Psychological counseling: How lethal is the anxious mother?

Movie "Mother"

Chinese culture is a mother-seeking culture.

The most obvious point is that when describing our relationship with the country, we use me and the motherland, saying that when a person finally returns home after many years of wandering, he uses the embrace of the motherland.

Both culture and society as a whole emphasize the important influence of mothers on their children, and the relationship between mothers and children is always a very important relationship in people's lives and plays a vital role in a person's growth.

In our traditional thinking, the mother is always a person responsible for the big and small things in the family, and the task of parenting is more on the mother.

But moms are also new moms, and raising children is a novice driver, the first time on the road.

When something unknown and significant comes to us, anxiety is our natural response.

Psychologists have also said that moderate anxiety is beneficial. Anxiety is an emotion inherited from human evolutionary history that contributes to human survival.

Anxiety lets us know that we are not yet able to cope with what lies in front of us, so we still need to learn and improve.

Therefore, mothers with moderate anxiety will understand how to educate their children, what else they need to improve, and let themselves grow up in the process of raising their children.

However, excessive anxiety is detrimental.

In China today, the education model of many families is "anxious mother + missing father + out-of-control child".

Many people sigh that anxious mothers must have done too much, no one helped, widowed babybuilding, everything is by themselves.

And overly anxious mothers, in fact, rarely realize their anxiety, most of the time they think about how to make their children better, and how to give their children better.

Mothers who are overly anxious will have these manifestations in their relationships with their children:

01. 

Unable to distinguish between yourself and your children,

As the old saying goes, children and grandchildren have their own children and grandchildren, and do not worry about their children and grandchildren.

What does that mean? That is, children and grandchildren will naturally have their own good luck, and parents do not have to interfere too much.

But anxious mothers are always worried that their children will not have good luck, or this good luck is not good enough, and they always want to give their children good luck themselves.

As a result, we see anxious mothers, under the banner of "good for their children", doing things that interfere with their children's boundaries.

The situation where the mother and child are not clearly defined and are in a symbiotic state is logically only present in the child's infancy.

Because the child is not strong enough, he does not have enough strength to survive, and he needs his mother to be his strength, to be a part of him, to help him survive.

But when the child grows up and has enough strength on his own, he must end this symbiotic relationship with his mother and go his own way.

Individual psychologist Adler calls this "subject separation," which refers to whoever is responsible for the subject. Children have their own issues to be responsible for, and mothers have their own topics to be responsible for, and the boundaries between each other are clear.

Anxious mothers are always worried that their children's strength is not enough, so they will "grab" their children's topics, be responsible for their children's topics, break through parent-child boundaries, and interfere in their children's lives.

Decide what training courses your child should take and what hobbies to cultivate, and feel that this is good for your child's future development;

The child is going to college, decide what kind of major to study, and then be employed;

Everything about children is best decided by themselves.

Unable to separate, even if the child grows up and has a family, he refuses to let go, and becomes a control over the child.

Unable to distinguish the boundary between oneself and children, excessive intrusion into the child's growth space will only make the child unable to become himself and grow up.

02 

I always want to be the perfect mother

Overly anxious mothers often have a sense of guilt that the parenting process is not perfect,

So some mothers stay up late to watch videos to learn parenting scriptures;

There will be feelings of guilt for not being high-quality enough to accompany their children, so some mothers learn all kinds of psychological knowledge of children and adolescents, so that they can change from a "layman" in psychology to a "licensee";

There will be a sense of urgency to engage in an educational arms race, so there are "chicken dolls", so that children can keep reading and learning to attend training courses, and even some mothers will let their children do genetic testing to find specialties.

In the end, anxious mothers always want to get a perfect score of 100 points on the parenting test paper and be the perfect mother.

Just like Xu Yiwan's mother in the movie "Mother", she takes her child as the entire driving force of life, claiming that "I will live for you in this life".

This sentence is completely a true portrayal of these anxious mothers, who revolve around their children 24 hours a day, covering everything, and living only for their children.

But we all know that perfection is nothing more than a human fantasy, there is no perfect person in the world, and there is no perfect mother.

A good mother does not necessarily raise a good child.

"From kindergarten to junior high school, I can be said to take good care of my son, and I still help him organize his school bag, but he has practiced an 'iron fist' in school and his grades are also very poor." A mother who has always pursued "100 points mother" said so.

The mother does her best, but she also undertakes the part of the "task" that the child should be responsible for, giving too much, and the child also loses the space for his own independent growth.

The psychoanalyst Winnicott believes that a mother actually only needs to be a "good enough mother", not 100 points, only 60 points.

The mother of 60 points gives the child a basically satisfied and basically controlled parenting environment, gives the child his own growth space, and also makes the child understand that complete satisfaction is impossible, and neither he nor his parents are all-powerful.

At the same time, the mother also knows that she does not have to devote all her energy to the child, and should not live for the child all her life.

03 

There is only your own anxiety in your eyes

Another characteristic of overly anxious mothers is that they can always find "growth problems" in their children.

The child is about 1 year old, and he will start to climb, although the mother is very happy, but some of the other children of the same age around him are already learning to leave, so the mother begins to worry about whether the child is not developing well;

The child just entered kindergarten, and he adapted very well in the kindergarten, the teacher reported that he didn't cry much, but seeing the video taken by the teacher of the child in kindergarten, the child did not interact much with other children, so the mother began to worry about whether the child did not deal with people very well, whether he was withdrawn;

When the child enters school, the mother has more things to worry about, what should the child do? What should I do if my child has poor grades? What should I do if my child can't get along with my classmates?

……

In the eyes of overly anxious mothers, there will be all kinds of problems in the growth of children, and there are always some problems in the child, which are always not good enough.

The anxiety in their hearts makes them only see problems, but they do not see where their children grow and improve.

Such anxiety can easily affect the child's physical and mental health, under the mother's anxiety, control and denial, the child with a slight sense of power will become rebellious, anti-controlling, and work against the parents.

Some children are well-behaved and obedient, but fall into deep depression, they think that they are not good enough, so they have to attack themselves inward, becoming powerless, pessimistic and self-denial.

Many anxious mothers are distressed by their children's "non-cooperation", but they do not know that the latter will cause more harm to their children.

And a mother who is always restless and worried will pass on her anxiety to her children.

The mother's distrust of the outside also makes the child feel that the outside is dangerous, so some children dare not interact with the outside world, shrink in the arms of the mother, and behave very sticky to the mother, and this also verifies the various worries of the overly anxious mother for the child, doubling the anxiety and worry.

As a mother, it is not an easy thing, mother is not superhuman, will be fragile and collapse, may all mothers, give their love a little more, worry less, choose to let go moderately, let the child go naturally to experience the setbacks and difficulties in the growth path, let the child become himself!

END

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