I had to think pretty hard since my upbringing was very stable and supportive. Their “worst mistake”, and I think a lot of people can relate, is they began watching Fox News on a regular basis and bought into it hook, line, snd sinker. For parents that were at one time big pbs supporters, preached tolerance, help the needy, etc. they slowly became jaded old people who blamed “those people” whomever Fox was targeting at the time for all the problems in the world.
That didn’t really happen when you were at your most impressionable.
Sad, nonetheless.
Just think of these poor kids in homes with rabid Republicans as parents. Now.
Good lord, another generation lost.
My parents were Presbyterian missionaries. I got all the values and none of the faith.
I still curse them all the time with “my fuckin’ missionary parents.” In context of things like forgiveness of all the times my ex had affairs and stupid stuff like that. In many ways, my life would prolly be better without that forgiveness gene. That said, those missionaries really incubated in some basic qualities that proved to be foundational when taking care of my special needs, very autism spectrum youngest.
As with others here, I think the mistakes were more patterns than one-offs. They made a series of choices which resulted in my being alone most of the time while growing up, and also were careful to communicate that they wanted me to be self-sufficient (and maybe out of the house) by age 16. That’s not actually what they wanted, but my dad said it a lot, and I didn’t know he was joking because I didn’t know him that well, despite living in the same house! I always felt rather unloved and unwanted, which wasn’t the case, but a child’s confirmation bias found plenty of evidence to support the hypothesis. Thank you, therapy as an adult!
Nowhere near the level of abuse others have mentioned (and my four grandparents were certainly abusive, which accounts for a lot of my parents’ blind spots). One parent, like the OP, was raised Jehovah’s Witness, which really really fucks you up. People who don’t know about that religion have no idea how toxic the culture is. My parents knew what NOT to do, and managed that part of it pretty well.
As for specific mistakes, I think it was letting me quit music lessons without asking why. I was learning the violin, and my muscles hurt. Two things I didn’t know, as an eight-year-old: the muscles would get stronger, and practice would help me improve. I thought I’d have to be in pain and sound bad forever. I feel now that it would have been pretty easy to disabuse me of these notions, but no one asked.
I don’t know what other MLM companies were like, but Amway was a full-on cult with chanting, manifestation lore, pamphlets showing shiny happy people living in a utopian future, etc
My dad died when I was eight.
My mother devoted her life to raising 3 kids on her limited teacher’s salary, and we had a great upbringing, living at schools with pools, trampolines, lots of space.. for14 years.
Then she met someone. And married him.
Nobody likes him. Not even his own kids, who rarely speak to him, and not my brother, sister or I.
He’s old school racist, sexist, chauvenist. He does nothing but golf & TV (thankfully not Twitter!), while my mother fusses over him and does all the work. They live off an inheritance from my mother’s mother, as he has no cash or investments.
My brother made the apt joke “Mum has just got a new pet”.
Oh well. She seems OK but none of us visit unless he is out playing golf.
My mother was constantly worried about money. Maybe it came from growing up in the Depression.
Anything fun was usually too expensive. “Mom, Dad, can we go to Disney World this year?” “No, it’s too expensive.” "Can we go skiing this weekend? “No, it’s too expensive.” “Mom, can I take guitar lessons?” “No, you play already play piano, and guitar lessons are too expensive.”
It was years before I learned that “it’s too expensive” was Mom-speak for “I don’t want to do it; therefore, we won’t do it.”
Another of Mom’s worries was … well, to put it plainly, being cheap. We ate store-brand products, “because they’re cheaper.” My sister and I were encouraged to go to university in our home city, because we could live at home and not living in residence/dorms at a school out of town “was cheaper.” And later, “Why would you want to move out, because living at home is cheaper? Why do you need a car, because the subway is cheaper?”
I didn’t buy this. I got the hell out, bought a car, got an apartment, and earned the wrath of my mother for the rest of her life.
My sister, however, bought it, hook, line, and sinker. She lived at our Dad’s house until she got married at age 28, because “it was cheaper than moving out.” To this day, Sis does things as cheaply as possible. Her kids did post-secondary education in their city, so they could live at home, “because it’s cheaper.” Costco is her friend “because it’s cheaper.” Sis has taken me to task for flying business class. “Coach is just as good; it gets you there, and it’s cheaper.” Hell, Sis has been known to haggle with real estate agents over their commissions, when she has bought and sold property.
I love my sister dearly, but I think that Mom warped her into thinking that “save as much money as you can, and get the cheapest deal” is best. Sis has taken this attitude to almost pathological heights.
The irony in all this? Sis is a millionaire, and so is her husband. She can afford to spend money.
My parents did not know how to discipline children. My mother was given to hyperbole, and my father was lazy, so discipline was a constant string of threats that were rarely enforced.
I mostly did what I wanted, and got yelled at a lot, but no real consequences. When they did actually follow through with something, I was shocked and angry. It didn’t have the desired effect, because it seemed random and out-of-the-blue, which it would not have been if it were the typical and expected consequence of whatever I had done.
You couldn’t tell my parents anything, because they had PhDs and were smart, and could reason through anything. My aunt, who was brilliant at parenting, but did not even have a college education (just what then used to be called “secretarial school,” and amounted to an associate’s degree), tried to model better parenting for them, and took care of me a lot when my parents were working. They never understood why I behaved perfectly in my aunt’s presence.
Best thing they ever did was hand me over to my aunt & uncle when I was a teenager. My grades were good in high school, and I’m not sure I would have made it through if I’d lived with my parents.
Dad taking his first drink.
Worst mistake? Getting married too young, getting married at all, IMO. Mom was youngest of eight from an immigrant family and Dad was younger of two (his brother became rich, educated, and sophisticated - Dad struggled to find a job at 19 and later enough to support a family, since neither knew anything about birth control.). I came along exactly nine months after the hurried wedding and ‘spoiled all their fun’ forever. My mother despised being married and a housewife, a bitter angry narcissist. She was neglectful, mean, and super-prudish, as I grew older called me a slut and a whore! … She had a friend who was a career girl who traveled, had several men in her life, never married but was a kept woman for a while. My mother adored her and dropped everything to listen to her latest tales of being mistress to one or the other… My grandmother raised me part time, weekends and summer vacations. That woman was a saint, loved her with all my heart… My father never voluntarily spoke one word to me - he just lived for my mother! He ignored me as a costly nuisance. The house was filled with tension 24/7 and I spent as much time as possible at friends and relatives (many of whom lived right across the street). … Along came two brothers later, “it’s a boy! Huzzah!” twice, and things settled down because, sportsball and watching The Game. One went on to become rich, educated and sophisticated.
I had a pretty good upbringing, compared to a lot of stories here. There was no abuse or alcoholism at our home.
However, praise or encouragement was virtually unheard-of. There was a thread here many years ago discussing the “midwestern way of parenting,” which was never to praise or compliment your children because it might give them a swelled head. Although I was raised in southern California, both of my parents were from the midwest.
I think I remember two sentences of praise from my parents in my whole life: my mom once called me a “capable driver”, and my dad once said “you look like a young lady” on the day I cut my hair into a chin-length bob. Both times I was gobsmacked to hear these weird phrases come from them.
So when I was eighteen or nineteen, I was so starved for approval or compliments that I fell for the first loser guy who called me pretty.
I don’t see what’s wrong with any of those things? Sounds like Sis is perfectly normal.
My father was severely abusive, physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually. My mother was emotionally neglectful. Both of them had the EQ of small children.
I’ve posted a lot about the abuse so I don’t want to rehash it, but one example is that when I got into seventh grade and got my first report card, straight A’s except a B in PE, my father came down really hard on me. Most people would assume that it was because it wasn’t all A’s. Nope. I was doing too well. After that, each report card would see the pressure increase higher and higher until finally in ninth grade, I intentionally lowered my grades to a B average and that was good enough for my father. Later, I found out one sibling lowered their GPA to a C+ and another lowered hers to a B -.
I got the shit beat out of me once because my dad had a dream someone was in his room and it was convinced it was me. He beat me until I confessed. Not only did I have to confess, I had to give a good reason why I had been there.
Pretty much anything else was just noise. I’m sure he did some good things in his life, and had his share of normal flaws, but it was lost in the overwhelming abuse.
My father was just great at undermining my self-confidence. The only thing he did not undermine, thankfully, was my intelligence. Unfortunately, according to him, everything I did was wrong because I didn’t do it exactly the way he would have.
I stopped dating in my early 20s because if my father met people I was dating he would embarrass and humiliate me in front of them.
That explains some things. I was a straight-A student and it was hardly ever acknowledged. Except in my teens, in a joking way, they would say my grades were “adequate.”
I actually feel really bad for the other smart kids I knew whose parents were awful about the academic pressure they put on them.
I’m finding this thread pretty interesting. I had a pretty bad childhood, but I am always aware that there are other ways to have a bad childhood that I didn’t have.
Of course I’m sitting here wondering what my son would say twenty years from now. Because that’s the genius of this thread. No matter how good of a parent you are, there’s always going to be a worst mistake.
I don’t think my parents made ‘mistakes’. How they parented was how they were – there wasn’t anything they could have changed, I don’t think, even with an awareness that what they were doing was fucked up.
I had a picture-perfect family. We sang around the piano, my dad thought up family adventures all the time, like renting a houseboat, staying at a fancy hotel in San Francisco one night, camping by a swimmable river, ski trips. Our house was full of art and music and books and flowers. We all did well in school and graduated from college, got married and had children.
Unfortunately there were just a few minor things. My mother was incapable of expressing any interest in her children, much less love. She loathed being touched, and questions harder than what’s for dinner made her fearful and angry. I realize now that she was autistic – as her father was, and as I am – but it seemed like she hated us, and me in particular. I don’t think that was true, but what was true was completely hidden, including from herself.
We children all bear a lot of scarring from that experience. Two of us fixed blame on their siblings – I was always the scapegoat of the family, the identified patient – and now they are in their sixties and seventies, they have yet to give that up, although we were all powerless at the time, and probably I was the most powerless of the four of us. I no longer talk to those siblings. They can’t hear anything but their own comforting but completely false narratives. I’m close to the other one.
My dad is still alive, coming on 98, and if I mentioned any of the above, he would just hear ‘blah blah blah, the past, blah blah’. He could not take it in. So I don’t. I live 3000 miles away from all that now, and it is just far enough.
That goes in my minimalism Hall of Fame right next to “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
My parents were good parents. Not perfect, but no one is.
My father’s worst mistake was investing substantially all his retirement money in the stock of one Greek shipping company about which he knew almost nothing. My mother’s biggest mistake was never learning anything about money and letting my father manage it without any adult supervision. They will survive though, thanks to a defined benefit pension plan, real estate investments, and some IRAs that I set up for them. My mom’s other big mistake is being too afraid to ever see a doctor, including one to treat her crippling anxiety about doctors and many other things.
Yes, but I think that there are people for whom, on balance, that worst mistake is not that bad, or an aberration. And there are kids who for whom almost anything is going to be a mistake. I always think of the aphorism that people don’t remember what you do, they remember how you made them feel. I think that’s true.
True; but “Frequently overcooking the vegetables,” “Not keeping the house very clean,” and “Leaving loaded firearms around, which is how I lost my leg,” are all in different paradigms.
I guess I was lucky that my parents realized I needed consistency they couldn’t provide, so they let me live with people who could, and who also loved me a lot and wanted me. I guess they were smart, because not everyone can have that kind of perspective on themselves. I suppose that took a lot of courage, since people would wonder why your daughter wasn’t living with you. It was the 80s-- maybe they told people they were getting me away from the crime in New York.
I have no idea why my parents were such lousy disciplinarians. I suppose I was a difficult child, required vigilance, and they got tired of it, so it was easier to let me run amok, and do damage control later. They did fine with my brother, but he was the kind of kid who just did what he was told the first time. I think he kind of raised himself.
My parents were remote, though, and there was almost no hugging in our family. My brother didn’t seem to care, but I craved it, and my aunt gave it freely. I think it made me somewhat more inclined to listen to her in the first place, so part of it was that, along with her ability to be consistent.