Oh geez, what a loaded question... The main thing that I would change is the way the house I grew up in was kept. I'm pretty sure my dad is an undiagnosed hoarder and my mom's not much better, and the house was such a disgusting mess that I was embarrassed to ever have friends come over. There were also roaches that didn't seem to concern my parents much, and they were another reason I'd hardly ever invite anyone over.

(I grew up in a wealthy suburb; roaches in people's houses were not the norm.)

It would've been nice to have had someone say 'good job' every once in while instead of saying 'well that's nice, but what about [other thing]'. Also, allowing me to become a person instead of trying to force me into the shell that they wanted me to fit into. A helluva lot less male privilege would've been nice too.
Yes, I am a bitter, bitter person.

I would have to go back more than one generation. I'd have to find both of my parents as young people, find a place in their lives, and be a source of unstinting, unhesitating, unconditional love.

If they had grown up knowing unconditional love, they might have been able to offer it.

I've been thinking a lot lately of the sorrow of my young parents: each of them raised in a cool, aloof home with very little emotional expression, households old enough to believe that softness was actively damaging to children.

Then the two of them fell in love, married, and had a baby upon whom they could shower their blooming sense of deep, unflinching love. (I wasn't there, of course, but from stories of The Old Days, I suspect this is about what was happening to them.)

... and then their first baby died. How awful that must have been, how stunting and crushing, what a betrayal of their new experience of love and affection.

I wish I could soften some of that pain, some of that brutal slapping down by fate. I wish I could go back in time and give them pure, flowing love --- not only to show them how valuable it is and so they could pass it on to their future children, but simply because they needed that love.

Eh, I have some thoughts about this, but I don't spend much time with them. At this age they're more like reflections/insights/explanations than grievances or issues, and I can see that on the whole I was very lucky with drawing a good family from the deck. If I could change one thing, it would probably be teaching me how to better relate with people of all kinds, and support the development of confidence a bit more, maybe. But that's probably a very standard answer from the children of geeky/writerly introverts.

As to what I'd change, well, I'd want to be very supportive and encouraging. But I'm pretty sure whatever project you take on as a parent, you fuck up somewhere else. It's sort of inevitable that imperfect people raise imperfect people, and so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby.

I wish I could have been raised WITHOUT all the Southern Baptist bullshit. I know my mom believed it all sincerely at the time, but a lot of heartache could have been avoided had it not been there. I also wish I'd understood my mom's emotional instability at a much younger age than what I finally did.

Overall I give my parents huge kudos for the job they did raising me and my brother, especially given the dysfunction they both grew up with (minor in my dad's case, major in my mom's). Even though I'm not really a lot like either one of them, I think I'm mostly a product of the way they raised me, and not a rebellion against it.

I guess I wish my Dad tried to get to know who I was. It seems like half the time he was trying to force things on me that he thought I should like, and then on the other hand always getting angry or disgusted with whatever I did.

He really showered a lot of attention on my older sister. Like, he coached her soccer team, but never spent any time with me at soccer. Gave her books that were special to him; gave me books that he didn't want to talk to me about because he thought they were crap. He tried to force me to ride a bike too young, and then when I learned to ride it on my own later, he didn't care at all.

Notorious family story: I broke my arm playing soccer in the driveway (with a basketball) and he refused to believe it was broken. He got a splint from work, an old one like a long glove with a metal spoon in it. For three days I was complaining and crying because of the pain but I guess he just thought I was a pussy. Finally my Mom made him take me into the hospital and sure enough I had a fracture.

So I guess if I had to change something about how I was raised, maybe it would be accidentally hitting my Dad right in the nuts more often, you know, with wiffle ball bats and penalty kicks like on those funniest home videos. Real hard, right in the nuts. Maybe once a year; never on purpose or anything.

Heh -- funny this question came up just before Thanksgiving.

I recently discovered how much was within a 45-minute walk of my (rural farmland) childhood home. Had my mom not kept us on such a short leash as to how far and where we could go until we were 16, my life overall would have been much better. So so much.

] Encouragement to reach out beyond my limits would have been nice as well, but that was more a general affliction of the entire region. Even our high school guidance counselors lacked such vision. [

What would I change?

The unrelenting negativity. It was endless. I was never encouraged to strive for anything because it probably wouldn't work out anyway. And if something went well, there was always a negative comment about it.

1. no drunken father
2. no children, see #1

Fun. Exploration. I had this whole thing of what was proper. And no, I didn't conform to that, I rebelled, but, well I see my co-worker's youngest daughter visit her at work and just be amazingly cute and happy and self directed because she is wearing her rain boots on the opposite feet and it isn't even raining, and everyone thinks it's cool, and cute, and not wrong, and I hope she grows up happier and freer than I did, I think Co-worker is a good Mom.

I think most parents try to provide what they feel their parents didn't. Of course then they run the risk of making a different mistake.
But more than that I believe that parenting is mainly done with ones personality. So you can make some conscious choices but a large part is a given for better or for worse.
So I'd quote Wilde and conclude that most parents deserve forgiveness for their failings.

Those generalities don't say anything specific about me. That is because I don't spend time on counter-factuals, because I find it unbecoming for someone my age to complain about my upbringing and because I feel uncomfortable putting very personal information on a public website.

so easy...

my dad died when I was 6 months old...

I would change that....

Oh and now I think that sounds too weird and creepy and final. I am at my Dad's place right now, we get along okay. But he's got an alcohol addiction and pretty much has for my entire life and it's sort of a bummer and it's easy to have it top the list of "things I'd change" because I'm pretty sure it would have made a big and interesting difference. maybe not even for the better, but there's definitely part of living with someone who is only partly there where you spend a lot of time thinking "if only..."

talk about two ends of a continuum.

hang in there, Jessamyn....

I could go on about finding the good parts, but that would be a bit trite after those two comments juxti'ed as they did (I claim that word!).

Happy thanksgiving everyone...

Oh well this is a really big big question, too big for a Friday night when I'm already down as hell. I tried to raise my kids to not flinch when they were touched because you know in my house growing up we didn't touch at all and I think that's been a problem for me my whole life. I don't know how to interpret just, like, a friendly pat. But my kids are comfortable with that kind of thing, so that one has worked out. What else? I tried to be honest with them about everything always because that was something else we didn't have much of and now in retrospect I think perhaps I took that too far and should have kept more things quiet longer. I tried to raise them to not fear their parents and so they don't and again in retrospect, particularly in my son's case, maybe a bit more fear might have been a good thing. And I didn't try to force them into a mold that I apparently had full blown in my head that had nothing to do with them, I didn't try to fake some kind of existence that had no basis in anything real and I spent a lot of time learning who they honestly are. Or I think I did, but who knows, really? Parenting is a cavalcade of errors, sometimes, a minefield of love.

It took me many years to realize that my parents really did the best they could with what they had and no, probably they should not have had children, but they did. And they tried and, well, it didn't work out very well but there were books and dogs, so, okay. Is it normal to pray that your parents will get divorced? We did. My mother was pretty wonderful, really, and my father, well. The war fucked him up, I think, the war and his own mother and, just, I don't know. Genetics. The world. Alcoholism. There's a lot to say there and most of it is not so happy. But they're both gone now and I did love them and I miss them, you know? Even my dad.

Ach. That sounds so sad, Jessamyn, Huronbob and Mygothlaundry.
I have my own if-only's but alcoholism was never part of the equation.

It took me many years to realize that my parents really did the best they could with what they had and no, probably they should not have had children, but they did.

Well said, and I've come to believe that this is really true for almost everybody. Maybe there are a small handful of people each of us know that really should be parents, but we can all see they're in the minority.

That's OK.

The imperfection of parents is OK, because we get people out of it. We get lives out of it. It does suck that people go into parenting swinging blind and hampered by their own unacknowledged aches and failings. And yet, there is something wantonly beautiful in that it just fucking happened - that's nature.

It definitely sucks that some parents weren't/aren't all there or weren't/aren't all that one should be when embarking on parenthood. And yet, I don't want to give up any of the PEOPLE they made. If the world were suddenly purged of all the people who had clumsy, imperfect, absent or damaging parents, I'm not sure the aggregate result is really better. Just in this thread - you mean, if we insisted only fully self-actualized people be parents, we'd have no Jessamyn? No mgl? No Elsa? No me? --I'd say no thanks to that. I'd say that even though there's a random, amoral, complicated aspect to the human drive to reproduce, that we are almost all the products of people who, if they had thorough advice and proper counseling at the time, would probably not have chosen to have us. And yet, stupidly and courageously, they did. And that's why a lot of us - most of us? - and the things we have done and the people we are, are here at all.

Less abuse and neglect for starters.

I think that I may have been a good parent, but with my background I'm glad I chose not to be one.

If the world were suddenly purged of all the people who had clumsy, imperfect, absent or damaging parents, I'm not sure the aggregate result is really better.

And yet, the realization that my parents (who did so much better than their own parents) did the best they could, but that it simply wasn't enough, and that it's okay for me to acknowledge that --- that was a powerful revelation for me, and a fairly recent one. Just because they did their best doesn't mean it was enough, doesn't mean I didn't deserve more, doesn't mean that their stingy, stinging reluctance to love was my fault. It had nothing to do with me.

And seeing the pattern repeated over generations has helped me come to terms with not having children myself. For a long time, I expected and hoped to be a parent, but it's recently occurred to me that no matter how much I want it, maybe I ought not to be a parent. I know that many children have worse parents that I would be... but they all deserve better.

And yet, the realization that my parents (who did so much better than their own parents) did the best they could, but that it simply wasn't enough, and that it's okay for me to acknowledge that --- that was a powerful revelation for me, and a fairly recent one.

Oh god, yes. My parents were fine, but I've been listening to stories for the past several weeks from kids who were either physically and sexually abused by their parents or else whose parents sided with the kid's sexual abuser and blamed the kid for somehow inviting the abuse, and you know what? That shit's not ok. It's not forgivable. I don't care how bad the parents' childhoods were. It's not ok. And it's both breaking my heart and making me want to punch holes in walls that these kids are taking that blame on themselves and trying to find excuses for parents who not only didn't protect but, in many cases, actively put their kids in harm's way. And these kids are too scared to get angry about that. I'm trying not to do their anger for them, but it's hard not to come home and punch walls. And cry.

Anyway. As for my own shit, I wish my family hadn't been quite so geared toward toughing it out as our main, or sometimes only, coping mechanism. It's a frustrating journey to try to move toward more emotional openness and greater comfort with vulnerability. That's definitely something I'd want to give my kids.

To have been as far away from my mother as possible.

Wow. I always knew I was very lucky to grow up in a happy home. My parents are just .. great. They loved and nurtured us, supported us, gave us firm limits, high standards and lots of encouragement. There really isn't anything about them I would change. They are human so of course they made mistakes but nothing that compares to what everyone else here endured. I wish they'd found me an alternative school early on, when I sort of disengaged myself from the public school system and just did the bare minimum to get by .. but even so, I got a decent education and graduated from college and have a very gratifying career.

We aren't a Beaver Cleaver type family .. we had and have disagreements, and my sister gets mad at me sometimes, and all that, but there have always been really firm yet unspoken rules about being decent to one another, about steadfast support for each other and about the way we conduct ourselves as a family unit. I remember visiting a friend's house, where she and her sisters said "shut up" to each other, and argued and talked back to their parents, and that just horrified me. We didn't do that in my house.

So, I hope to be the same type of parent to my son. I love him for who and what he is, not for what I might imagine I want him to be. And I'll make mistakes with him but if I aim to give him the kind of upbringing that I had, he'll know he's adored, cherished, respected and blessed.

Am I the only one who had this kind of upbringing?

Kangaroo, that's how my family looks from the outside, and how it looks from the inside if you aren't looking hard. That's how it looked to me until ten or fifteen years ago, when I started looking harder at my own problems and sought out the roots of them. I started seeing how my problems and my siblings' problems meshed, and how they all developed from the hesitant quality of our parents' love for us, and for each other.

I know I'm luckier than lots of people and so were my siblings, that our upbringing was free of abuse and major hardships, and I don't mean to minimize those horrors by describing my own parents' shortcomings. But they are shortcomings, and they did a number on me. It's good to see it, because it's the terrain I live on and now I can navigate around it.

the realization that my parents (who did so much better than their own parents) did the best they could, but that it simply wasn't enough, and that it's okay for me to acknowledge that ---

Oh, absolutely, and I didn't mean it was not necessary to acknowledge that.

It does sadden me, though, to hear people say it's better that they didn't become a parent because of that past. It's definitely not necessary to repeat the cycle, as occhiblu says, and the way you avoid that is to acknowledge and work to see yourself and your life differently than you were taught. I know lots of people whose childhoods were various kinds of awful messes who have become parents, and loving and strong ones as well, despite their inevitable flaws. It worries me that my generation has over-idealized parenting; sometimes it seems we collectively think that only the perfectly blessed should reproduce. I don't believe that, while still not winking an eye at abuse or any such thing.

It does sadden me, though, to hear people say it's better that they didn't become a parent because of that past.

For my own part, my (relatively easy) family troubles were not the cause of my childlessness; that's a fact of timing and circumstance. (And who knows? My own preference would be to adopt or foster an older at-risk kid, and someday we may be in a position to do that.)

But my own (again, relatively easy and privileged) family history has made me turn over in my head the idea: would I be, or would I have been, a good enough parent? I just don't know. I hope so, and I know I'd strive to do better every day, as I suspect every good parent does.

But certainly my doubts make me feel better about the very real sorrow of not having children. And my long-term examination of my past has allowed me to be happier, more open, and more loving of the people in my life ---- including my mother, who will never really be able to give it back freely. But now that makes me only a little sad for her, instead of stupidly shattered or mutely angry.

It's okay. It's sad for her that she can't fully and freely love me, because I'm AWESOME. But it's okay for me, now. Finally.

I'm going to be away from my desk for the rest of the day. This has been a fascinating conversation, and I'm sorry to leave it.

It does sadden me, though, to hear people say it's better that they didn't become a parent because of that past.

This is something I hear from people from time to time. With respect, it's often from people who did not grow up in neglectful or abusive households. Nothing personal at all, but I don't want to raise a child with a decent genetic chance of being schizophrenic or having a problem with alcohol. I don't want to have a kid and have my inappropriate parents be inappropriate with them or with me about my child. I see not having children as a totally valid choice for me to make no matter what my family situation is. But actually given my personal situation, it's actually a fairly smart choice because of my upbringing, background, personality, and temperament.

For me, part of undoing the baggage of my parents' terrible marriage [and yes, they did the best they could, and it broke both of their lives completely in ways that are irreparable] was deciding to make different choices for myself which meant not entertaining a husband+kids+house+whatever fantasy that flat out doesn't work for me, for my type of person, for my situation.

I'm not idealizing parenting or motherhood and saying I don't measure up. I'm idealizing my life right now and saying children would fuck it up. Nothing personal to my wonderful friends who choose to have children but parenting should be a free and open choice for people to make or not make. The fact that it basically wasn't for my parents' generation is one of the reasons so many families crashed and burned [among other reasons]. You had kids because it's what you did, not because you wanted to, or were good at it, or had any plan at all. And then you had a lump it. I'm happy to live in an age where my choice is, for the most part, respected.

Sorry for the essay, this is a bit of a hot button for me.

I feel odd having to defend what I said above, but:

There are other reasons that I chose not to have children. There is alcoholism in my family going back at least three generations, there is addictions in general going back at least three generations, heart disease and cancer seem to love my family, there is also diabetes and depression (not just me, ancestors and siblings as well), not having enough money or health care, marrying a man who already had a grown son and grandchildren and didn't want more (which was fine with me as I was ambivalent at that point). Neglect and abuse were just a part of the decision. As I said, I think I would have been a good parent, but there are other issues involved.

I love my younger brothers and sisters, but in truth, I'd choose to remain an only, the way I started.

And I'm a childless woman too, mostly by choice. When I finally met the man I'd be willing to have a child with, he too felt he didn't want children, because of the abuse by his own dad in his own background. There is a lot to be said for being childless, though people don't like to acknowledge the fact.

I have gone through a lot of stages. Was in therapy some about family issues, and for a long time felt that I had a shitty upbringing. Lately, I have changed my feelings about that. Partially this has come because several other people around my age who grew up on my block have told me that they used to like my house because we were the "good" family, meaning that the level of dysfunction was a lot lower.

I was a middle child and middle children love to be dramatic about their pain.

But if I could change anything it would be my ATTITUDE about it all. A few small tweaks in that would have resulted in a happier childhood.

And, oh yeah. . .I would have loved to me more careful about being in the sun, but then a lot of social life happened on the beach, and tan skin was the uniform of choice, and the options for sun screen were either zinc oxide or this horrible stuff called Afil, which was pink and smelled horrible.

I'm only 22, so looking back on my upbringing is not something I think I have the perspective to do yet. If we're being honest, I'm still being brought up.

That said, I wish my parents had been less...pressuring. That pressure instilled in me a need to please them and then triggered total anxiety meltdowns when I couldn't do that. It sounds like ridiculous preteen angsting, but I wish they had understood what I was going through at ages 12-20, and I wish they had been nicer about it. I wish I had been more comfortable talking to them about the way I felt; a lot of pain and suffering could have been avoided.

I also wish that my mother had been more open to who I was, and what I needed, and less stubbornly fixated on things that didn't matter at all - like her baffling insistence that I not use a real razor to shave my legs at 13, but use instead either depilatory cream or an electric razor, when all I wanted was a normal razor like everyone else.

But they loved me and wanted the best for me, and they did what they thought was right. When all is said and done, I was lucky to grow up in their house.

I would have had my father not knock up my mother's best friend and fuck off, leaving her to cope with four kids under school age alone in a time when divorce was a shameful thing and single parents were shunned by society. Now that I have a son, I'm acutely aware of what I missed out on. I'm trying to make sure my son gets the guidance I didn't in becoming a man, although I'm not really sure what that means.

If I could go back, I wouldn't have kids again because I just don't think I'm properly equipped to be a parent.

I'm happy to live in an age where my choice is, for the most part, respected.

I can't claim to know you other than your public persona, but it seems like you have a pretty bitchen life. And having a kid would bite into that and give you a lot less flexibility, so I guess I just want to say, keep on living that life a lot of us sorta wish we could.

(Had one kid, which I was very ambivalent about beforehand but so so glad I did.)

I really want to clarify what I'm saying, because it's hard for me to talk about these ideas without looking like I'm critiquing anybody's choices, which I'm not. I hope everyone here knows that I in no way am judging any choices made by anyone or anyone's personal decisions. There's no way I can possibly have enough detail and understanding of individual perspectives to do that and it wouldn't be my place even if I did. But there's a specific point of view that I have heard now and then from people who have endured serious family problems, and that's the idea that by virtue of that history alone, they consider themselves unfit to be parents, even though they would actively want to have children.

Both in and outside of my own immediate family, I have certainly seen the children of alcoholism (generations of), suicide, depression, PTSD, violence, and so on have children who are not impacted by those ills. In other words, it is possible for those lineages to end. There is always concern for the risk and reason for continued personal reflection and growth to do what's possible to control the risk, but since most of those difficulties are increasingly being shown to result from combinations of nature (genetic predisposition) and nurture (how and by whom you're raised), what happens in the environment might mean that any genetic predisposition that made it through the dice roll is never expressed. Also, the other protective factors in a child's life can vary widely based on situation.

(I realize that I might feel this way largely based on personal experience - my mother's own family of origin was drastically dysfunctional, alcoholic/absent/verbally abusive father etc. My own immediate family, which she created, did not feature most of these issues. We did have others, including a depressive tendency and my dad's PTSD in addition to the fallout family drama from my mom's generation).

I certainly recognize that there are ton of good reasons not to have children and that no one should ever have them if they don't want to, because that's the worst-case scenario for everybody. I am sure that the bulk of those decisions are excellent ones, and at my age I certainly know from my own personal life that they are never easy decisions. Nor do I operate with archaic ideas that parenting is some kind of automatic requirment or standard life path, that parenting is the only way to be fully human blah blah blah -- that was always a nonsense cultural narrative and still is - the world needs all kinds of people, parents and nonparents, aunts and uncles and friends and people who use the time and energy they've gained to be community members and artists and travelers and writers and moviemakers and CEOs and people who do all the different kinds of work a society has to do. And then there's population control anyway. When you throw in personal preferences and life choices there are bazillion good reasons not to go the parent route. I'm hugely in favor of and respectful of the choice not to raise children, and making sure that's not considered a negative. There are factors that make it a flat-out rational decision.

What I mean about what "saddens" me I'm not talking about these decisions, which are basically satisfying, rewarding ones for the people who have made them even if tinged now and then by 'road not taken' stuff like what Elsa mentions. What I'm talking about specifically are the more painful emotional-reactive perspectives I sometimes hear expressed -- in other words, I'm addressing not statements like "I don't want to have children and it's the right choice for me," but "I would have liked to have children, but with my family background it's probably better that I didn't because I am too damaged and would have fucked up as a parent." That self-evaluation seems directly related to the toll that bad parenting can take on an individual, that it can extend to the point of causing not only doubt in oneself and one's worth and capability and tranquillity as one grows up, but even one's ability to consider themselves fundamentally capable of being able to be a decent parent and have a functioning family if they were to choose to.

I'll stop commenting because I am aware that it is a hot-button issue and that everyone is entitled to choose what's right for them. We all know people who have dealt with this in different ways and everything works out differently and complexly based on the individual. What I want to do is speak up in support of people who might like to have families, but fear their own background has shaped them for an utter inability to perform well as parents themselves. To me, that is very rarely true, assuming that recovery, reflection, support, and the development of a healthier self-concept has been taking place in that person's adult life (not always the case). So I'm saying that for those who wish to become parents and for whom this is the only major obstacle to them pursuing parenthood, I hope they would find a way to address this obstacle and question the idea that it's something they would be incapable of doing. If they wanted to.

You're absolutely right of course, Miko. In some ways, people who lived through a dysfunctional childhood (however defined) are in a better position to be good parents, because they can work to avoid the factors that made their own childhood difficult. My own comment about not feeling equipped for parenthood was simply a reflection on my perception of my personality - I'm simply too selfish to be able to truly dedicate myself to the needs of others. Although I try not to be this way, I feel like I'm faking it most of the time and that can't be a good thing.

I've heard lots of similar ideas expressed by my friends who are parents, and even my own parents now that they can talk about it. No matter how well you do it, it's not possible to do perfectly. I don't know that you need to dedicate yourself fully to the needs of others - that can be taken to an extreme, too, and be a dysfunction in its own right. That's some of what I meant by 'idealization' of parenting.