Many people can easily spot over carrying or possessive parents among their family or acquaintances. Such parents do not leave their children alone even for a moment. Whether it is worrying excessively about their health or allowing oneself to make all of the choices for your child, it is quite obvious when you are looking at it as an observer. Unfortunately, it is not thus apparent for the parents themselves who believe this is what real love to children is supposed to be.
If you are a child of such parents, you might be interested in finding more on this topic in this article, however, it will be especially useful for parents.
What is over carrying?
As you can imagine, over carrying is based on the superfluous amount of attention to one’s child. Such parents are doing their best to protect the child even from absolutely unreal dangers. As a result, they make the child extremely bounded to oneself and to act in the way dictated by their parents which they believe to be the safest one.
Unfortunately, parents who are really over carrying will not agree with such words believing that someone is trying to attack the common sense of protecting a child and taking care of him and her which is the responsibility of every parents. Certainly, parents must take care of their children and do their best for their well-being. Yet, they also should understand that children will become adults one day and no matter how long the parents will live, they will not be able to be present in every life situation of their child. Thus, the child will have to deal with some things on one’s own and the more prepared for it he or she is, the more successful and happier this person will be in the adult life. Needless to say, it will not be possible with over carrying parents.
The negative impact on children
What possible problems can your child face if you are protecting him or her too much right now? Actually, there are many of possible issues and you should be aware of them.
A childhood trauma
In fact, carrying excessively of your child can damage one’s psychological well-being dramatically. Just imagine what will happen when you are protecting your child all the time doing any possible work for him or her, reminding the child of all the responsibilities, making decisions, even wakening the child up and giving him or her a lift wherever the child needs to go somewhere and suddenly your child starts one’s own adult life moving to another city to study at university.
This can cause total shock for this person who is totally not used to dealing with anything on one’s own.
Lack of skills
Undeniably, such a child will suffer from a large lack of various skills which are needed for communicating with other people, dealing with daily routine and making decisions. Such a child might not be able to resolve conflicts with peers, might overreact to normal situations at university, can feel offended and miserable. Certainly, for some children these feelings of confusion and discomfort can grow to such an extent that they can even get depressed.
Of course, when there will be a time for such a child to search for a job, there might be even worse problems. As you can imagine, every employer no matter what his or her organisation is, is looking for employees who will be able to deal with their tasks on their own. They need people who have all the skills required for work. It will be absolutely devastating for a young specialist to feel helpless without one’s parents even during such a normal albeit stressful situation as an interview.
Why some parents tend to be over carrying?
If by any chance you have concerns about your own parental approach, it is high time to understand the things in yourself which are making you behave like this. Anyway, recognising this behavioural pattern is a crucial step into resolving this problem.
The culprits for such a behaviour can be a lot.
One of the most popular situations is a parent who is feeling insecure about losing one’s child. This can mean losing the child in a literal way because of various risky situations. This is especially widespread for parents who have already lost one of their children or have to struggle with an inability of having a child for a long time.
At the same time, parents might feel losing a child when the child starts living one’s own life. Some parents want to keep their children close to themselves for their entire life and the best way to do it is making the child unable of living without their parents. Of course, a child who can’t make a decision of which clothes to buy or which course to take at university will hardly be able to search for a job abroad moving out from their parents far away.
A hidden motive of keeping a child with oneself is also frequently the loneliness of the parent who was not whole to find one’s own destiny, dream job or friends and now, this person is trying to get everything missed from a child.