Threat Brain Parenting

This is part 3 of a series. Read part 1 here.

A "Big O" is a person, an Other, who generates strong emotion and attachment compulsion in us. They are different from others (small o's) who do not. We can be "in love" with all sorts of Big O’s, including our partners, children, celebrities, political and religious figures, and gurus.

In this series of blog posts, we will be exploring the problems that come with Big O love and how the over-inflation of others diminishes and hurts us.

The purpose of children

What is the purpose of having children? An evolutionary biologist might argue that it is to ensure the survival of the species. A historian or sociologist might draw attention to the once-essential contribution of children to family life—they worked, looked after siblings, added to the household income, and cared for their elders. A feminist might suggest it is to buttress the patriarchy by ensuring women remain bound to and dependent on men. What would you say?

I would say that we have turned a biological urge and necessity (sex and reproduction) into an activity that brings meaning to our lives. And there is nothing wrong with that unless we then turn our children into objects upon whom we depend to fulfill our purpose and to feel good about ourselves. When children become our Big O, the "love" we offer does not result in mutual growth. In fact, as we will see, it interferes with the growth of both parent and child.

Threat brain parenting

We have seen that Big O love is submissive love, and its expression where children are concerned can be seen in coddling, over-affectionate, clinging, protective, and smothering behaviors. We see it in the anxious need to keep our children happy and entertained and to meet their every wish. This people-pleasing or moving towards¹dynamic represents the "freeze" part of our threat brain and appears in all Big O relationships.

George Glass and David Tabatsky, in their book The Overparenting Epidemic, examine the adverse effects of "overparenting" which occur when:

Someone tries too hard to manage the outcome of his or her child’s life, imposing his or her expectations, often inappropriately, regardless of the child’s wishes and abilities.

Glass and Tabatsky suggest that such behavior can be associated with a growing lack of trust in politicians, the media, and our communities. We increasingly feel, say the authors, that institutions (such as the police) and the state (governments) cannot, and do not, keep us safe from crime, war, poverty, and disease, and the consequence is that,

These insecurities and polarizations that we have come to feel as a nation have bled into our personal behavior.

Brené Brown has described a similar phenomenon, which she describes as a "scarcity culture," where everyone is hyper-aware of lack. The fear of not being, having, or doing enough has triggered extremely anxious, competitive, and evaluative behaviors amongst many parents.

These fears, and the lack of trust that Glass and Tabatsky refer to, trigger and sustain what I refer to as threat brain parenting, and it appears in the submissive behaviors of Big O love.²

Under the spell of Big O love, we try to manage the anxieties of life by focusing all our vigilant attention, adoration, and time on this young being. The more we do so, we think, the more we can eradicate the threats that surround them (and us). Examples of this Big O dynamic include hyper-controlled scheduling of the child’s time, intense interest in a child’s grades, achievements, and safety, over-sharing of a child’s activities and developments, and excessive praise and adoration of everything the child does or says.

Research suggests that the outcome for children can be a lack of trust in their own abilities, an inadequate range of basic life skills, a fear of failure, reduced self-esteem, feelings of entitlement, a lack of creativity, increased anxiety, a reduced sense of responsibility and accountability, and reduced resilience. Some of these acquired characteristics are similar to those we associate with narcissism, and there is some evidence to suggest that adoration of our little "Big Os" does indeed produce adults with inflated egos and artificially high self-esteem.

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We can understand how Big O love like this happens when we recognize that most of us live in individualist or "me" cultures which have fuelled a growing need to feel special, unique, and esteemed. And parents, as the agents of this culture, may feel that Big O love is the best way in which they can "help" their children to feel these things—even though, as research shows, such attitudes and self-beliefs can lead to problematic consequences for the growing child.

Glass and Tabatsky note that the long-term consequences for parents who relate to their children in these ways are increased depression and loneliness. When the child eventually flies the nest, the parent who has been caught in Big O love will feel bereft and without purpose.

Indifferent love

It is easy to turn a child into our Other. They are so willing and desperate to please us. A parent can say and pretend to be all they want, and the child enters willingly into collusions, reflecting back to us our preferred realities. And so, children can temporarily enable us to live an alternative, preferred truth. Yet they cannot permanently take away what actually exists in our cursed thoughts and memories, and neither can they tell us—for a while at least—what they truly see.

Teenagers are so well-equipped to hit us where it hurts most because for 15 years or so, they have been silently observing our every move, our every hypocrisy, our every self-deception. Observing, gathering, and waiting. The more you use your child as your Other, the greater the force of their retaliative feedback.

Alternatives to Big O love arise when we start to own or "take back" our projections of anxiety and fear and recognize that the qualities we adore in Others are actually our own or at least those we long for in our lives. When we do this, we invite an exploration of how we might address our fears and yearnings through our own inquiry and endeavor—and not through the lives of our children.

The psychologist James Hollis talks about "disinterested love" as an antidote to cursed love. When we love with what I call indifference, our love is wholly invested in the well-being of the other without, as Hollis puts it,

...the shadow of self-interest cruising below the surface like a surly shark.

Indifferent love is a withholding of our problems, not to deny or avoid, but to give someone the space to be an other as opposed to our Other. And it becomes possible when we start to notice our threat brain triggers and can understand and soothe ourselves without resorting to the defensive spells and tricks that make us believe other people have the answer to our problems.