Sometimes, this healing involves cutting your parents or other family members out of your life. And this is one hundred percent okay to do. Even if it makes them angry or they write you out of the will or they say really mean things about you. Even if they say you are a disrespectful child and they don’t understand why you don’t respect your elders.
Pro tip from me to you: Respect is a two-way street, and you don’t owe anybody shit.
The Ways Our Parents Fail Us
I know what you’re thinking. How is childhood trauma a Millennial issue? It’s not—but we are the ones behind an “epidemic” of family estrangement. According to psychologist Joshua Coleman, “Parenting has changed more in the last forty years than it did in the few centuries before that… The principles of obligation, duty and respect that Baby Boomers and generations before them had for their elders aren’t necessarily there anymore.”9 (Shout out to my Gen-X friends who are joining us in this unsavory destruction of society.)
In a post on Bustle, writer Gabrielle Moss shares my difficulty in finding data to support this bubble of estranged Millennials who don’t call their parents to gab about their day like besties. She says: “We don’t want to raise our voices to say, ‘I didn’t get told I was special, I was told I was a piece of crap who ruined my mother’s life,’ because we’re afraid to find out that we really are wrong, twisted, different from everyone else.”10
It’s important to note that, while child abuse, neglect, and other traumas are being called out more publicly and freely than in generations past, actual rates of abuse are trending on a major decline. Consider the following excerpt from Millennials Rising, published in 2000:
In this new era of hypersensitivity, people have been alarmed by government reports that child abuse is on the rise. In particular, the 1996 National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect caused a great stir by reporting a huge jump of over 50 percent in the rates of most types of child abuse…between 1986 and 1993. Research by the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System shows the problem getting sharply worse in the early ‘90s and then better in the late ‘90s. All these scenarios are troubling: Is the rate of child abuse really going up?
The answer is: probably not. What the government numbers track is not the actual incidence rate, but the official intervention rate. And in the Millennial child era, experts suspect that rising interventions parallel a rising willingness by neighbors, teachers, nurses, and officers to report possible cases of abuse. As for the trend in actual incidence, the best personal survey data…point in the opposite direction: toward a dramatic decline of over 40 percent in the rate of parental violence against children from 1975 to 1992.11
—Neil Howe and William Strauss,
Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation
Millennials are not unique in having experienced traumatic childhoods. But when we are mistreated, abused, neglected, etc.—we talk about it. Hence, I’ll be exploring these factors of abuse in my book about Millennials, because we’re working to normalize and destigmatize talking about abuse. We’re not keeping the family secrets anymore.
Poor parenting has an infinite number of sources and explanations but often takes one of two main tracks in how it is inflicted upon a child: ignoring or engulfing. While there are myriad ways a parent or caregiver may inflict trauma and suffering onto a child, this chapter will deal more with emotional trauma from parents who fail to meet a child’s psychological needs for love, approval, affection, and more. The ongoing struggle of children who did not receive emotional support growing up can and will follow them into adulthood and impact their ability to function in the world, in personal and professional relationships, as I mentioned before.
What More Could You Want: The Ignoring Parent
The “ignoring” parent fails to show up for the child’s needs. On the most extreme end of this spectrum, there is neglect and abuse: not feeding a child, abusing a child physically or sexually, failing to provide a child with adequate clothing, and so on. In general, the non-extreme variety of ignoring parents tend to their children’s physical needs but fail to meet their emotional needs. These emotionally neglectful parents may leave a young child to cry when upset or tell them to get over it or shut up. They may shame or bully their child, overtly favor a sibling over the ignored child, or not pay attention to their child’s emotional symptoms like depression or anxiety. The feeling of this parent is something in the neighborhood of, “You have a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food to eat, so what more could you want?” The answer, of course, is love, support, and attention, which are fundamental building blocks of healthy adult relationships.
The ignored child grows up to be an overachiever, hoping time after time that they’ll finally get their parents’ attention. Or they grow up to be a self-saboteur, knowing that their efforts have never mattered and will never matter, so why bother? Children of neglectful parents may develop anxiety (how can I do this so I won’t mess up or disappoint someone?), depression (what’s the point in trying, no one cares), substance abuse problems (I just want to feel something or not feel anything), and eating disorders (I just want to control something in my life).
My own childhood was one with an ignoring parent; my mother just didn’t know what to do with emotions. She dropped out of school and left home to live with her grandmother at age fourteen and subsequently grew up very fast. She then expected her children to also act like miniature adults, despite the fact that play and imagination are more developmentally appropriate than scrubbing and re-scrubbing the bathtub. My sister and I grew up feeling like we had to chase Mom’s approval through achievement in school and by performing our chores flawlessly. Laziness was the ultimate sin in our house.
From menstruation to sexuality to body image, my mother had no idea how to encourage growth, competence, or confidence. As a twelve-year-old, I asked her if I was fat. She approximated my BMI in her head, ran it through the filter of newspaper articles she had read about obesity in children, and left her response at “Yes.” When we had “the talk” about sex, I learned nothing of sexual pleasure or safe sex practices, but I did learn that it was the only thing guys want and that if I “came home pregnant, the only help [she] would offer me is the number to Planned Parenthood.” There was no safe space to learn what it means to be a girl or woman beyond “Don’t talk with food in your mouth.” It was all about image and propriety, never about what we needed emotionally. My childhood was spent aimlessly but thoroughly applying myself toward different projects in the hope that something would make her notice me as a person and not an extension of a mop.
When my physical needs demanded a trip to the doctor to investigate shortness of breath in gym class, I was prescribed an inhaler for exercise-induced asthma. My mother told me it was a fake inhaler the doctor prescribed me as a placebo and I just needed to lose weight. When I asked to go to therapy at age fourteen because I was suicidal, she let me see the open bills on the kitchen counter and did nothing to stop me from feeling guilty over needing care. At the same time, she told me I didn’t have depression and there was nothing wrong with me. When I was actually diagnosed with not only anxiety but severe anxiety at age twenty-eight, I was shocked. I assumed on some level that I had been faking it or making it up.
Countless friends and acquaintances have had similar experiences with their own parents.
Long story short: when parents act like the needs of their child don’t matter, don’t exist, or are a burden, it affects the child in fundamental ways into adulthood.
In a 2003 study published in Child Abuse & Neglect, Volume 27, Issue 11, researchers investigated
