People get their ideas about how to parent from their parents, consciously and unconsciously. Consciously, they make decisions about what sort of parent they’d like to be based on the impact of their parents’ parenting. Often a conclusion may be reached which implies a belief in a causal relationship between one particular behavior and one particular outcome. The thinking might be, “If I don’t do this, that won’t happen”, or conversely, “If I do that, then this will happen”.   One of the errors in this thinking is the belief that human behavior is predictable. While behavior can be modified, learned, or trained, it cannot be predicted. Barring one possible exception: When you do one thing in order to make sure  another doesn’t happen, you can almost predict that the thing you’re trying to avoid, will, somehow, happen!

Another significant error in this thinking is the assumption that one specific behavior is, in fact, the particular one that caused the respective outcome. A common mistake made by parents is the accompanying error in logic that says, if “a” causes “b” then no “a” will mean no “b”. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater often,. Paradoxically leads parents to the same outcome trying to avoid one behavior and ultimately creating it).   Instead of thinking in all or nothing terms, the real question is- was it too much or too little and finally the question comes to “How much is enough?”. One very common example of this revolves around the issue of parental involvement in a child’s life. If a person is aware of the impact of his own parents’ non-involvement, to become very involved, and perhaps, overinvolved, in the child’s life.   Unfortunately for many, this may additionally take the form of underinvolvement in their own lives (i.e. experiencing themselves in the same way they were experienced by their parents).

The mistake here is in assuming that the parent was not involved with the child’s life, and that the solution must be to become involved in your child’s life. What is probably the most likely scenario is that the parent’s ability to be involved outside of himself at all was very limited, which affected his ability to be involved with and engaged with the child.   Ideally, a relationship with each parent should be reciprocal, mutual, and balanced with each parent having the ability to be engaged with and involved with himself and with his child in a consistent enough fashion to evoke a solid sense of trust. Many times, however, instead of maintaining a balanced relationship both with oneself and with the child, parents often “throw out” their relationship with themselves, to avoid experiencing themselves as if they were their own “selfish parent”, thus creating an imbalance which, in fact, is good for neither parent nor the child.

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