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Key points
- Parents with difficult childhoods may overcorrect and help create similar symptoms in their children.
- Being a good father or mother won't erase being a "bad son" or "bad daughter" in a parent's eyes.
- Not meeting every single one of your child's needs isn't necessarily neglect.
- Instead, allowing them to experience disappointment and failure will help prepare them for real life.
Despite what we may believe, perfection doesn't imply an extreme; genuine perfection entails a balance between them. So, while the question of "Is there such a thing as too much love?" may seem ridiculous to some, the answer is a complicated—but direct—yes.
Much of the popular literature on perfectionism tends to highlight trauma in its incubation, noting how exacting demands create the foundation for an obsession with "the shoulds," or excessively high standards. While this route may be more obvious and also easier to empathize with (we tend to feel more sympathy for those abused), there's an equal yet less direct one to perfectionism, which on the surface masks an underlying cruelty.
This is the route of the doting parent, who attempts to correct for the mistakes of his own upbringing and/or even those of the other parent. Failing to acknowledge his limitations, as he believes he can offset the damage done elsewhere, and the potential consequences of his apparent benevolence, he may contribute to outcomes similar to his own, despite his efforts.
A parent who was mistreated as a child may, in part through black-and-white thinking, consider the antithesis of her childhood as the only solution to the problem of parenting, overcorrecting for the mistakes made by her parents. Offsetting being a bad daughter with being a good mother, she may yearn to provide her child with the emotional and material foundation she didn't have.
Her life's purpose may become wrapped up in her new identity, which she protects with diligence and defiance, supporting her self-esteem through her relentless drive and penchant for mental gymnastics. Tiring of all of the criticisms hurled at her, she resolves to take her destiny into her own hands. From now on, it's her way only, and she decides what's best.
Sensing her mother's high expectations for her and inability to accept blame, the daughter resolves to hide herself from her. Yet she continues to hold onto the anxiety of being worthy of the love provided to her for free, fearing that others may not see what her mother does.
So, she resolves to re-make herself, to truly become the individual in her mother's imagination. This way, love (which is solely defined by this excessive degree) becomes guaranteed. Somehow, she becomes just like her mother.
Humans are fragile, in both body and mind. And, in reality, many of us struggle with deluding ourselves, despite how often we can. While our parents may idealize us, affording us a degree of self-esteem that they were deprived of, we, eventually, become acquainted with the real world, which notes our failures more so than our strengths.
In turn, to make sense of this paradox, we may infer that our parent was biased. Thus, searching for that same type of validation from the world (and even wanting to live up to the grandiose image of the parent for their own sake) becomes an addiction in some sense. Just as the parent attempts to erase the flaws of her past, the child attempts to erase the flaws of his present.
(Additionally, the child may buy into his parent's conception of him and believe he's perfect, without any effort needed. Terrified of losing his place in his fantasized hierarchy, he meets the world with the same degree of denial, believing that anyone who criticizes him is merely jealous of his gifts.)
The need for control, hubris, and good intentions are the culprits here. The harder you try, the worse things seem to get. But this isn't that much of a secret.
The poet William Blake wrote: "The iron fist that crushed the tyrant's head became a tyrant in its stead." History repeatedly indicates the drawbacks of obsession, self-righteousness, and pride. The parent who attempts to erase her childhood would need to seek out alternative, and more internal, ways of making peace with it.
And she would need to consider ways of sustaining her self-esteem that don't entail her feeling like a "good mother"; psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott's "good enough mother" comes to mind here. Winnicott noted:
The good-enough mother... starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure. Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt to external realities.
Our perfectionist mother may fear her child reacting to her neglect in ways that she responded to her own, but she fails to account for the missing ingredient: Unlike her parent, she's able to tell the child why she's giving him the chance to make his own mistakes, informing him of why depending on her all the time isn't feasible or desirable. She does more by doing less. She prepares him for the world. And, paradoxically, she becomes a better mother, who's now less focused on making herself lovable.
To be clear, this doesn't necessarily mean that a parent ought to mirror the world, which, at times, may be cruel. Instead, she may note her child's strengths and help him better understand and accept his weaknesses, rather than deny them.
She doesn't have to significantly reduce her degree of love for him but she would have to, for his own good (if that perspective helps her), help him learn that the world doesn't revolve around him, even if this means choosing herself, at times, instead of him. By doing so, he also learns that it doesn't need to for him to be loved: he doesn’t need to be special to be important.
