them for teaching me to lie. Now, when necessary, I can lie to a professor, a store employee, a manager, even a police officer, all with a completely straight face. You wouldn't believe how much that "skill" helps me now.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. There are so many thing that parents do that they think they are doing to teach the child a lesson but intead it teaches bad behavior. I just wish it was as easy to tell them this. A lot of parents have it stuck in their head that their teaching methods are perfect. I'd like to maybe write a book someday about this stuff as to alleviate the bad teaching methods some parents tend to fall into.