This seems a bit personal but......

[ajmrowland]

What do you do if your parents never had the guts to punish you and never taught you anything you didn't need to know until the last minute, and now you really feel you could have benefitted from the discipline.

[CampbellzSoup]

My brother is going through this situation where my mom NEVER punishes him yet I'm the one to put my foot in his behind and teach him things

So if I wasn't taught I would like someone too...trust me someone without the love of discipline grow up without a sense of pride and respect for things/people.

My kids will be the same.

[ajmrowland]

My sister's moved out, so that may be a little hard. And she did so when I didn't have problems. And I'm looking for a job, mostly to have a sense of accomplishment in my life. Considering I have goals for the next few decades, my life feels like it won't be going anywhere anytime soon. It also doesn't help that both my parents have worked almost full-time since I was 10.

[Prudence]

I have no idea. I have just the opposite problem. What do you do when you were the entirely unplanned firstborn to highly educated and horribly snobby people that knew nothing about kids and sent you to kindergarten when you were three, then continually pressured you until you left home at sixteen making hard-earned cash for yourself because they never so much as gave you a meager allowance and you now have a number of complexes stuck with you for the rest of your life?

Walk on and see where life takes you, I suppose. I suppose the same advice applies to the situations mentioned here, too.

But be thankful. My sibling is suicidal, recently released from hospitalization, due to the overly harsh and controlling environment we grew up with. And my sibling was the favorite. Lord knows what that says.

Honestly, I'd rather be a loose parent than an overly controlling parent. Messes people up less.

[littlefuzzy]

Prudence, maybe being the favorite put him/her under MORE pressure: to live up to the expectations, to maintain the position as favorite, and so on. Maybe you as the non-favorite felt that nothing you could do would win that coveted spot, so why get stressed out about trying... Also, you might have felt that if you did something to mess up, it wouldn't have altered their opinions of you that much.

Family has the potential to hurt much worse than any friends or so-called friends, enemies, bosses, or even significant others could ever do...

Note: I'm not a psychologist, although I've seen one played on TV!

[Prudence]

Mm, littlefuzzy, I will send you a private message. The oldest child is almost always by default pressured the most regardless of whether or not the oldest child is the favorite.

[ajmrowland]

Before I posted the thread, I was watching E's most Horrible Hollywood Murders. Not the most comforting thing after throwing a tantrum at nobody but the house.

[Elladorine]

It may take time to learn, but there is such a thing as self-discipline. And I obviously don't know what this is specifically about, but here are some generalizations I've come to realize over the years . . .

Basically, we can blame all our problems on our parents and the way we were raised, but in the end we all grow up with the option to think and make choices for ourselves.

We can continue to blame our parents and upbringing, or we can realize that becoming an adult means taking risks to gain experience, taking responsibility for making our own decisions, and figuring out our roles in life. In the end, parents are only a guide, and I believe that most genuinely do the very best of their abilities. They're human, they make mistakes, and they're not solely responsible for they type of adults we turn out to be.

[Disney-Fan]

It may take time to learn, but there is such a thing as self-discipline.

I agree! If that's how you feel this is the part where you take responsibility for yourself and make a change from within. I know I always seem to be the disciplinary figure for my siblings since my parents have kinda "given up" on them. I wouldn't recommend you throw that responsibility at anyone since it can get really tiring.

[Disney's Divinity]

Basically, we can blame all our problems on our parents and the way we were raised, but in the end we all grow up with the option to think and make choices for ourselves.

I think there's a difference between blaming your problems on your parents and blaming them for making problems that could have been avoided in the first place.

I personally have a lot of resentment for my parents. Not to go into too much detail, but most of my childhood involved my father at his mother's 24/7 (mama's boy), arguing constantly, my mom who has an anger problem blowing $50,000 in credit card debts to get back at him (conincidentally, she was a housewife and he barely gave her money at all before finally going back to work), with me and my sister in the middle. Anyway, getting to the point, I ballooned up to around 250 to 300 lbs while I was 10-12 years old. And I've spent the last 5 years of my life (at 20, that's nearly 10 years' obesity) overcoming a problem that happened when I was too young and stupid to realize what was happening to me (and stopping it). Yes, I can resolve the problem now that I'm older, but I can't help placing part of the blame on my parents. Especially since, combined with the gay and friendless thing, I went through a long depressed/suicidal period. At times, I think I resent them most for having made me hate myself (because I was a spoiled brat). Thankfully, I've grown into a better person.

Yes, parents are human. But if they don't think they can take care of children the way they should be taken care of--they shouldn't have them (God knows we don't need more children in the world at the moment anyway). There's a difference between a couple of mistakes and just not trying. That's why it's good to just let go of things and move on with your life; you can't change the past.

Anyway, I just said all that to show that I know how you feel ajmrowland about thinking you could have benefitted from better parenting/discipline. But I do agree with enigmawing that it just comes down to teaching yourself to overcome their mistakes in the end.

[Elladorine]

I think there's a difference between blaming your problems on your parents and blaming them for making problems that could have been avoided in the first place.

I totally agree with that, and I hope I haven't jumped the gun here.

I tried to be careful in mentioning that I don't know the specifics of this particular problem, which is why I tried to stay general with what I had to say. It's just that I've seen people blaming their parents when it comes down to how they were treated or disciplined as they were growing up so many times, as if the bad habits they have as adults cannot be shaken because their parents helped forged them as children.

I mean, I could point out that my mom literally taught me the habits of an eating disorder (which are still hard to shake now), that my dad was way too strict and overprotective, working too much to pay any attention to me other than to criticize, and that both of them were so caught up in their own lives that neither apparently gave any thought as to why I became so withdrawn and even suicidal as a junior high student (they didn't catch any of the signs that I was being abused by another family member).

I'm currently in my thirties, and even now I'm still trying to pull myself out of the situations my past has set me up into. Part of the healing process has been, at least for me, making those realizations that they actually did their best as parents, and that I can actually learn from those mistakes now that I'm an adult myself.

Sigh . . . it doesn't mean I didn't have a hellish childhood. I admit I'm still angry and bitter over a lot of things. It's just that, I dunno . . . that we all have to do the best with what we've been given.