Codependency in Parenting: What Is It & Why Is It Bad?
Our episodes are usually a little bit outrageous, but after interviewing Alana Carvalho in our exclusive 6-to-Teen Parenting Community, we knew we had to get her on our podcast to discuss the topic of codependency in parenting. So here we are with a more serious - and super informative - episode that we know is going to help so many people. Listen in and get ready for your mind to be blown.
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Alana Carvalho is a licensed mental health counselor who specializes in helping people form true, real and intimate relationships (whether it's parent-child relationships or couple relationships or even friendships). She helps make relationships work!
Codependency is generally the act of feeling a really strong emotional reaction or responsibility for someone else's feelings or experience. For example, if your child is going through something difficult (or even something minor) but you have a reaction to it and you put yourself into the situation to try to alleviate the feelings for your child - because it's distressing for us as codependents to allow our child to feel their feelings. So oftentimes, as codependent parents, we get in the way of what's going on with our child to try to move their feelings into a different space or take care of a difficult situation that we feel isn't going well for them.
It's important for parents to realize that you're not doing your child a service by helping them to not feel their feelings. You want your child to feel their feelings and learn how to navigate through difficult emotions so that later in life, when you're not there all the time, they can learn how to do the same thing and not just try to get themselves out of those feelings really quickly. Because a lot of times, that's where we start using different dysfunctional things in our life to alleviate or avoid the feelings that we're feeling, and we don't want that for our kids.
It's very normal to feel discomfort when our child is feeling discomfort. What takes it to the level of codependency is when we try to carry our child through it so they don't feel the discomfort.
An example of a codependent parent is one who goes into the school when their child gets in trouble and tells off the administrator when their kid was actually in the wrong. Instead of allowing the child to experience the consequences of their behaviour, as parents, we come in and try to get them to avoid the consequence because it's uncomfortable for us to let them feel those feelings of having done something wrong and have to deal with the consequences.
If a child hasn't been given the opportunity to gain confidence through independence, it becomes hard for them to cope when they move out or go off to college and all of a sudden they're dealing with these situations and they don't have their parent right there with them. We want to avoid this! We want to avoid raising young adults who don't know themselves well enough and don't feel like they have the ability to cope with difficulties that come up in life. These are the skills that children need to learn early, so that they can bring them into their adulthood. We don't realize but our kids are learning so much of this at such a young age and that's what they carry with them. So we as parents need to give them the tools to be able to fly out of the nest rather than have them get to this point in life where it's time for them to fly and they don't know how to do it because we haven't allowed them to because of all of our fears, concerns and feelings. That's when it becomes really problematic.
If you think you've been "saving" your kid too much, it's never too late to change the course. Even if you're a parent of a young adult, you can still make huge changes that help your child begin to flourish once you take a step back. So you can improve your relationship with your child at any age and also help them thrive in the world. But the younger you start, the better.
Codependency can come up at any point in time. We tend to have a stronger reaction to our children's feelings and experiences about things when it's something that has happened to us in our life as well. And unconsciously, we don't realize it, but we try to get our child to work through a lot of what's actually our emotional baggage that we're carrying. So you want to be mindful that when your child is going through something and you're having a really strong reaction to it, it's probably because it's something about you and your experience and less about your child's experience, and that's what you need to learn how to separate.
Codependency is on a continuum where some of us are a little codependent and some of us are very codependent and you have to figure out where you fall on the spectrum.
It's important to separate out what is your issue and what is your child's issue. The reality is that when you're having an emotional reaction to something it's actually always about you and never about your child. Even if your child is doing something that's upsetting and not okay, the anger you're feeling is actually not about them at all. It's about you. So as a parent, you have to identify that your feelings aren't caused by your kids. They might be connected to something your child is doing, but you have to take ownership of your feelings. You cannot put them on your children.
Another piece of codependency is when we have lots of feelings, and we share them with our children, they can have a tendency to take on our feelings and that can create a really codependent relationship between us and our children which we have to be careful of. It's not that we shouldn't show emotion, because we want to show them we're human and show them how we work through our feelings, but we don't want to put our feelings ONTO our children.
We don't want to hang our kids out to dry. It's great to be able recognize the different needs of our children and support them, but where it becomes problematic is when we don't let them learn how to get in touch with what's going on internally and be able to vocalize it and speak up for themselves.
You want your children to have confidence in themselves and to know themselves. But if you're always fixing things for them, they won't know that they're actually capable and won't gain the confidence to actually do it on their own. You're not born confident - it's something that you learn over time when you're given the opportunity to do things yourself and you feel proud knowing that you can do it on your own.
If you have a codependent relationship with your child, it will affect their confidence. Instead, you have to help them learn how to be confident and help them experience confidence by helping them see all of the amazing things about themselves that they may be unable to see. You have to give them experiences or situations that can help them slowly build up to this point where they feel like they can do something or understand something on their own.
As parents, we have a lot on our plate, but it's important that we take the time to stop and think about how we can help our children feel really good about themselves without it being so obvious that we're doing it.
To help build confidence in your children, talk about what you're seeing in terms of their actual behaviour. We have a habit of saying "Great job!" but that doesn't really speak to what's happening. So instead, you can say something more concrete like "Wow, you really worked hard on that." Acknowledging the effort one puts into something is way more important than the outcome. And we don't want our children to be focusing on the outcome. The grade that they get isn't as important as the amount of effort they actually put into the assignment.
You can also build their confidence by starting small and doing activities together with them until they get to a point where they feel capable of doing it on their own. And every child is going to be different in terms of their development and what's appropriate for them, which is why every parent needs to really understand the child that they have in front of them.
A lot of Alana's work came out of working with parents who were dealing with children who had mental health and substance abuse issues. Those relationships often become the most codependent because the child has so many needs and the parent is so fearful about the situations the child is in and what could possibly happen. So that's where Alana steps in and helps these parents take many steps back from their children. And in every single one of those extremely difficult situations that she has worked with, when the parent becomes less codependent and learns how to separate emotionally from their children, it becomes a much healthier relationship between them. And it gives the child so much more advantage to get well because they see their parent doing it and they're modeling that behaviour to them. The child is actually craving that separation from their parent, but nobody knows how to do it.
Your parenting has to change as your kids grow older. You can't parent your teenager the same way you parent your five-year-old. You as a parent are transitioning along with your child as they are growing. You are learning how to be a different parent of a different child as you see them developing. They are growing and evolving and we need to grow and evolve with them - we can't just stay the same.
We as parents should feel uncomfortable a lot in terms of learning how to take those steps back often, as we see our children growing. We need to take steps back and let them feel more and more empowered.
When you're codependent, you're not allowing your children to feel for themselves. So when they get into adulthood and they have to feel things, often they turn to substance abuse because they don't know how to cope with their feelings because they've never had to before.
Rather than distracting your child from feeling their feelings, let them experience their emotions and be in the moment even if it's uncomfortable.
When our kids are in school, we can see the independence and confidence flourishing, but covid and the lockdown has sucked it away from them. Luckily, children are resilient, but they are going to need some weaning off of us when they go back to school because it's so different than it was in the past. All of these things are going to feel weird, uncomfortable, upsetting and awkward for our children at first, and we need to give them some space with that and acknowledge it and validate it for them. And they may need some extra support from us as they transition, but give space for that.
At any point in time, you can make a change. You don't need to feel guilty about what you've done in the past, just decide to make it different for the future.
MORE ABOUT ALANA CARVALHO:
Alana Carvalho is a yoga-practicing, soulful music-loving, mother of two, and the founder of The Codependent Perfectionist framework. After earning her Masters of Education in Psychological Counseling, she started her work as a licensed mental health counselor in a substance abuse treatment center. It was there that she met families navigating how to support their loved ones struggling with substance abuse, and she became passionate about healing codependency and transforming relationships. In 2013, she started her own private practice, Alana Carvalho Therapy in New York City, and met countless individuals and families struggling with codependency and perfectionism.
Follow Alana on Instagram & Facebook.
Grab a copy of her book “Raising Empowered Children: The Codependent Perfectionist’s Guide to Parenting” here.
Listen to The Codependent Perfectionist Podcast here.
And find out more over on her website alanacarvalho.com.
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