And I can’t resist speculating that some parents react to these unconscious and completely innocent effects of children by refusing to claim them, by rejecting them, by blaming the children for their own deficiencies.
And since what I write about is me, here, mainly, I further cannot resist speculating that I was a very precocious child who saw and understood things far beyond my age, and it frightened and then angered my mother. She told me some years ago–I think it was a confession of sorts, although she laughed and tried to make it a joke, and certainly did not seem to feel any genuine contrition–that they used to spank me sometimes for being too quiet. I would just be sitting there, I guess, in a trance of sorts, and that scared them, so they hit me.
Worse things happen to kids, obviously, but effects are also proportionate to the sensitivity of a child. Some kids seemingly can handle nearly anything–especially if they have at least one caregiver they bond with, which I didn’t have–and some of us just sort of spin in circles then crash. I crashed.
This is an interesting thought, though, that children more or less compel self knowledge and personal development of parents–especially mothers–if they are sincere and trying to do it more or less right, and that much child abuse may come from parents unwilling to read the tea leaves being presented to them, which they interpret (no doubt in the main unconsciously) as reproaches and inappropriate accusations of deficiency. That little shit, they say, I’ll teach him (about me, as I see me, and what I consider my role in this whole thing).