Overprotective Parents Raise Insecure Children – Understand the Consequences!

After all, what is overprotection?

We cannot confuse protection with overprotection. Protection is healthy and vital to the children, while overprotection is harmfulthen overprotect it is to go beyond the satisfaction of needs and necessary care.

excessive careif not dosed and balanced, can become a obsessive syndromewhich can affect the relationship and family system.

This way, to overprotect is to live for the child. It is to make its own development impossible, to speak for it, to decide for it, to solve its problems.

Is to nullify your autonomyand in a way, imprison you in your own choices, decisions and frustrations.

We can define overprotection as a movement against education for independence and freedom.

Overprotection is a deprivation of the attempt to hit and also to miss. As well as a deprivation of growth, choices and development.

Obviously, overprotective parents they are full of good intentions, but overprotecting your children is a brutal way to paralyze them.

Barring your child constantly, depriving him of any frustration, not allowing him to try, do and make mistakes from time to time, conveys to him the message that he is incapablewhich fails, and which is not good enough.

And this can be extremely harmful, because it can make you overly insecure.

How do I know if I’m overprotecting my child?

I’ll give you three examples of some behaviors, and if you replicate them, I think it’s important to carefully assess them.

1) Constant fear that something bad is going to happen to your child

Many parents use phrases like: “the world is so dangerous”; “today, all care is little”; “the way things are, we need to be careful”, to justify a constant and often disproportionate concern and fear.

Of course you need to care for and protect your child. You must not be negligent by any means, but also may not want to control your childall the time, smothering it and preventing it from growing and developing. this is obsession.

Example: Lucas* is eleven years old and his class is going on a field trip to a museum in a nearby town. Teachers will accompany students. All of his colleagues have already confirmed their presence, and Lucas really wants to go, but his parents forbid him, as they consider it too dangerous, and he is afraid that something will happen to him.

Lucas insists, because the test will be about the experience at the Museum and will be graded, but the parents don’t change their mind, and Lucas will be the only one who has to stay at home.

Lucas was never able to go on any school trips, not even birthdays or friends’ houses.

In this case, the parents, for wanting to control him and out of fear, end up harming Lucas in several ways, because in addition to being harmed at school, he ends up being excluded, which greatly affects his life, his personal development and your relationships.

2) Treating your child in a way that does not correspond to their age

When your child is a baby, he totally needs your care to survive. That is, he has no autonomy, he is an extension of you. You are the one who feeds, bathes and takes care of their basic needs.

As he grows up, he detaches himself from you and recognizes himself and learns to place himself and impose himself as individual in the world.

It is natural that as the years go by, he gradually obtains autonomy. Autonomy to choose, decide and take responsibility.

In overprotection, this development of autonomy does not happen. It is common to see parents who infantilize their children, and this can be seen in situations such as:

• Way of speaking – Often parents talk in a childish way, that is, they talk to the child as if he were still a baby. They make childish voices or use the wrong words on purpose.

Example: “Mommy’s love, come here with mommy” – which means: “Mommy’s love, come here with mommy”.

• Actions – Parents do not allow the child to perform certain tasks alone, as he is old enough and able to solve them.

Example: John* is fifteen years old and his mother takes him to school every day. He is old enough to cross the street and go to the classroom alone, but his mother insists on accompanying him to the door of his room, as she is too worried about his safety.

3) Excessive fear that your child will get hurt while playing

Children need to play. Often, even through play, they relate to the world.

But at some point, they will get hurt. And this is completely normal. A scratch here, a bruised knee there, are absolutely to be expected from a child. And that’s not the end of the world!

Of course, parents need to be aware and must stipulate places, times and spaces for children to play, and depending on their age, it is very important that all this is done with an adult’s inspection, but you can’t exaggerate preventive measures. and exaggerated care.

You can’t isolate the child in a bubbleit is healthy for her to have contact with other children and also with other spaces and objects.

Do you want an example of this? I!

When I was a kid, I lived with black knees. I fell on a roller, on a bicycle and sometimes I fell for nothing! I liked to adventure, run and explore.

I have scars to this day on my knees that give me good memories and guess what: I’m still here!

Children are Scientists – Allow them to explore and question!

In addition to the unconditional love of parents, affection and attention, children need clear criteria and consequences for their actions.

Children need limits. They influence decision-making, and delimit what is their right, and what is the right of others. They establish a barrier of what can and should not be done.

Children need, gradually, to have the freedom to do things for themselves, to solve their own problems and to bear the consequences of their own actions. This will make them grow up more confident and develop the ability to learn from their own experiences, including their own mistakes.

If the parents do not allow the child takes responsibility for his own actions and have the freedom to act and make mistakes, that is, if they always solve their problems or end up interfering so that the child does not suffer the consequences of their own actions, in fact, they are not helping. On the contrary, they are hindering and delaying its development and maturation.

I’ll give you an example: Chanel* doesn’t like to do her homework, and so that she doesn’t get punished at school, her mother ends up doing her homework. In this case, the mother is not allowing the daughter to bear the consequences of her actions so that she does not suffer any harm and receive no punishment.

Chanel’s mother* is not helping her. It may be that it is helping if we analyze the tasks as something isolated, but not in terms of the context itself.

What the mother is doing is nothing more than reinforcing her daughter’s irresponsibility, which in the long run can have disastrous consequences.

Children need to learn to be responsible and also to deal with the frustration of having to do what they don’t like. They shouldn’t (and can’t) do just what they like or just what they want, simply because they are children.

Children without limits are adults without limits.

Don’t take your frustrations out on your child – Allow them to be imperfect!

Your son is not the best. He’s not the prettiest, the smartest, or the most talented. He’s probably not a genius, let alone a perfect son.

And as much as you see him that way, the world won’t see you with eyes as loving and admiring as yours – and instead of flattering him, you need to love him and teach him to deal with it, to work, accept and be able to see your weaknesses, as well as boost your strengths.

He won’t always be the highlight, and as much as you do everything in your power, as much as you educate him and give him love and support, he will fail. He will fail and he will disappoint you. And you need to learn to deal with it.

You cannot feel guilty about your child’s faults and failures. You shouldn’t punish yourself mentally or blame yourself when your child makes a mistake. Mistakes are part of the process, learning and development.

Their mistakes are not yours. The fault is not yours. Let him take responsibility!

I’m sure, throughout your life, you learned a lot from your mistakes, right? Even perhaps more than with their own successes. Allow your child to make mistakes too and learn from their own choices. Allow him to make his own way!

Walk beside him, but not in front. Allow him to choose his path.

Extend your hand, but with the softness of support and not with the brutality of annulment of the power of choice of its own trajectory.

Giving everything you didn’t have to your child can be severely harmful!

How many times have you heard a father saying that he wants to give everything he didn’t have, to his son? I many.

Obviously, it is explicit in the speech of parents who replicate this phrase, various types of lack. And because they have a lack, they want to make up for it with their presence (physical, financial, etc.) in their child’s life. However, if not dosed, this presence can be “overwhelming”.

Overprotection often comes in as a way to fill this gap. And therein lies the problem. Overprotective parents are controlling parents.

Overprotection is overprotection. And the excess suffocates.

Children of overprotective parents often become insecure, restless or too introspective, fearful, with difficulty in socializing, angry or aggressive.

It is essential to give support, support, affection and favorable conditions for your child, but controlling him too much, invading his space and making decisions for him, in addition to causing direct damage, often distances him from the family (physically or emotionally).

All of this can be avoided with careful but balanced protection. Without the weight of you having to give everything you didn’t have, because maybe his needs are different. Without the weight of him being what you couldn’t be, or getting to the place you didn’t get. Without guilt. No exaggerated control. No obsession.

*PS: Your child is not an extension of you and he does not need carry out the your dreams or the your wishes.

*PS 2: All names and examples given are fictitious.

Jóice Bruxel – Psychologist in Curitiba – CRP 08/25350

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