As the famous poem by Philip Larkin goes 'they f**k you up, your mum and dad' and while it goes on to say that 'they may not mean to' there are definitely some parents out there who really could do better.
Not everyone had the best caregivers growing up and these days there's a whole community out there to help you work out whether what your parents say and do is the right thing or not.
TikToker and life coach Ben Cole-Edwards has outlined three of the main things to watch out for, whether you're wanting to know if your own parents are being toxic or what behaviours to avoid in your own parenting.
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Nobody ever said it was easy to be a parent, far from it, but when someone is your entire world, protector and caregiver the things they say to you can have a profound effect on your mental state.
Kicking off his list of three with something many might have heard over the years, Ben explained the trifecta of red flags to look out for from parents to show the relationship might be toxic.
"Number one, guilt was your parent's main tactic. Every single thing they done was for your benefit," he said, before giving some examples of things parents might say to push this.
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"You'd hear things like 'I sacrificed so much for you', 'I put a roof over your head', 'I put food on the table for you'.
"For those of you who don't know, putting a roof over your child's head and putting food in their bellies isn't step one of being a good parent, it's step one of not having your kids taken away from you."
He continued: "Number two, if you weren't benefitting your parents they didn't give a f**k about you. Whether that was financially, physically, becoming their therapist emotionally. If you weren't actively doing something to make their life better and easier you were a burden and that's it.
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"Number three, they belittled you constantly because they hated seeing how happy you were in your own skin and the independence you had to go out there and be whoever you wanted to be instead of being proud of you for finally being authentic, which they could never be."
The life coach said this would manifest in the toxic parent 'trying to bring you down a peg so their ego would feel better'.
He told people they were 'not an extension of your parents' as well as not being their words or thoughts and encouraged anyone listening to 'go and live your life, not theirs'.
Returning to the Larkin poem again, it tells us 'they were f**ked up in their turn' and so it's possible that toxic parents learned this from their own mums and dads.
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Sometimes very bad parenting advice gets handed around from older generations, who picked it up in turn from their elders and so on and so forth.
Topics: Parenting, Mental Health, TikTok
Joe Harker