Are you/were you close to your parents?
We have a good relationship.
shareA lot of heartbreaking responses so I don't want to brag but yes, I am.
shareMaybe I was spoiled and blessed but I am genuinely shocked at the amount of people who had rocky and dysfunctional relationships with their parents growing up. Many of them are not on speaking terms with them for many years. It's sad.
shareIt IS sad, but oftentimes it can't be helped. Some parents are really terrible to their kids. What drives me a bit nuts is folks who say, "But it's family! How can you cut them off?" They just don't seem to understand that some families are truly dysfunctional, with different forms of abuse present. If one has truly toxic parents it becomes necessary to cut them off in order to survive, to be happy and content.
shareYeah once someone has a bad childhood, it definitely fcks them up as an adult and they never truly 100% recover from it. It permeates to other aspects of their life later on(dating, self-esteem, etc). Your childhood really does define your adult years. I'm amazed at people who had shitty and abusive childhoods and they somehow become well-functioning adults. I don't know how they do it.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems alot of the dysfunction stems from blended families (step parents, step kids). Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I'm really a firm believer in the nuclear family. That was what I grew up with.
Parents are humans. I think of the mistakes I made BEING a parent. I just hope the good I've done outweighs the bad. No family is 100% perfect. That's where grace and forgiveness comes in.
But some kids don't have a chance with the parents they end up with.
I have a neighbor who's an alcoholic, almost never home (to purposely avoid the family) and his wife has mental and physical issues so she was "absent" for her kids as they grew up. Their kids sometimes played with mine when they were little. They were always filthy and were fed junk, like cereal for dinner. Whenever I could, I would feed them real meals and they were appreciative.
But these kids were always in trouble. They got kicked out of school, arrested, etc. When they were young I heard their mother say she shouldn't have had kids and doesn't like kids--and said it right in front of her daughter who was probably no older than 8 at the time. How does this make a child feel?!
Those kids got into drugs by their teens and God knows what else.
Kids like that end up raising themselves. My kids would complain that their kids had all kinds of freedom mine didn't have. Now that mine are grown they see things differently and are glad they had 2 parents who were/are always there for them and who love them dearly.
As far as dysfunctional families who many times are blended, I see your point there and have noticed that happening often. There's something to be said for parents staying together. Mine did, my husbands did and I've been married once, to the same man for nearly 30 years. Divorce has been a rare thing in my family. All of my aunts and uncles stayed together, same with my grandparents. I have a few divorced cousins but two of them were battered wives, unfortunately. Thankfully they're safely away from them.
The older I get I do realize I'm really blessed to have the family I have and I also realize it's not like that for so many people.