MODULE 1.3: SOCIO-EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
I saw a post about a couple with a child hanging out with their friends, and the father was praised for being a hands-on father. So the mom reacted, "Dapat lang noh!". And she said in the post that this scene made her think about societal norms when it comes to parenting. Society expects that the mother should be the one who takes care of the baby, and when the father does the same, it's as if he did something unexpected and beyond what is expected of him. But, when you think about it, the father and the mother both contributed to "making" that baby. Why is society expecting that sole caregiving should come from the mother? When the father does his part in parenting, it shouldn't be seen as extraordinary. He's doing his part. It should be normalized. This is also the reason why diaper changing stations should also be installed in the men's toilets in malls and other public establishments.
And then I thought about the article, "Attachment Theory Is All Wrong. Here’s What The Science Really Says." by Vinopal. Through this article, she refutes how outdated the attachment theory is and how it became popular to keep mothers from working and leaving home. And to be honest, this theory, for an unknown reason, has stuck with me since I was a child. I'm not sure if my mother was always drilling the concept into me, but growing up, all I thought was that when I became a mother, I needed to be with my kids no matter what. that I should be the one to take care of them. I wanted this so badly that when I got pregnant unexpectedly in my second year of college, I stopped going to school and stayed home to care for myself and the baby. And when my eldest was born, I also stayed home to take care of him, even though I had the brains and the skills to work a job with better compensation. To cut a long story short, I was eventually able to work and had to leave my kids with my parents when I was working.
I’m glad that I read Vinopal’s article. After all, I have always felt this nagging guilt because I had to work and leave my kids with my parents. I have always had this fear that, for some reason, my children would not be emotionally stable in their adult lives because I didn’t stay home to take care of them. But, through this article, I realized that I don’t have to feel guilty all the time and that the attachment theory is outdated. I learned that there are so many factors that affect adult life and the most impactful would be the historical events in their lives.
I have two teenagers and to describe it in one word, I would say a rollercoaster. There are times when I couldn’t understand my teenage kids and I could also feel that they’re pulling away from me, which makes me scared. It always makes me wonder if I’m doing something wrong in raising them or if I’m making the right decisions for them. It’s not easy to raise kids because like they always say, there is no instruction manual that comes with being a parent.
Then, I watched the Youtube video “Why are Teens so Moody?” and it answers some of the questions with how my kids are acting. It’s all about how their brains are wired at this stage of their lives. I now understand why my kids sometimes prioritize their friends over us, their family. I’ve realized that I shouldn't really take this personally because they are at the stage of wanting to be accepted by their peers. I now know how to better take care of my kids.
This module has led me to understand my family and myself better. First, let’s talk about the possible reason why I smoke. As per Freud’s theory, if a stage in one’s psychosexual development is not satisfied, it could cause a person a certain fixation in their adulthood to pacify this frustration. I was thinking about this a lot because perhaps the reason why I smoke now is because according to my mother, I only breastfed from her for less than a month. Could this perhaps be the reason why?
Second, I have always wondered why my partner who is 9 years younger than me could love me or could want to be with me. Knowing his history and the psychology behind it might be the key to understanding him better. He was abandoned by his mother when he was just 3 years old. I wouldn’t judge the mother hastily. She was physically, mentally and emotionally abused by her husband and mother-in-law. But, I now realized why her son, my partner, would be inclined to be attached or attracted to me. He didn’t have a healthy attachment with his mother and he might now be acting on his frustration of having a maternal influence. His past relationship might not have worked because they didn’t have the maturity of someone like me who is older than him.
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