Guilt And Worry - Part II

Parental guilt, like worry, is a significant part of parenting. As mentioned last month, each of these emotions has positive as well as negative effects. On the positive side, parental guilt can serve to help us correct the mistakes that we might make with our children. For example, let's say you wrongly accuse your child of something and later discover that he's innocent. Your ensuing feeling of guilt can lead you to do the right thing * apologize and promise you won't hastily jump to such conclusions in the future. Guilt also has a negative side, however, and like excessive worry, can damage your child's emotional growth and hinder your effectiveness as a parent. In a sense then, there are two kinds of guilt * helpful guilt and unhelpful guilt.

Unhelpful guilt is the kind of guilt that parents often have in spite of the fact that they're either doing the best that they can, or the situation is not under their control. For example, let's assume that you have to work full time because you're a single parent. If you feel guilty that you aren't home when your child gets home from school your guilt is unhelpful. You aren't doing something wrong that your guilt is acting as a conscience about, in fact, you're doing what is in both your and your child's best interests. But acting on this kind of guilt often creates a backlash of sorts that harms both parent and child.

Maryann is a good example. A single mom since her husband abandoned her when their son was an infant, she's struggled to make ends meet by working full-time as well as taking in some free-lance work at night. Her son David, now 12, is independent enough to have a set of keys to the apartment, and often comes home from school and lets himself in. Maryann gets home around 5:30, approximately an hour after David. Many of Maryann's friends are stay at home mothers, and Maryann compares herself to them and feels guilty that she's not home when David arrives. She tries to "make it up" to David in myriad ways * when he was younger, she would buy him several toys each week, in an effort to show how much she loves him. Lately, she's taken to ordering in his favorite foods almost nightly (even though she really can't afford to) and by doing much of his homework for him when he complains that he doesn't understand it. Many times, when she has some free-lance work she needs to complete, David will insist that they don't spend enough time together and that she should sit with him while he watches his favorite TV show. Maryann will cooperate, even though she knows that it means she'll be up past midnight completing her work.

Here is a situation where Mom's unhelpful guilt has tipped the balance of power in the family. David no longer has a mother, he has a doormat * someone he can walk all over and order about. Seriously overindulged, David is not learning the