Bad-mouthing a Parent Harms Children’s Self-esteem

In response to a comment on my recent Huffpost blogpost, I wrote the following.

Children identify with both parents. Remember how you felt as a child when a playmate trashed-talked your parents? In my day we called it “ranking out” a kid’s parents. Stephen King referred to this as a breaking “the cardinal rule for kids.” In The Body (the story adapted for the film Stand By Me), King explained, “You could say anything about another kid, you could rank him to the dogs and back, but you didn’t say a word ever about his mom and dad. . . . If a kid ranked out your mom and dad, you had to feed him some knuckles.”

The situation is more challenging for a child when the attack on a parent comes from the other parent. If a child sides with the critical parent, her image of the other parent suffers. If a child opposes the critical parent, her image of that parent suffers. Even if she tries to say out of the conflict, she feels guilty for failing to defend the target of the criticism.

When children are led to believe that one of their parents is not worthy of being loved, respected, and admired, they cannot obliterate their identification with that parent. They can repudiate it. They can drive their identification underground. But, turning against an aspect of their core identity causes emotional havoc and chips away at self-esteem.

To see the other comments to my blogpost, and to leave your own comments, click here.