How should you have been raised differently?

My mother – among other things – made me her confidante from an early age and while I learned a lot about people, it was inappropriate. She also tried to own me as I was growing up and didn’t give me enough space. Both my folks are dead now and I didn’t discuss this with my Mom but I freed myself from her and was still working on it when she died.

My elder son and I have had several clearing the air discussions in recent years. I’ve made a ton of mistakes but have tried to own up to them as far as I am able.

With the benefit of my adult hindsight I now further appreciate being raised the way I was.

They should have encouraged me to go to college and get a career. Dad told me girls don’t need to go to college.

I could have done without the belt/hairbrush ass beatings…even though I know I deserved them. One other thing that always bothered me is my parents suspected I smoked pot (I did) and never confronted me or talked to me about it until I got caught red-handed. We talk to our sons at least once a week about drug/alcohol issues. This has cultivated a open and free dialogue with our boys who are very comfortable to talk with us about that issue and other issues they may be involved with. My parents never did any of this with me. Otherwise I fully approve of how I was raised. Had a great childhood.

I’m not sure how to answer this… I have no evidence to suggest mine was trying to get it right in the first place.

Wow. What if? I really can’t think of much my parents did wrong to me personally. Overall they were good parents. I always felt loved and safe.

Like all people, they made mistakes. I mean, that’s life. My dad really blew it once and put our family on a much different course than it was headed. He was being groomed as a VP of the European division of his company with a clear future as CEO with headquarters in Paris. A real shooting star. This was when I was three. There were to be domestic staff, chauffeurs, Parisian and NY apartments, country homes, Swiss schools and Harvard, or Yale, or Loyola in all our futures.

I’m not sure if any of that would have made me a better person, but it certainly would have been different. But my dad got his secretary pregnant and the CEO had to quietly let him go for that. Big non-non. And off we all went in a big station wagon, along with our new little sister and a dog, to sunny California and a good, hearty, middleclass life in a neighborhood full of engineers, test pilots and other people who worked in the ultra-secret missile defense industry during the height of the Cold War back in the late 50’s and 60’s. The kids I grew up with were a lot like the ones in the film Stand by Me. Good guys. Stand up guys. So, instead of polo, I played baseball and things turned out OK. I have no complaints.

I had a great childhood. I had a single mother who made a good living. We lived in a beautiful village in a Tudor-style apartment building. We’d regularly take walks to the parks nearby and to the village, where there was a toy store, book store, stationery stores, stores with fun stuff to look at. We had enough money for vacations, we did crafts, my mom read to me a lot. I had grandparents who I spent a lot of time with, and they, too, took me places including the city (NYC about an hour away by train) to see The Rockettes, museums, stuff like that. My grandmother did sewing and baking with me and read with me a lot, which is what I credit to my love of reading. They lived in an old Victorian on the Hudson River, and their property went down to the river. We’d have my friends from the neighborhood over and we’d walk down to the river to explore. We’d also walk on a path to an old estate which was turned into a huge public park, and we’d venture up there to explore and spend time. Great childhood. I’d not change anything about it.

It’s peculiar, but I don’t think my parents viewed the world as the combat zone I’ve come to see in my declining years. I like to attribute this to the fact that those were easier times and better days, but there are disturbing indications that the flaws may very well be with the “observer”.

My father had OCD (which was not diagnosed and never discussed). As a result, he would become enraged over little things and scream and yell and sometimes hit us. I was almost grown before I realized that most people were not afraid of their fathers.

On the plus side, he was very intelligent, had a good sense of humor, was always reading and studying, and was very good at interacting with people. I did not confront him because he died quite young (at 54).

My mother treated me more as a friend than as her child, but she was a lot of fun to be around, and I miss her very much. I could not really turn to her for advice or trust her with my secrets though. She gave me a love for music and a great sense of humor. Occasionally, I confronted her about issues, but it was a fruitless exercise. She would never take any blame for anything, and she lied to me often.

After a lot of therapy, I have forgiven them and come to the realization that they did the best they could having their own childhood wounds, which were not (because of the times) dealt with.

Being an intuitive thinking personality as well as a female and being raised by sensor judger types I was a very misunderstood kid. haha
The free spirited, out of the box, highly creative and unconventional type having my round peg constantly forced into the square holes of the rigid, by the book, rules, and traditional, black & white approach to life. I wish my parents had known about personality theory and found a way to work with who I was instead of trying to strong arm me into their own mold.
The same with school system which is also, predominated by sensor judger types.

If something motivates me I excel, if it doesn’t, wild horses couldn’t get me to apply myself. Something my teachers always said about me. haha
I was the kid with the report card that was half A+‘s and half D’s and F’s. lol

Hearing “If you’re gay, we’ll kick you out of the house” when I was about 15 traumatized me. I wish they’d never threatened me as an adolescent with homelessness in a small town in deeply conservative Oklahoma in the 1970s.

I’m 52 now and have made peace with the whole thing. I have a fairly good relationship with my parents who are still alive and know I’m gay. We are friendly to each other, because we never talking about it.

Similar, asked two months ago, to fill in info: http://www.fluther.com/184240/do-you-agree-with-the-way-your-parents-raised-you/

My father never should have married my mother. And he was doubting the marriage while walking down the aisle after the ceremony! Mom was a devout Catholic who only thought about having lots of kids, with no thought about the work it took to raise so many. Both got burnt out, and increasingly more so, with each child that entered the clutch. I was number 3 of 8. If they could have stopped at just 2, things for the 4 would have gone so much better! More money, more love, more emotional support.

I should’ve been brought up by an Irish boyband on the west coast, what a life that sounds like.
“You raise me up…”

GQ!

I think my controlling tendencies could have been handled better, but I am not sure how they evolved. I do have a theory: My mum easily loses her temper, and I have been able to appear cool during arguments from a young age. Winning arguments by pretending to be strong has not taught me anything valuable. In fact, it took the loss of a friend to make me realize that those who are in control are also fairly lonely.

The other thing I wish I could change in retrospect: My parents believe in letting children share the family’s worries. I agree with that, but at times, I was given too much responsibility. My mum was completely thrown when my dad left her (and, on and off, in the years leading up to that point). She needed a lot of emotional support. My sister and I stayed up way too late during that time, talking and watching re-runs with her. My dad had the lovely habit of simply disappearing for days, without warning, and without even sending a text message to let us know he was still alive.

I’ve talked about this with my mum, and briefly discussed the disappearances with my dad, but there is not really much to say. Or rather, there is probably too much to say.

I don’t blame my mum and dad (anymore), but I wish things had been easier. The effects of that time are still visible, in all of us.

All in all, I am happy with how I was raised. My parents did a great job of letting me be who I wanted to be, and they always made clear they would trust my version of the truth over that of other children or teachers. As a result, though I could have been a great liar, I do not remember lying to them about anything substantial. I feel trusted and loved up to this point.

I’m trying to figure out how to answer this, since my parents messed up really badly in a lot of really big ways.

One thing that comes to mind, though, is that I wish they would have encouraged me academically more than they did. My sister and I are both smart, but she’s always been more outspoken than I have, in general. I was shy and introverted, so I was never acknowledged the same way my sister was when I did achieve something for them to be proud of, because I just wasn’t as comfortable in the limelight. So I always got the impression they never actually understood that I was smart – until I was in college (something else they didn’t educate my sister and I about, which I wish they would have) – and it gave me some pretty bad complexes. Especially because something they and the rest of my family and their friends did focus on, was how I looked. It wreaked havoc on me growing up, in ways that I find hard to explain. I never cared about it as much as they seemed to, because it was always superficial to me and the compliments didn’t actually acknowledge the things I was capable of. I thought I was stupid for a really long time and I always felt inferior because I was very rarely given credit for the reasons I wanted to be. It was horrible to constantly see my sister given praise for the things she did and then, literally, be looked at a few seconds later and hear “And you’re so beautiful, Sara”. My sister was pretty messed up because of it, too.

I dunno. There are a lot of things.

I don’t think it is really a case of being raised differently; more a case of being raised elsewhere. I sometimes wish my folks had stayed in England so that I would have had more contact with my extended family. I think I would have been a lot more outgoing and a lot less remote with my feelings. Of course, had they not moved so many other things would have not occurred that did so maybe it was for the best; I hate to think that I would not have met and married my wife.

When I was 10 I began “serious” comic business. Within 3 months I got one comic and a half “published”. It gained popularity among the classmates, but the teacher was nowhere next to approve of it. She even brought it up in the parent meeting. After the meeting a parent said if my parents could take me to one of those “special education” school. Now I wonder what would happen if my parents took that advice instead of laughing it off and went on to ban all my writing until now.

You might mean Magnet School, @Mimishu1995?

It would have been nice if positive emotions had been given equal or greater weight than negative ones.

There was a lot of hate, doubt, and ridicule. Very little overt love, acceptance and support.

As kids, we were taught that we were not to be trusted, so we never trusted ourselves. 3 kids, and our parents raised us with no zest for life

@ibstubro something like that, but I don’t know if it exists around my place. Granted, working as a writer earns little money, but how about something related, like a director?

I cannot complain, at all. My parents were good parents.

I do wish that adults in general during my childhood had not been quite so gung ho about the idealistic messages we often throw at kids: appearance doesn’t matter! It’s what’s inside that counts! I grew up with a kind of black and white view of the world in which I truly thought that nobody was going to think badly of me for going to school with unbrushed hair because it’s what’s inside that counts. I probably could have avoided some bullying if someone had told me that realistically, what’s outside matters too.