Creating Healthy Family Scripts When There’s No Manual
For many years, I worked as a nanny for young children. Prior to this, I babysat many members of my own large families, including foster children. I saw a lot of behaviors and learned a lot of techniques for supporting children. If anyone thought they were prepared for parenthood, it was me.
But then my own kids came...
Needless to say, I was not prepared.
I was not prepared to have children who needed radical acceleration in several topics.
I was not prepared for children with learning differences and disabilities.
I was not prepared to create a neuro-affirming environment for my neurodivergent children. I didn’t even know that was a thing.
I did not have the tools I needed for the children that I had. When I would talk about it with older parents, they would often knowingly (and cryptically) nod and say, “Kids don’t come with manuals!”
We learn a lot of things from our parents. We develop familial scripts, ways of talking and connecting that are often generational and unique to a family. They are basically parenting shorthand. Have you ever had the words your parents said to you fall out of your mouth – especially in a time of intense frustration? These scripts are often things like, “Because I said so” or any other saying that you may have heard from your parents, and even their parents.
In addition to family scripts, we often follow expected cultural life scripts – the expected path of our lives, such as grow up, get married, have children, retire, etc. Each generation often shares an expectation of these life scripts, which is why it’s easy for us to relate to stereotypes about each generation.
When scripts work, they are like an inside joke with the people you love. Everyone gets it. Everyone benefits from the shared family “language” and communication. For example, my family played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, and during one campaign, my sister-in-law perished to a vampire and yelled, “You can’t kill me! I’m a mighty and powerful wizard!” After 25 years, I still say this to my own kids in our own campaigns, even when I’m not a wizard. I also jokingly say, “I’m a delicate flower” to my kids, and it cracks me up when they say this now.
What happens, though, when these scripts no longer work? We learn many things from our families, but even in the best of circumstances, what we learn may not fit the situation we have. We may not follow the cultural life scripts of our families. We may have children that no previous family script prepares us for. We may realize that the family scripts we have are actually toxic and painful, full of generational trauma or abuse. There are so many valid reasons that the family scripts you were raised with don’t fit the family scripts you need to create for your own family.
How do we create healthy family scripts that honor our values and support the children we DO have vs the children our families prepared us to raise?
1. Acknowledge the scripts you have. Take time to think about your cultural life expectations that you have for yourself and for your children. Do these still hold true for you? Do they hold true for your child? Write down any time you say something that your parents said to you, or anytime your children say something to you that you had said to them. These are all family scripts. We can even have scripts around schooling. Do you say things your teachers said? Most public school children share a collective script around that experience. US Public schools have not changed that much in 100 years, so we often share a strong cultural life script around school progression.
2. Process the feelings that come with the scripts. Scripts can bring a lot of feelings. We can remember a family script fondly as we think about loved ones who shared it with us. Or, there can be grief around that isolation that comes with deviating from a conventional life path or deeply held family script. I see this a lot with parents of twice-exceptional children. We may worry that the growth path our children take doesn’t align with their similar-age peers. We may worry that they will “never go to college” or “never get a job.” Many of our children grow and develop at their own pace and in their own time. These scripts can also make it difficult to fully embrace strength-based learning because we may have grown up in a family or school environment that focused on work for work’s sake or a progression of school learning that hasn’t really been updated in a century.
3. Change the script. Take time to look at the scripts you have and see if they still apply to your family or if they are ones that should be changed. For example, I grew up in a family where we had to eat everything on our plate. With my own children, this never worked. We instead changed it to “take three no thank you bites.” This gives the kids a change to try a food and decide if they want to eat it or not. Changing the script takes bravery, intention, and deliberate practice. For those scripts that deeply held and may be the result of trauma, please reach out to a trained professional. Changing these types of scripts can help end generational trauma.
None of us were given a specific manual on how to raise our kids.
Instead, we are just practicing being a parent in the hopes that we can become the expert in parenting our own children. If you are like me, you may not have even known about the wide variety of diagnoses and supports our 2e kids might need.
For many parents of 2e kids, our parent community ends up becoming our library of knowledge.
The more we learn, the more we grow, the more we get feedback, the better parents we are going to be, and the healthier familial scripts we have to pass on to our own children.
How have you rewritten your script?
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