It has been hard for me to claim the word “abusive” with regards to my childhood, partly because I knew families that were much more violent than mine.  On the other hand, there was spanking, pinching hand-slapping and a lot of emotional abuse in my upbringing.  I would say that physically, my childhood was borderline abusive, emotionally, it was abusive. 

I have not done much to confront these issues other than come to terms with myself, my desires and how my choices reflect these.  I haven’t ever felt like demonizing my parents for the situation that I grew up in; it is easy for me to see that they did a much better job raising their children than their parents did raising them. With one exception (where someone that I was working on a project with had a highly charged tantrum that brought back all of the fear that I experienced when my dad “went off”), I have been able to push the abuse to the back of my mind and simply make choices that are different than my parents so that the issue doesn’t permeate my life any longer.  Until now.

It is easy to be critical of my parents and the choices that they made around my growth. It is easy to say that I will never be like them and that I will do as good of a job or better without resorting to corporal punishment or threats.  Based on conversations with our adoption agency and with J-, I realized that some of the bigger holes in my ideas about child raising are around discipline.  It actually isn’t enough to not believe in hitting kids.  I have been told that without actively understanding and practicing the alternatives, it will be second nature for me to revert into the sorts of punishment that I was raised with.

I had trouble believing this was true.  I mean, I have steered my life so far away from the life that my parents had. I am a lot like my mom in some ways, but I married a man so different than my dad.   But recently, I have been noticing behaviors of my mother showing up in me around J-, when I am tired or grumpy and in a zone where I am saying things without really thinking about them first.  I am proud of myself that I notice, and sometimes I even catch myself before I speak.  I am confident that I will not just “slip into” physically punishing my kids, but the emotional control is much trickier.  Both of my parents had a temper had a very emotional relationship to our discipline.

The one easy answer that I have had to how I will deal with disciplining our kids is humor.  I think that humor can be very effective for changing the dynamics of  a situation and getting the kids out of immediately critical situations, but something more is needed.  Breaking the children’s habit of getting themselves into trouble and helping them understand the consequences of their actions are important, as well. 

So, I have been hitting the books. I have been paying attention to how other parents interact with their kids.  I have a network of friends that I will be able to contact when I can’t figure out the right thing to do.  We also expect to be in a lot of therapy.