Do My Parents Love Me?

Do you seem to be at odds with your parents about practically everything? Do you hear more criticisms at home than compliments? Do your parents give you grief about your appearance, your manners (or lack of them), your room, your music, your friends, your grades or your activities? Do they easily catch you doing things wrong and hardly ever notice when you do things right? Do many of your conversations end up as arguments or shouting matches? Does it seem that they are more interested in your brothers or sisters than in you? Do you sometimes wonder whether your parents really love you?

In some families, parent/child conflicts may be so severe that they can be described as abusive. Other parents neglect their children's basic needs for shelter, food, clothing, medical attention, education, emotional support and so on. Children in these kinds of homes should report physical, sexual or emotional abuse to the proper authorities or to a trusted adult. Emotional abuse is very serious and needs the proper attention, but most of what I will be talking about over the next several blogs is primarily about parents becoming inattentive—a serious situation but one that can quite often be corrected.