by Josephine Polifroni

Created on: December 02, 2008

There's an old joke that tells of two moms waiting for their children to come out of school. The first mom tells the second mom about how she always wanted to dance when she was a child but her mother insisted she play the violin and how unhappy that always made her. The second mom tells her she bets the first mom will be different with her daughter. To that, the first mom responds, "Of course! She's going to dance!"

This joke illustrates how a parent can expect their children to be like themselves and not individuals. Unfortunately, unlike the joke, the result of this type of expectation is usually unhappiness.

Literally, from the moment the child is born and placed in a mother's arms both parents begin searching for and exclaiming over how the child has the dad's nose or the mom's mouth. As the child grows and matures these physical characteristics may or may not continue to remind people of one parent or the other, but no one thinks much about it. The child either looks like you or not and there isn't much to be done about it.

Personality characteristics are regarded differently. We yearn to not only pass on our genetic material, we want proof we are passing on this material as expressed by the way our child behaves. And that is to behave as we do.

It seems logical. Our child has our genes and watches what we do and hears what we say. Therefore, by nature and by nurture our child should behave as we do. He or she may not behave exactly as one parent or the other, but their personality should reflect one or the other of us. Often, parents tend to appropriate a same sex child, paying more attention to them, believing that a girl will be more like the mother and a boy just like his dad. Or, regardless of sex, a parent spends more time with the child they feel is more like themselves. Parents may expect to relive their own lives through the lives of their children, forcing a child to believe and behave as they do, as the mother in the joke takes her child to dance class regardless of what her daughter may want.

Each of these circumstances will cause problems, not only for the child, but also for the parent and the family unit as a whole.

Children are individual people. There was a time when everyone thought a child was a tabula rasa, a blank slate that could be molded in any way without resistance, especially by their parents. Some still hold this view, but children react to the outside world in different ways depending on their own personalities that they are born

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