Help us in our Research on Authoritarian Parenting & Developing Autonomy
A guest post by Krispin Mayfield
Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, a newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high-control environments. Today I have a guest post by my partner, Krispin Mayfield, who is collecting information on the long-term impacts of authoritarian parenting on a person’s sense of autonomy. Krispin and I are working on a book project together and we are committed to highlighting the stories of survivors and people who have come out of high-control religious families. Due to time/energy constraints, we are limiting access to the forms to people who are in the paid subscriber community. If you would like to be able to access the questionnaire but are unable to afford a subscription, please reply to this newsletter or email me at dlmmcsweeneys @ gmail.com and we will get you sorted. Thank you so much to everyone who supports this newsletter and who supports this work!
Authoritarian Parenting & Developing Autonomy Questionnaire
DL and I are working on a book about evangelical parenting books, and how authoritarian parenting is helpful to authoritarian political movements. While DL’s been digging into recognizing authoritarianism in national politics, I’ve been reflecting on recognizing authoritarianism in the home. I like to describe authoritarian parenting as high demand, low listening. In other words, children are expected to obey particular expectations, but parents aren’t tuned in enough to their children to change the rules or expectations according to their needs, nor are the rules ever truly up for discussion. There is no chance to talk through challenges together—it’s a completely top-down approach. In this kind of parenting, children are discouraged from exercising their own autonomy.
The goal of authoritarian parenting is to train children to submit and conform immediately, bypassing the child’s own preferences, desires, perspective and needs— in short, discouraging them from developing their own autonomy in the family (and in their world). Growing up in such an environment does not allow a child to develop a sense of self. You don’t get a chance to practice making decisions on your own, according to your preferences or feelings, because the expectation is to simply follow the rules.
Children who grow up in this kind of environment often have difficulty exercising their own autonomy, even after leaving home. Am I allowed to make my own decisions? And do I even know what decisions I want to make? For some, it can be hard to know what career path you want, or even where you want to go out for dinner. This often happens when you grow up in a family where it’s safest to disconnect from your own preferences or desires and simply go with the flow. You were trained to disregard your own needs so effectively that it’s incredibly hard to get back in touch with them as an adult.
Some of us actually know what we want, or at least have a small inkling of what we want. But we don’t use our own autonomy because we’ve been trained to do what makes others happy. Lindsay Gibson, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, uses the term “role coercion,” where a parent pressures their child (even into adulthood) to live in a particular way, rather than supporting them to become their own person. They are pressuring the adult child to fulfill a role that they have in mind. Gibson gives the example of an adult child that is pressured to remain in a toxic marriage, because her parents believe that marriage is sacred. This could also look like going into the career field your mother always wanted to, but couldn’t because of the limitations on her life. Or an adult child who would really prefer to live in another part of the country, but feels pressured to stay in their hometown to avoid their parents’ grief. Without a strong sense of self, it can be hard to make decisions for yourself, especially when under the pressure of parents who didn’t often encourage autonomy.
Others have been excited to make decisions for themselves after they’ve left home—and faced backlash for it. Perhaps you’ve been shamed, guilted, or lectured for making decisions for yourself. While it’s not abnormal for adult children to experience some conflict with parents regarding life decisions, many evangelical parenting books were geared specifically toward discouraging autonomy. Dobson and others promised parents that if they used certain parenting strategies, they would produce children that would make the same decisions their parents would. This set up some unrealistic, unhealthy expectations for the parents of what relating to their adult child would look like. Rather than giving their adult child space to make their own decisions, they believe that they should have undue influence or say in their adult child’s life.
We’re currently gathering information for our book, and today we want to hear from you about how authoritarian parenting has impacted your sense of autonomy.
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