Part of the difficulty of liberating ourselves from a certain kind of childhood is that being loved and being controlled can – for a long time, from many angles – feel like almost the same thing. Both a loving and a controlling parent will pay a child a great deal of attention, both will appear very concerned with their welfare, both will remember their birthdays and tell them how much they care for them.
Nevertheless, there is one vital difference between love and control. When it comes to a conflict between a child’s sincere aspirations and a parent’s wishes (it might be over a choice of clothes or a food preference, a desire for a particular game or a judgement about a circle of friends), the controlling parent will inevitably, and with enormous vehemence, require obedience rather than permitting authenticity. When push comes to shove, it really doesn’t matter what the child wants or thinks. They simply can’t wear anything they want, there can only be a few appropriate subjects at school, friends have to be edited and criticised according to non-negotiable principles, they have to stand a certain way, they must not pull that sort of face and they should not put the plates in the wrong place. Love feels fundamentally conditional – to the extent that the child may, in the end, wonder whether it’s truly love at all.
Cause
Needless to stay, controlling people don’t feel very much in control. They experience an outsize wish for everyone to obey their commands because, somewhere inside (and especially in their pasts), there was an impression of chaos on a catastrophic scale.
When they scream that their child must come to the table right now, there isn’t just an issue of etiquette at stake. Upon the matter of the child’s appearance, or non-appearance, a whole section of the parent’s difficult history has come to hang. The apparent struggle in the home may be about when to do the laundry or how to write a thank you letter, but for the controlling parent, it is really a question of whether or not the world can feel like a tolerable place.
Effect
Small children are uniquely badly situated in relation to controlling parents. On the one hand, they are wholly at their mercy. These parents, who are many times their size and strength, can do with them more or less as they wish. The most servile animal cannot compete, in terms of guilelessness and vulnerability, with a fragile 1-year-old.
At the same time, small children are – without meaning to be – intrinsically hard to order about as one might want. They wake up at strange times, they keep asking for unusual things, their screams may not stop. They are out-of-control beings.
This bewildering combination of weakness and independence can be especially hard for a fragile parent to understand and accommodate. The temptation to become authoritarian is great.
In response to the battery of commands and regulations they face, the child of a controlling parent may resort to well-worn patterns of covert rebellion. They may refuse to eat very much, for example, fighting back against parental encroachment by monitoring with precision whatever enters their mouth. Or they may speak in a very low voice, in the vain hope of being authentically heard. Or, they may take the rebellion that they want to but cannot unleash at home out into the world and get into fights with the police or protest at the government or industry in response to the intransigent attitudes they know only too well, and have suffered from, at home.
In the long term, it may prove impossible for controlled offspring to tolerate working for a large company or organisation with many rules and established protocols, so powerfully do these evoke the restrictions of their early years.
There is an equal risk, however, that, like a hostage who no longer wants to escape captivity when the doors are flung open, the controlled child will seek out the very same kinds of subjugation that once hampered their early development. They will continue to confuse being controlled with being loved, and so might try to please a difficult CEO for many decades or marry a domineering partner whose bossy tones they will associate with reassurance and care.
The controlled child’s struggle will be to identify – while there is still time – the substantive differences between love and obedience.
