I didn’t have the best of parents, but in some ways they weren’t the worst either. For one thing, they never hit us. My mother did attack me twice, though she managed to catch me only once, smashing my head against the piano my well-to-do uncle had bought from the local convent and somehow installed in the bedroom of our fourth-floor council flat. How he managed to get it up there, neither my siblings nor I can remember; still, my uncle was an exceedingly pious man who once entered a seminary with the intention of taking holy orders, so it may well have been a miracle.
Nor did my parents punish us or try to control us—perhaps because we were model children, though more likely because they simply didn’t care. "Do what you like," my father would say, "so long as you don’t get caught," and, in the absence of parental supervision, that was pretty much what we did. The only times I can ever remember him reprimanding me were for bad grammar, excessive wordiness or tautology.
As a child, I never took kindly to being told what to do, so this arrangement suited me just fine. Even so, there were times when I envied children whose parents called them in from play, hugged them, or showed them affection. Mine never did.
To me, the hallmarks of bad parenting are violence and excessive control. My own experience was largely one of neglect, while my best friend experienced the opposite. Her parents were loving but gave her almost no freedom, and she became pregnant at the age of sixteen. One example proves nothing, of course, but it makes me think that children fare best somewhere between those two extremes.
As for whether children can rise above the effects of bad parenting, I think that the state of utter perfection I have somehow managed to attain, is proof positive that they can.
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Posted in response to Galenkp's Weekend experiences asking "What do you feel constitutes bad parenting and why? Does bad parenting effect the child's life moving forward or can they rise above it?"
