By Ogova Ondego
Published April 14, 2024
Trust is something that a parent need not do anything about to earn one’s own child’s trust. It is already there. All a parent can do is strengthen or weaken it!
As the child grows, says Robert McGee in Father Hunger, this trust becomes fragile and has to be reinforced for it to remain intact.
Children first assume that their parents are always right. That they never make mistakes. However if a parent behaves in a manner contrary to this belief, the child loses the faith and trust he or she has in him or her.
Children learn by observation. Consequently, parents are advised to affirm, love, and value their children by using words like “I am sorry” or “I love you.”
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Children can lose the trust in their parents by what they see, hear, or if the parent intentionally breaks the bond between them or when their perspective changes.
Jane, for instance, says she lost faith in her father when he kept teasing and ridiculing her.
“But it was not until he called me a slut and slapped me in front of my friends that I lost the little trust I still had in him,” she confides. “Even after I was married and had children, he continued to put me down by telling them about my failures. How I hate him!”
Mariam, on the other hand, says she loved her father dearly because he loved her. But there were times when she could not bear to be near him.
“Whenever he came home drunk my brothers, sisters and I would duck under the bed because he really beat us. He also beat up our mother and for this I came to have little respect for him. I do not trust him even though it is four years since I left home to live on my own,” she says.
McGee writes that whenever a child fears what the parent is going to do next and hides from him or her, it is critical. Trust is earned and never manipulated. A parent should also trust the child for there to be mutual trust. In adolescence, many children lose trust in their parents if their parents fail to trust them.
Some people never see their parents negatively no matter how ill they are treated. But later, they may start seeing how bad their parents treated them and then lose faith in them.
Children brought up in families in which they have lost trust find it difficult to trust anyone else. This also destroys relationships with a future spouse and children. It can also prevent one from opening up to colleagues at work. This leads to poor relationships among people and pain of generations as parents who never trusted their own parents transfer the same to their children who in turn mete similar treatment to their own offspring.
John remembers that as a child he was never as good as his sister in school and that his parents always lavished praise on his sister while they ridiculed him. Although he is a senior manager at his place of work, he still thinks he is not as good as he should be. He has no faith in his parents.
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As for Miria, she says her parents neglected her. They never said a kind word to lessen her pain whenever she stumbled and fell. Instead they kept quiet or laughed at her.
“One day I fell in a trash can and instead of them feeling sorry for me, they not only
laughed but captured me on camera with slimy dirt all over my face,” she says.
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People who never received enough affirmation, love and trust from their parents are likely to be sensitive to being offended. To befriend them, you must aspire to be perfect to avoid breaking their fragility.
Such people tend to vascilate between extremes; trust and mistrust, wonderful and evil. They not only tend not to trust other people or be committed to them, but are also likely to be less forgiving, lack thankfulness and shift blame to others.
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