"What is wrong with you? Are you a moron, why don't these simple things go through your head? You are just a good for nothing idiot, I guess you are born to ruin our lives. We never thought we raised a failure all along". These things may sound rude and unnatural, but we are not new to any of these comments when we were kids and this generation of parents are not any better when it comes to expressing their distress in more or less the same way with the kids.
EMOTIONAL ABUSE refers to any form of maltreatment that involves belittling, shaming, ignoring, isolating, overpresssuring through excessive expectations, blaming, neglect, expressing sarcasm, threatening, berating the other person. It is not limited to kids, but includes even your spouse or your family. In fact more than the physical abuse this kind of emotional abuse is live and alive in India and yet less talked about. Thanks to the Indian law, we are not arrested for this, though we need more jails than schools if this were the case.We don't even acknowledge that we do these things to our own kids for the same reason we convince ourselves that our parents used these on us to make us strong.
We keep telling that it's just anger which is talking and it has nothing to do with what we actually feel about the kids. You tried your best and it's not your fault if your kid turns a failure despite your unrelenting efforts and sacrifices, hence you are obliged to release your frustration on anything that reminds your incapability. After all you are a human being too right? I am sorry but all this rationalisation works only for you but never for your child.Every single statement you make no matter how small or how much you deny, it is amassing over the years like a slow poison for your kid. It kills their confidence, trust, love, beliefs, dreams before you even realize that it's actually happening. What you end up is seeing your own child getting destroyed day by day, feeling helpless and acquiescent to a point of invisibility in a world filled with regret, self reproachment, guilt and a loathing for life.
No matter what you do, it just leaves a scar, a void which can never be filled by anything you do.It's time to stop shadowboxing our life using our kids. The only thing that can alleviate this is your unbridled love, acting out on an explicate expectation of your child's true potential and most of all a contemplation of our own ego about where and why it's going wrong. You can never be a perfect parent, but you can always try to be a truthful one, not to others but to yourself. You may not be in control of what you feel, but you can definitely be in control of how you react to them. Raising a kid is not about having a right to regret, it's about a responsibility to relish.
I say we don't own our kids, we only owe them a life!
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