I am writing this article drawing on three sources: my own experience as a mother, theoretical knowledge in psychology and psychoanalysis, and my clinical work with both adult and child patients.
Why did I decide to write this text? Perhaps it is partly a need to integrate the experience I have accumulated, and partly a response to something I increasingly encounter online—numerous posts and articles describing how terrible some parents are and how they supposedly damage their children.
Psychological science has long advanced in understanding how parental actions and relationships influence a child’s psyche. However, many parents still find it extremely difficult to abandon violent disciplinary methods or situational aggression toward their children. Will our outrage and condemnation truly help such parents and their children?
Often these parents themselves need understanding, support, and help in learning how to manage their feelings.
Like many psychotherapists, I frequently hear from my patients that they sometimes slap their child or raise their voice at them. And which parent has never raised their voice, trying to obtain obedience from their child? How often do we encounter families in which both parents fully share the same views on child-rearing?
One of my patients once told me how she witnessed a boy being humiliated and told that he would never achieve anything. She intervened and reproached the parents, defending the child. Yet when her own child destroys toys or torments the family dog, he occasionally receives slaps from both her and her husband.
The contradiction in this patient’s behavior lies in the fact that when she observes such a situation from the outside, she intellectually understands and deeply feels the humiliation experienced by the child. She is capable of empathy. However, when interacting with her own son, she becomes overwhelmed by her negative emotions and cannot control her anger toward him—although she later regrets it and experiences guilt.
Another example. Once I consulted a woman in an online parenting community who complained about her daughter’s behavior. The situation was quite common, almost classic: the mother opposed punishment, the father supported it, and the child manipulated the parents by exploiting their disagreements. I tried to draw the mother’s attention to this dynamic in my response.
Most comments from other members of the community, however, suggested that she should simply leave her husband.
In both this and the previous example, we can see how easily observers defend the child while condemning the parent. What benefit would it bring to the patient in the first example if someone were to “open her eyes” to the fact that she herself humiliates her child? She already knows this perfectly well—she says so herself. In fact, it is precisely her understanding that humiliating a child is wrong that motivates her to defend someone else’s child.
And how would the advice to leave her husband help the woman in the second example?
I am convinced that these families would benefit far more from understanding what exactly in their child’s behavior triggers such intense anger, why the child behaves in this way, and how both sides could learn to express dissatisfaction in less destructive ways.
Here is another situation.
At a playground, a two-year-old girl is screaming and struggling in her father’s arms. He repeatedly asks her—raising his voice in frustration—what she wants, offering various options. She continues to scream. Eventually he puts her down on the ground. She throws herself onto the grass and continues crying.
Exhausted and helpless, the father sits down on a bench nearby and asks me, completely distressed, what he should do.
At that moment I was there with my younger daughter, who became very interested in the situation. I did not rush to give advice to the father. I had no idea what had happened before the tantrum, what interaction had taken place between them, or what might have triggered the child’s reaction.
Instead, I calmly explained to my daughter that the little girl was crying because perhaps she and her father had misunderstood each other.
Then something remarkable happened. The father, who had clearly heard my words, began watching his daughter attentively. She had started to calm down and was pulling grass from the ground. The father then said: “Let’s pick some grass for the rabbit.”
The connection between father and daughter was restored, and the tantrum did not resume.
I do not think that condemning this father or attempting to pick the child up and calm her would have helped restore their contact. In my work I like to think of myself as a channel or mediator between parents and children. In that moment I saw that these two people had lost connection with each other. Yet they needed one another—they were close to each other—and what they needed was someone who could help restore that connection.
Sometimes this only requires recognizing and naming what is happening between the parent and the child and acknowledging their feelings.
Incidentally, in post-Soviet societies, witnesses to such situations often do not help restore contact between parent and child. On the contrary, they frequently intensify the distance between them. They might say things like, “Don’t lie on the grass—you’ll catch a cold!” Or worse, they frighten the child by threatening to take them away, or they attack the parent with accusations and demand that they immediately pick the child up.
I work with real people. I live with real children. I myself am a real person. I neither want nor expect perfection—from myself or from others.
Today there is an abundance of materials about how to be a perfect parent, how to raise and develop a child in the “correct” way in order to become ideal. But there is very little that supports real parents and helps them trust themselves.
Donald Woods Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, was one of the few who supported mothers—their intuition and their capacity to understand their child. He introduced the concept of the “good enough mother.”
Modern research shows that a “good enough mother” is quite different from an ideal one. She satisfies not all of the child’s needs, but approximately 30 percent of them. A good-enough mother is a real mother who trusts herself.
In my view, the most important element in the relationship between parent and child is the striving for understanding.
Parents gain much if they try to understand both themselves and their child, including the sources of both their own aggression and the child’s.
Every human being possesses two fundamental drives: aggression and love. Children are no exception. A child may consciously display aggression and even experience pleasure from it.
Even if we assume that a child’s aggression arises from frustration—the inability to satisfy a desire—we must accept that just as frustration is inevitable (because it is impossible to fulfill all desires), aggression is also inevitable.
Parents therefore face a difficult task. On the one hand, it is important not to suppress the child’s aggression, because doing so inevitably suppresses a part of the child’s personality and interferes with development. On the other hand, parents must prevent aggression from taking destructive forms and help the child learn to express it in socially acceptable ways.
During normal development, children pass through stages in which aggression is necessary and even essential for the growth of their personality.
At the same time, parents often have to guide their child’s aggression into constructive forms precisely when they themselves are experiencing strong negative emotions. A child overwhelmed by aggressive impulses toward a parent simultaneously needs that parent in order to cope with those feelings.
By nature, a child has only one initial way of expressing aggression—direct action. An impulse appears to break, hit, destroy, or attack, and the action follows immediately. Adults can help the child become aware of this impulse.
Most parents, when confronted with aggressive impulses in their child, try either to suppress them or to punish the child. This easily turns into direct confrontation, because if the child is in the developmental phase where hostility toward the parent helps protect their emerging individuality and independence, the child will not easily abandon their aggression.
Understanding that increased aggression is a necessary part of development helps parents maintain contact with their child and prevents them from being overwhelmed by their own anger.
The second step is helping the child find constructive outlets for hostile feelings. Aggression can be expressed in acceptable forms—for example, in play, drawing, competition, or imaginary battles.
I recently witnessed such an example.
In a courtyard, a four-year-old boy was running around with a toy gun, pointing it at adults. His mother chased after him in panic, trying to take the gun away. It was obvious that if she had succeeded, a conflict would have erupted immediately because the boy was emotionally overwhelmed.
The mother appeared to be driven by shame about her son’s behavior, difficulty accepting his aggressive and sexual impulses, and anxiety that they might become uncontrollable.
When the boy ran toward me, I raised my hands and said, “I surrender.” The mother stopped. Everyone smiled. My acceptance of this expression of his impulses helped both him and his mother release the growing tension.
Below I will describe periods in development when a child may experience aggression toward the mother or father not because of a specific frustrating situation, but because they are passing through an important stage in the formation of their personality.
The first period occurs during the separation–individuation phase described by Margaret Mahler, when the infant moves from complete fusion with the mother toward awareness of themselves as a separate individual.
Around 16–18 months, the child begins to realize that their desires and their mother’s desires may not coincide. The illusion of omnipotence fades, and the child becomes aware of their separateness, often accompanied by depressive feelings of loneliness and helplessness.
During this stage, characteristic traits such as greed, envy, and ambivalence appear. The child struggles with conflicting feelings and incompatible desires. They may demand mutually exclusive things and drive their parents to frustration: once they receive one thing, they immediately want the opposite—and when they receive that, they still erupt into a tantrum.
Their desires resemble those of an adult, but their abilities are still those of a small child. They begin to understand that they cannot control adults and experience their own helplessness.
Understanding this internal struggle makes it much easier to empathize with the child rather than respond with rage.
The age of five, following Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, corresponds to the Oedipal phase. At this stage the child’s fantasies shift from wanting a special relationship with one parent to wanting to take the role of one parent in relation to the other.
This stage is painful because it challenges the child’s sense of self-worth. The child cannot win the competition with the same-sex parent and simultaneously realizes their own immaturity. They both desire victory in the Oedipal struggle and fear it. Even the most loving parent inevitably disappoints the child during this period, because the child’s desires far exceed reality.
Finally, there is adolescence, which involves two major psychological processes: relinquishing parents as primary love objects and finding new ones outside the family.
Adolescents tend to criticize their parents, who now appear inadequate, disappointing, or unfair. Behind this hostility lies the same emotional reality as in earlier separation stages: loneliness, emptiness, and the painful sense of losing parental support.
At this stage, however, adolescents already possess the ability for sublimation—the capacity to channel their impulses into symbolic or creative expression.
These developmental periods require patience and emotional strength from parents. They may also activate unresolved conflicts from the parents’ own childhood. Anxiety and anger may lead parents to react automatically according to patterns learned in their own upbringing—sometimes identifying with the aggressor and responding with aggression as a defense against feelings they cannot tolerate.
Parents, too, need support. It is important for them to understand that they are not alone in encountering such manifestations in their beloved children.
As many psychoanalysts have written—and as clinical practice repeatedly confirms—the resolution of these crises lies in the reconciliation of opposing feelings, in learning to integrate love and hatred.
It means recognizing that it is possible to love someone deeply and at the same time feel hatred toward them—and to tolerate this hatred without destroying the relationship, without seeking revenge, and without resorting to rejection or punishment.