Enmeshed Parenting, Four

Parents often mistakenly believe that they are helping their child by rushing to meet their emotional, mental, social, and financial needs. Truth is in many cases, however, they are actually handicapping the child and preventing them from having a rewarding, interdependent, and fulfilling adult life. If it is a single parent who is enmeshed with a child, the parent may never marry or remarry because the child becomes upset at just the thought of losing his or her position as the adored offspring. If and when the child marries, the child may choose a child-parent type of relationship. There is rarely a husband, however, who wants to pamper his wife the way her father or mother does. The first time the spouse does something that the adult child doesn’t like, the boy will run home to Mommy so she can comfort him and solve his problem; the girl will run home to Daddy so he can comfort her and solve her problem. If the girl’s husband is happy to have a ‘child bride’ mentally and emotionally and willing to have his father-in-law do all the nurturing, being content for his wife to be’ arm candy,’ so be it. If not, the marriage will likely not last or the couple will live very separate lives. The wife may interact physically and sexually with her husband, emotionally she belongs to Daddy. More tomorrow.