I would like to ask the men a question. Do you remember a time when your mother's efforts to physically discipline you were (at best) ineffective and (at worst) a joke?
I personally remember a time when I was about 7 or 8 when my mother was really upset with me. I don't remember what I did that made her so mad --- I just remember that she was REALLY upset. She used to have a large yardstick for spankings, and she started to use it to spank me. I remember starting to laugh. It wasn't that the spanking didn't physically hurt, because it did. It was just the absurdity of it --- her trying to physically discipline me / to physically impose her will on me. Eventually I was laughing almost uncontrollably, and the more I laughed, the more upset my mother got until the yardstick broke. At that point she pulled off her flip flop and began spanking me with that. By the time it was all over, I was rolling in laughter and my mother was in tears. Never again did she try to use a physical form of discipline with me. [I should quickly add here that when my father got home that night, it wasn't nearly as funny.....!]
When I have asked college students about this, the vast majority of the men agree. They may not remember a specific event (like I do), but they agree that at some point their mother's capacity to be a physical force in their lives became an exercise in futility.
[I sometimes give parenting talks, and when I get around to discussing this type of dynamic between mothers and their sons, there is often an audible sigh of relief: "You mean it's not just me? I'm not a defective mother?"]
So what's the point?
Suppose a mother finds herself in a situation where her son's father is absent? What recourse does she have if she would like to teach her son right from wrong, and she wants to use discipline as a way to discourage wrong? Physical discipline techniques (not necessarily spanking, but any attempt to physically insist that her son complies) will work for a time, but eventually they will no longer be effective.
What is left? If you know anyone who has found herself in this type of situation, you have probably seen firsthand the answer. It is what I call SHAME-BASED PARENTING. [Let me add here that shame-based parenting is used by both fathers and mothers, but it is more common among mothers, and it is especially common among single mothers.]
The litany of shame-based comments is long. "I am so disappointed in you!" "How could you do this to me?" "I am so ashamed of you!" "What did I do wrong for you to turn out like this?" "What will people think?" "You should be ashamed of yourself!" "If you really loved me, you wouldn't act like that!" "How dare you embarrass me like that!" "Don't you feel guilty?" "You are a disgrace!" "How do you think that makes me feel?"
Shame-based parenting works. Because such comments are so painful, they discourage the undesirable behaviors --- children want to avoid hearing these sorts of comments and so they will change just to avoid the shame. The problem is that shame-based comments also hammer away at the person, bombarding their sense of self-worth.
Now let's look at shame-based parenting in the light of love relationships. Single men who have grown up with a single mom are especially vulnerable to the emotional upset of their partners. Just like the boy who doesn't want to upset his mother and hear her demeaning comments, men who have grown up without a father are more apt to be people-pleasers. As one man told me, "A happy wife is a happy life --- so I make sure I never upset my wife, just like I grew up making sure that I never upset my mother." If you are in love with a people-pleaser, then you know how difficult it is to discuss problems and to resolve differences --- people-pleasers are too interested in keeping the peace to seriously discuss your life together?
But wait, you say, "I dated a man who grew up in a single-parent home and he was never sensitive to anything that I said or that I wanted. He just shut me out whenever I tried to talk with him about things that were on my mind."
Let me ask you: What is another way that a boy can escape the shame-based comments of his mother? If you said, "Tune them out," you are right. For some of us, the way we learned to cope with shaming comments was to simply block them out --- if you don't listen to them, then they can't hurt you. Within relationships, we call this stonewalling.
Perhaps you have dated a stonewaller. [Although both women and men can be stonewallers, in nearly 85% of marriages where stonewalling exists, the stonewaller turns out to be the man.] When he doesn't respond to your desire to talk about something that is bothering you / when he refuses to acknowledge that he has heard you / when he essentially shuts you out --- that is stonewalling.
Imagine the boy who doesn't want to lash out at his shaming mother. Instead, he begins to shut her out. She can say whatever she likes and it won't hurt him because it is as if she is talking to a wall.
Old habits die hard.
