‘People expect kids to act like adults’: Therapist goes viral after yelling that toxic parenting is necessary
Author and licensed marriage and family therapist from Florida, Whitney Goodman has over 550,000 followers. on Instagram 1 person.
She regularly creates relationship content, especially her recent video about letting kids choose sides and treating them like adults in a “bad marriage” went viral .
In them, Goodman explains why she thinks one of the worst things a parent can do is fight with their partner in front of their children.
This is Whitney Goodman. He is a mother, licensed psychotherapist in Florida, Toxic positive
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Recently, she made a video about kids growing up with a ‘team’ in the family
“Okay, this video is for those of you who grew up in a home where your parents fought a lot and your marriage was terrible. Tell me if this happened to you. You may have found that families split into different alliances and teams to manage marital discord, and since marriage was not a good, safe foundation for families, everyone else found themselves on new teams. had to be formed.”
Image credit: Wavebreakmedia (not actual photo)
According to Goodman, they are forced to choose between
“So you and your dad team up and you might say bad things about your mom. Mom is crazy and we need to fight her. One sibling may have teamed up with your mom and started acting like your mom, or like you.
Image credit: whitney goodman lmft
and deprived of growing up in a stable environment
“You all look for security and try to find it in many different ways, but you can never achieve the same type of stability that your parents could have if they had such a concrete and stable relationship.”
@whitneygoodmanlmft♬ Original Sound – Whitney Goodman, LMFT
Goodman said moms and dads shouldn’t get a free pass no matter how hard parenting is
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And it’s actually the children who deserve more empathy
“When I talk about adult children and their parents, I get a lot of comments saying that parents are human too and we need to empathize with them. I think it’s one of the hardest things ever, but what I’ve really found is that people don’t have empathy for kids.”
Image credit: whitney goodman lmft
even when I grow up
“People expect their children to behave like adults. And the focus really shifts back to the parent: “You don’t know how hard it was for me. Being a parent will tell you. I didn’t have the money. I didn’t have the resources.” .
Image credit: Wavebreakmedia (not actual photo)
“And all of this is and can be 100% true, but you have to be able to keep empathy on both sides of that coin, right? This is always true when a child is helpless, defenseless, and unable to take care of themselves physically or mentally. It makes the conversation a little fairer.”
@whitneygoodmanlmft #parenting #adult child #adultchildrenofdysfunction #whitney goodman ♬ Original Sound – Whitney Goodman, LMFT
Therapist received comments from people who disagreed with her
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“I want to reply to this comment not because I want to reply to this person specifically, but because they bring up something I hear a lot and I think it’s important for us to talk.”
complex dynamics
“They say that when a child grows up and becomes an adult, their relationship with their parents and their childhood trauma is their job to heal, and the parent is no longer responsible for healing it. I want to think about and rethink how we think about the child-parent relationship: there are no other relationships in which someone is abused, hurt, ridiculed, or denied their needs and rights. Unthinkable, you have to figure it out, but we tend to do that with adults and their parents.
And it’s always under the guise that, well, they’ve done all they can. And I think there’s a lot of empowerment in telling adults that childhood doesn’t decide their lives. But we also need to address the dynamics and healing that occur when parents are able to say: Maybe I hurt you Maybe there is something I can apologize for or I can take responsibility so that we can have a good relationship moving forward.
@whitneygoodmanlmft thank you #therapytiktok #childhood trauma #sitwithwhit #whitney goodman lmft #adultchildrenofdysfunction ♬ Original Sound – Whitney Goodman, LMFT
But at least we’re talking about it
