Calling Their Daugher a Dope
Yesterday I went to a birthday party. I noticed a girl getting a bottle of soda from a cooler. As she started to open it I heard a voice saying "Melissa, how do you think you're going to drink that?" The voice came from inside the house, through the kitchen window behind me. The girl answered sheepishly, "I don't know", which is probably just what the mother expected her to say. The mother then said, "Well get a plastic cup, you dope."
Instantly I remembered my mother saying to me, "Well of course we can, you idiot" when I was 35 years old. It was the first time I noticed her calling me an idiot, though I have no doubt she had done it countless times before.
Later Melissa, her father, mother and I were all sitting on the porch talking. Melissa did something else and her mother again called her a dope. They both watched her every move and commented critically on seemingly everything she did. The next time she started to get herself something to drink her father said, "Do you want me to pour that for you?" Melissa was ten years old by the way, and perfectly capable of pouring a glass of soda by herself. She handed him the cup and he held it while she poured. If I could have asked her how she felt at the moment of his question I suspect she might have answered underestimated, if she had that word in her emotional vocabulary, and if she had the self-awareness to know how she was feeling. This is assuming, of course, she was not too afraid to answer truthfully.
Before she poured the soda, however, she dropped the lid, perhaps because she had been made anxious by the combination of her father's question, her mother's verbal attacks and by the feeling of being watched constantly by both of them not only that day but for her entire life. She was starting to pour the soda and the father said "Wait a second!" in a disapproving, superior tone. He picked up the lid and put it down on the table with a more drama than was necessary to make his point -- a point which was not even necessary to make. I wondered why he didn't just wait a few seconds himself to see if his daughter would pick up the lid after she had poured the soda. Again he underestimated her and failed to show trust in her in his attempt to correct her behavior. His own behavior may have been partly inspired by his own motives to look like a "good" parent who was teaching his daughter the importance of such essential things as retrieving bottle caps before pouring a drink.
After she poured the drink she sat her cup down on the table and picked up the lid to put it back on. She fumbled it again and it fell right into her soda. Her father laughed first, joined by her mother, and another woman sitting with us. Melissa laughed at herself as well. I did not see the lid go into the cup because it was behind the bottle, which was one reason I did not laugh. But even if I had seen it I doubt I would have laughed because instead I was feeling empathy for how the girl was being over-controlled. And now she was being humiliated on top of that.
I doubt, though, that anyone, including Melissa, would say she was being humiliated. It was obvious the family system was working quite smoothly. The mother and father needed someone to control and criticize, and Melissa played the role perfectly. She did not protest at being over-controlled and underestimated. In fact, she laughed right along.
Melissa, by the way, was noticeably overweight. Her mother criticized her for drinking too much soda and ordered her to start drinking water, surely because her mother was worried about her weight. It probably never occurred to the mother that the way she and her husband were treating the daughter could be the real source of the child's need to eat as way of compensating for her insecurity.
While Melissa and I talked she told me that she was good in math, according to her mother, but that she liked drama and art. She had already been in at least one school play where she played one of the leading roles. This is in line with my belief that intelligent children who are emotionally damaged are most likely to turn to art, drama and literature as an escape from the abusive reality of their lives.
When I asked Melissa for her opinion on something, she hesitated with her answer. Before she was allowed to respond, though, her father said, "she probably hasn't formed an opinion on that yet." She accepted her father's premature assessment and remained silent. Now I regret not saying "Well, let's give her a chance to think about it."
In fact I also regret sitting silently and watching this scene, since I have made somewhat of a pledge to myself never to sit passively and watch a child getting abused. I wish I could somehow explain to the parents what they are systematically doing to their daughter. And it is not just the daughter, but their son as well, although he was left alone much more than she was. They only once shouted out instructions to him as he was playing in the yard while we talked. These were needless instructions as well, serving only to help him feel watched and underestimated like his older sister.
I had never met this family before and it is likely I will never meet them again since they came from out of town and were at a friend of a friend's party. I doubt many people would call these parents "bad" parents. I doubt that one in a hundred people would say that what they were doing was emotional abuse. I doubt that many people would even say that what they were doing might be causing the daughter's eating problem or that it might be damaging her self-esteem.
I am asking myself why I didn't say anything, why I didn't intervene on the daughter's behalf. I feel a little self-critical and hear myself saying "How can you call yourself a child advocate when you sat there in silence?"
It is because so few people see the things that I do and feel the things that I feel, that I am afraid to speak out. And it is because of my general fear of disapproval, criticism and rejection. I was invited to the party by a friend, but I did not know anyone else there. I am not from Australia, where this occurred, so I felt even more self-conscious about speaking out, not wanting to be seen as an intrusive, judgmental outsider. I am wondering though, how I might have been able to say something in a way which would not have offended, but which would have helped the mother see what she was doing. I wonder if I might have taken the mother aside and said something like, "I know you don't mean any harm, but I just wanted to say to you that I noticed you calling your daughter a dope. This reminded me of how my mother would call me an idiot and it really hurt me when I realized it at age 35." This might have been okay to say.
Maybe the next time I will be able to say something, something without feeling so strongly about it that I frighten the people around me, as have done in the past when I first started noticing the way parents treated their children. The intensity of my feelings probably comes from something like the re-experiencing of my own childhood pain. Or maybe my pain was never really consciously felt so it is not actually experienced before. I suspect that Alice Miller is right when she says children are forbidden to be aware and forbidden to experience their feelings. Something must ring true in this because the thought causes my eyes to water and I feel small and feel a desire to be held and comforted. It is hard to separate my tears into tears for my own lost childhood and tears for the children I see around me. Am I crying for Melissa or crying for myself? Or am I crying for the whole world? For the children who are being abused and the parents who neither know that they too were abused, nor that now they have become the abusers?
Encouragingly I am feeling more able to do something about these kinds of situations. In the past I have wept because I felt so powerless. I have wept because I felt so overwhelmed and defeated before I even began trying to fight the thousands of years of dysfunctional parenting, or "poisonous pedagogy" as Miller calls it. Now though I feel more sure of myself. More sure of what my eyes have seen, what my ears have heard and what my feelings have spoken to me. I feel less hostile to the abusive parents and more understanding. Perhaps because I am in Australia where so many things still work fairly well, I feel more hopeful that it is not to late. While it may be too late for some, or for many, I feel more optimistic than I used to that it is not too late to reach future generations. Maybe there is nothing I can do now for Melissa, but perhaps her children or grandchildren will be taught by teachers who are more emotionally enlightened and by parents who have gone through some kind of parenting course where they learn the natural consequences of underestimating, over-controlling and calling your daughter a dope.
Steve Hein, Nov. 2001