** 70th book of 2020: Generational echoes of neglect. **
Born to parents of the greatest generation, childhood for both my parents was an alternating gauntlet of neglect and criticism. My maternal grandmother suffered severe complications giving birth to my mom, and my paternal grandmother seemed to have an ambivalent view towards child rearing, with both families exhibiting the typical greatest-generation authoritarian parenting style with sporadic criticism, a workaholic patriarch, and a willful ignorance of children’s emotional lives.
So it’s no surprise that my sister and I, like many children of boomers, got an opposite parenting style. We experienced ‘permissive parenting, where through both benign neglect and intentional parenting choices, we fended for ourselves in relationships, what schools to attend and how to succeed in academics, how to earn money, spend time, or even what to cook for dinner (top ramen and cheese quesadillas for me).
As Running on Empty explains, permissive parenting when taken to the level of unintentional neglect can ricochet down generations, causing problems that often don’t manifest until adulthood. The book starts off with a quiz for emotional neglect, to determine if this is something that affects the reader. I kept a low index on the quiz on only by relying on a sibling as a parental figure. Without parental help in navigating the emotional landscape of growing up, many can suffer a feeling of emptiness, blame themselves, or exhibit ‘chronic empathic failure’. These problems may be sub-clinical, but a toolkit for addressing their symptoms is useful. Moreover, the framework of emotional neglect has allowed me to better connect with and relate to many people whose struggles I would have otherwise have found mysterious. Recommended.