Dr. Coleman was asked by CNN.com to write a piece about the parents of Jared Loughner and other parents who have had similar kinds of struggles. Here it is:

What if he were your kid? You wouldn’t raise that kind of kid. You’d know the signs and get help. You’d have spotted it early on and gotten help for him right away. You would’ve seen the warnings and acted before it became the national tragedy that it did. Good parents don’t raise those kinds of kids.
But, what if you’re a good parent and you didn’t see the signs and you did raise that kind of kid, or at least some kid like that?
You knew something was wrong, but you didn’t know what to do. So you told yourself, it’s a phase. Lots of kids these days talk about death, have pictures of skulls, watch violent video games, take drugs and write things that they call poetry; it’s not like any poetry you’d ever read, but what do you know? You’re not a shrink. Maybe it will get better.

You’re not the Loughners, your kid hasn’t been accused of killing anyone, but something’s wrong with your kid and you don’t know what it is and you’re scared. You don’t have a lot of money or you just lost your insurance, so you took your son to the county hospital because lately, he’s been so angry all the time that you don’t know what’s wrong with him.

And the psychiatrist at the county ER tells you that he’s schizophrenic and should be on anti-psychotic medication and they’d like to keep him for two weeks on an involuntary hold.
So they keep him for two weeks on an involuntary hold, but because of the cutbacks in county mental health services, there’s no place to refer him when the hold expires, except back to you. And now that he’s on medication, he’s much calmer and no longer seems to be a threat to others. Crisis averted. Thank God for modern psychiatry.

Except that he doesn’t like the way the anti-psychotic drugs make him feel, so he goes off of them. And soon he’s back to posting angry, disturbing diatribes that don’t make a lot of sense, and this time, he refuses to go back to the hospital because he doesn’t want to be locked up.

So now you’re worried all over again. You know that you could call the police and they would come pick him up and take him back, but he’s still mad at you for hospitalizing him the first time; you can only imagine how angry he’ll be if he’s hauled back there in handcuffs.

But he ends up in handcuffs anyway, not because he’s accused of murdering someone, but because of drugs, or theft, or some other crime. And you’re almost relieved because the terrible end that you thought was coming has finally come.

But maybe your kid doesn’t end up in jail, but ends up living on the streets because he refuses to take your help — anyone’s help — and now you don’t even know where he lives. He stopped calling a long time ago when he figured you weren’t going to keep giving him money, and he refuses to talk to anyone else in the family, even his brother, whom he was once close to.

And you’d like to get support for how heartbroken and guilt-ridden you feel, but you don’t know where to get it because everyone assumes that you must have done something terribly wrong to have produced a kid who has such serious problems, or who wants nothing to do with you.And no one believes that more than you, his mother or father, even though a meek voice of protest rises up inside you to try to unsuccessfully challenge the far more powerful accusing voice.

And watching the evening news, you recognize that while you’re not the parent of a murderer, you feel an affinity for those parents far stronger than the parents of your friends with grandchildren, and children in college, or weddings to plan. You know, like they know, that for all the lousy parents in the world, good people can still create children who do terrible things, or whose lives turn out in ways they never imagined, not in their worst nightmares.

And the image of that father the morning of the shootings, asking him what was in that black bag, knowing his son well enough to know that something was wrong, reminds you of all the signs you ignored or acted on, but apparently not well enough because now, look how things have turned out for you and your kid, your baby.

And no matter how many times you tell yourself it wasn’t your fault, and however secure you are in that knowledge, it never buys you more than the briefest moment of comfort before you’re back to blaming yourself and wondering, “How could I let this happen to my own child? What kind of a parent am I?”

The holidays elict strong feelings about family — hopeful, regretful or homicidal. And Thanksgiving is one of the Big Boys — a nondenominational, bipartisan, school-excused, frequent-flyer, triglyceride-grabbing holiday that can act as a gaping black hole for family feelings and memories.
For many people, the tender images touted by Madison Avenue and the television networks generate intense feelings of sadness, loneliness, shame, guilt or anger. These media-generated, picture-perfect, feel-good families can underscore the disparity between the relationships people have with their parents and the relationships they wish they had.

Around the holidays, unresolved family issues tend to get hotter than a pan of jewel yams, because they keep us from being as close as we want to be to our families. Well, we may want to be distant from our particular family — but we want to be a member of some family where we feel loved, respected and appreciated.

Children can carry the memory of hurt or anger from family relationships well into adulthood. Many people stay away from their parents or visit them reluctantly, bracing themselves to swallow, ignore or fight over issues that have haunted them for years. Some, with time, acceptance or the help of therapy, are able to make peace with what they didn’t get — and never will — from their parents. In other families, where the parents are healthy enough to address their mistakes and change their behavior, relationships can become stronger and more resilient.
Parenting is a science of approximations. What works magically for the first child may be irrelevant for the next. Some parents are great with certain types of kids and clueless with others — better with boys than girls, better with girls than boys, better with cats than either one. I was more patient with my daughter than I was with my twin sons — her nature was calm and introspective, which freed up time for playing, talking or reading. My boys were loud, rowdy and constantly in motion; a larger percentage of my parental reserves went toward containing and corralling them so they didn’t disassemble our house and build a skateboard ramp out of the spare parts.

None of us are perfect as parents, and all of us wound our children to some degree or another. Ideally, we try to pass on as many good things as we can, but, inevitably, we pass on some of our problems as well.
It takes a healthy parent to listen to an adult child’s anger or hurt about the mistakes the parent made and not feel undone by it. And it takes a mature child to feel confident enough to tell a parent what he or she doesn’t like about the relationship. Parents often feel betrayed when their kids criticize them, no matter how warranted the criticism. They frequently react by getting defensive or by accusing the child of being ungrateful. This counter-blame is a way to block out feeling unappreciated, sad or guilty. Unfortunately, it usually confirms the adult child’s worst fears and sets the clock back for getting the relationship onto a healthy track.

Some parents, whether they admit it or not, are responsible for parenting transgressions that are extremely harmful to their children. Child abuse, incest, alcoholism or drug addiction are a few of the more egregious examples. However, people are often hurt by their parents for reasons that aren’t obvious to others. Something that may look trivial from the outside can be suffocating or damaging to the person who lives inside that family. “My mother had a pretty low standard of parenting,” a friend once told me. “Tell your children that you love them and don’t beat them. My father didn’t, so he was a success in her eyes. And everybody loved my father because he was really funny and outgoing. They never saw his subtle, day-to-day humiliations of us.”
People who grow up in families like this — where the deficits in the parenting are less overt — don’t know they’re being denied the small day-to-day acts of encouragement and involvement that create a person, layer by precious layer. As adults, they don’t understand why they feel sad or inadequate, or can’t apply themselves to things they value, or choose relationships with people who are harmful to them. They don’t understand why they don’t want to see their parents or feel so lousy after they do.

It’s common in psychotherapy to hear people berate themselves for feeling hurt and angry over childhood wounds they are barely able to identify. “It’s not like I was beaten or anything,” is a frequent refrain. “So my parents were distant and never told me that they loved me. Lots of people have worse problems than me. That’s not a reason for me to be depressed.”

But for many people, it is.
Even for well-intentioned parents, pitfalls abound. One of the cruelest ironies of parenting is that we can do so much harm even when we are trying to do our best.

An example of this is when parents damage the relationship with their children by trying not to make the same mistakes their parents made. One of my colleagues grew up in a commune in the ’60s. “I was given a ton of freedom because my parents were rebelling against their parents’ conservatism. They were worried that discipline and limits would destroy my innocence and creativity. I remember asking if I could smoke pot with them when I was 10, and they said, `You decide. If you think that it’s a good idea, then it’s a good idea.’ I was 10 years old! How would I know what a good idea was?
“Now that I’m a parent, I’m super strict. My kids practically need permission to blink, and they resent me for it, but it’s better than what I had.”
Maybe. But adopting a parenting style at the opposite extreme of our childhood experience can create other problems. One couple, for example, risked their lives to come to America so that their children could take advantage of opportunities they never had. They constantly harassed their children to do better, and loudly criticized their efforts and achievements. If the children performed poorly in school, they berated them. As a result, their kids were burdened with strong feelings of worthlessness and guilt when they became adults.
These parents did the best they could, given what they knew. But fearing that their children would suffer in poverty, as they had, made them blind to the harm they were causing.

So should their children, now adults, forgive and forget?
Sure, if they can. But there is so much pressure in our culture to “get over it” and “move on” and “grow up” that many people aren’t allowed to look back long enough to grieve what they didn’t get from their parents without someone calling them immature. They end up blaming themselves for inadequacies and conflicts without understanding how those problems came to be. And if they’re blaming themselves for all of their problems, they may not be ready to forgive their parents. Forgiveness can only come when we know, in our cranberry-colored blood, that we didn’t deserve to be treated badly, no matter what our parents’ intentions.

Yet sometimes, the worst possible betrayals can be healed. In my experience of working with families who are trying to reconcile, the best outcomes occur when adult children are able to talk about their experience in the family and the parents are willing to admit to the possibility that they caused harm.
Children — even grown-up children — need to feel like their parents can accept the full range of their feelings. Listening without being defensive is one of the most crucial things a parent can do. It shows that we care enough about our kids to take their feelings and experiences seriously, no matter how unflattering or painful it is for us to hear them.

This is not easy for most parents to do, and it’s rarely pleasant. It’s an especially tall order to accept, with love and grace, the anger of a child who has an incorrect or partial picture of a parent at the time a transgression took place. Conversely, for parents who know they were at fault, there is the added weight of managing their own guilt and sorrow on top of their child’s hurt and anger. It takes strength and courage to face that we have hurt someone so important to us. But like it or not, it’s part of the job we parents sign up for when we create a child.
Parents have a right to have their perspective heard. There are separate realities in a family, and sometimes this is most strongly reflected in the difference between a child’s view of the parents’ behavior and the parents’ view of themselves. Airing this perspective, however, shouldn’t be done as a way to prove the child wrong. It should be done after there has been considerable demonstration on the part of the parents that they have correctly heard what their child has said, and that they are open to making efforts to address that hurt.

All parents do the best they can given what they know and what they have to draw upon. However, it’s important for both the parent and the adult child to recognize that this is where the discussion should begin, not end.

As children, we don’t get to choose the family we grow up with. But as adults, we get to decide who we want to have or not have in our lives. Being a member of a family is often a challenge, even in the best of circumstances. If we are able to make peace with our family, so much the better. If not, it’s our job to surround ourselves with people who treat us the way that we want and need to be treated.
Many people are confused about whether to blame themselves or their parents, whether to forgive or not forgive, whether being mad is infantile or an appropriate labeling of responsibility. We start out believing our parents know everything and slowly begin to see what they know and what they don’t — if we’re lucky.

Hopefully, our parents are willing to admit their mistakes and hear what it was like for us to be a child or a teenager or an adult in their homes. As parents, hopefully, we have children who are willing to forgive us for the hurt we caused when we were too tired, too frustrated or too selfish to do a better job. Hopefully we can forgive ourselves if they won’t. And hopefully, we are secure in the knowledge that we deserve to have people around us — whether family or friends — who care about our worries, value our friendship and take joy in our happiness.
Having that — at any time of year — is a reason to give thanks.

Dr. Coleman was interviewed by journalist Catherine Saint Louis for an article on the ways that social media complicates estrangement. To read the article go here

Dr. Coleman was interviewed in a recent AARP article by Meredith Maran on parental estrangement. To read the whole article go here: The Stranger in Your Family

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://www.pbs.org/lifepart2/exclusives/-threat-being-cut-grandkids

According to the panel, Boomers are often wealthier, better educated, and younger looking, than their own grandparents. “My kids dress like I do, and they listen to same music,” says Coleman. Their advice? Be cautious: don’t give advice that’s not asked for. If you want to open up a dialogue, start admitting your own mistakes as a parent. To see the whole segment go here http://www.pbs.org/lifepart2/watch/season-2/boomer-grandparenting

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