A recurring theme in my relationship with my parents and how that affected my social skills is that as a child I took how my parents treated with me as an example of how I should treat others. To use one of the milder examples, if I didn't say "please" when asking for something, my parents would say "What do you say?" Therefore, in the rest of life, if someone asked for something without saying "please", I'd say to them "What do you say?" Not so very good for general social interaction with peers or elders, but I truly thought that was What's Done. When I first read Miss Manners in my early 20s, I was quite genuinely surprised to learn that it's rude to correct other people's manners. It would never have occurred to me.
This has come up in conversation with other people who happen to be parents (haven't discussed it with my own parents) and they all seemed surprised that it wouldn't occur to me that parenting is an exceptional circumstance. But I can't imagine how it would have occurred to me. That was life as I knew it, that's how the world had been every day of my whole life.
It would be interesting to study a bunch of children and see how many of them see parent-child relationships as typical of all relationships, and how many of them see them as exceptional.
4 comments:
Wow, very interesting. As you know, I'm not a parent, but I always took the parent-child relationship to be unique (uniquely awful, in many circumstances).
That is why many adults tolerate treatment from their parents that they would never accept from anybody else - they view the relationship as exceptional, throughout their lives.
Wow, that is interesting! Who did you use as models of how people treat people then? Did how your parents treated other extra-familial people have an influence?
For models, I think I imitated people who seemed to do well in the world (had friends, seemed well liked) and who also seemed kind and thoughtful.
My parents' treatment of others was helpful as both a positive (mother) and negative (father) - what to do vs what to hate myself when I caught myself doing.
Now I have to figure out why that never occurred to me. I saw what my parents did as "this is what people do", period.
I think part of it is that the people who did better in the world than I did had something that I didn't and couldn't have. They were cool or they were pretty or something. But there's something else in there too. I have to figure out what it is.
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