What it’s like growing up with abusive parents

How to distinguish between the parent concerned about education and the future of his offspring, from the abusive one, who is almost a psychological executioner?

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Before we start, let’s remind ourselves that children make life seem so much more beautiful. Treat your child to the mini cars for kids, he or she deserves it.

Here is a question posted anonymously on Ciao.fr, a Swiss discussion forum for struggling youth: “In my case, my mother very often slapped me, insulted me, despised me when I was little, and I always wondered if it was normal. What I mean is I do not know where the line between strictness and abuse is. How can you know?” someone asks.

Excessive Authority with Harmful Influence

For Grégory Michel, doctor in clinical psychology and the author of the book “Personality and Development,” the definition of abusive parent is very clear — it is a parent who exercises excessive authority inducing harm and creating a climate of emotional insecurity that impacts health, well-being, and the development of a child. Disgusting comments, moral harassment, repeated humiliations, manipulation, degrading insults, disproportionate punishment — the abuses observed by specialists take various forms, and the child doesn’t even always understand the link between their actions and the violence laid on them by parents. We will also speak about a form of cruelty when parental love is conditioned by the child’s successes and performances. Some parents can only love their children when they do well.

A typical story is when parents constantly compare their children with other kids.

You come home and tell your mom what grade you got. Your mom instantly starts asking how much that classmate and this friend, and someone else got. And when you tell her how your friends did, she would show disappointment, because you were graded six out of ten, and they received better notes. It can be very harmful if done systematically. Children will feel that they are never good enough, that they are a walking disappointment. When now adults speak about this type of abuse, they always say that they remember it like yesterday.

When it is not the intellect being questioned, then it is very the physical development of a child that becomes the subject of inappropriate, hurtful, or stigmatizing comments.

“According to my mother, I was always scruffy, badly combed. My gait was either too loose or, on the contrary, too confident. After adolescence, it was my outfits that were too suggestive, too ‘hippie’ or too tomboy. My butt and my breasts were too much or not well enough highlighted. In short, there was always something wrong with my appearance,” recalls Justine, 29 years.

“My weight was always a concern. Admittedly, I did not have the physique of a prepubescent supermodel, but I wasn’t obese or anything like that. But for my mother it was clear as day — i was fat! Because of that, I will remain alone for all my life, unemployed and without children. At least that’s what she said,” ironically comments Penelope, 25. Some parents even interfere with the privacy of their children, often when they enter the precarious teenage years.