Does anyone else feel like this about their parents?

Post Reply New Topic

Looking back, I feel like my parents didn't really understand the magnitude of what my condition was. They tried a little bit, but I feel like they never really tried to teach me social norms or skills from a cognitive perspective, and when it came to executive functioning related issues, they always were either antagonistic and judgmental, or laid back and not caring. Then they let me go off to college knowing I had these issues, and didn't really try to prepare me for it. I feel like I needed a lot more help and attention than they gave me, and I'm worried that I may still have as many problems as I do now because of it. I was wondering if anyone else felt this way.

I'm sure everyone feels this way to some extent.

I'm NT, but I was raised in a dysfunctional household. I think my mother not only didn't prepare me well, but actively sabotaged me in terms of relationships and sometimes career stuff (she's a narcissist). My father was an alcoholic and so was vacant to abusive from the vodka.

If your parents are NT, I think they'd also really struggle to conceptualise teaching social skills cognitively. We learn most of our social skills through mirroring and sub-conscious observation. We learn some more complex social skills cognitively, but reinforced intuitively. So it's not natural for us to teach social skills to children that way and most of us would have to struggle to start thinking in a different enough way to teach those skills in an AS kind of way.

Plus, almost everyone feels ill-prepared in some way for the adult world!

I have very similar issues with my family. You can look up my recent post "Parental Rejection" for the specifics of my situation. I will say, one of my (many, many) issues with our society is there's this almost passive-aggressive pressure to be a parent, and this stigma with people who never have kids. The fact is, there are a lot of people who probably aren't really cut out for parenting. I wish more people would take a good, hard look in the mirror before deciding if they should have kids or not. One of the few advantages coming from our generation of broken homes might be more people thinking critically about raising kids than there have been in the past. Sorry for your struggles, just do try to remember, they are only human.