Pathological Over-Parenting

By Mugees Ul Kaisar

Parenting is inherently a problematic affair simply because the child is, fundamentally, torn between two worlds: inner drives and the outer reality. Parenting becomes more problematic when it does not receive proper critical attention. Parenting may always miss the mark and it can only become worse by neglect or overprotection. The latter two are – what we may refer to as – forms of toxic parenting. The toxic parenting of denial where the child is treated with indifference and insignificance needs a separate discussion in and of itself. Here, in this review, let us focus on the other form and that is “over-protection”. As the saying goes, “I killed a plant once because I gave it too much water; Lord, I worry that love is violence”.

A mother, naturally, more often than not, is extremely loving towards the child. It might take an effort to suffer the distance from the child whereas love comes more naturally. (Again, we are not dealing here with the opposite pathologies where malevolence comes more naturally.) But the downside, rather, the paradox, of an extremely loving mother is that she, unintentionally, to be sure, turns into a “devouring mother”. The mother loves her child to the extent that the child is left absolutely incapable to later face the real world which is not mother-like. The world is the plane of strife and struggle; the fray. A child who is either completely forsaken (as Gabor Maté usually warns) or completely embraced (here, Maté seems to lose nuance) will not be able to properly engage with the imperfect & contingent world that it has to inevitably enter into & contend with. A child needs a sufficient amount of skill set (both physical and psychological) to face the world. This is possible only if the child is gradually provided with its own independent space & exposure. The child has to learn the requisite interface with the world one way or the other; over-protective parenting ensures that the child learns it the hard way – in a far more painful way, with shock, at the face of reality which is not necessarily embracing or loving. 

Over-protective parenting can lead to a sort of an enduring “mother complex” due to which the child remains ever dependent on the unconscious expectations of love & mercy from the external reality/others which may not reciprocate like the mother/parent/caretaker. Mother-complex creates escapism. Just because one fails in something in life, as most certainly everyone inevitably does, one descends into a feeling of “abandonment” simply because the person hasn’t consciously realized the difference between parent and the world; the person expects the world to function like a parent. Just the simple conscious act of realization that the sphere of the world is far more complex, greater and larger, outside the fortress of parental protection (outside the Buddha’s heaven created by his father), can to a large extent cure a sudden, shocking & resentful reaction at – supposedly – “malfunctioning” world.

Aneesh Chaganty’s Run is a brilliant cinematic portrayal of this very problem at our disposal. The movie is a horrific narration of how a mother cripples her daughter (a deeper spoiler avoided here) just to keep her in her house permanently by her side. In this film, we can most lucidly see as to how our dreams convert meaning contents into symbolic representations. Toxic overprotection, in the movie, is symbolically transposed into the mother secretly feeding dog medicine (in the form of pills) i.e. “poison” to her daughter which, medically, is supposed to cripple her by interfering with her neural biology. Over-protection is literally transposed into “poison” here. The story basically conveys the point that over-protecting the child, no doubt done out of love, to keep the child (even after gradually but surely breaking free of infancy and childhood) under constant supervision, actually amounts to poisoning the child with incompetency and dependency.  

The movie brilliantly captures this in one of the most unnerving scenes of the movie where the daughter asks her mother, “You poisoned me?” and the mother replies, “I protected you”; it is exactly this unchecked urge to overprotect that forgets to gradually leave appropriate independent space for the child to grow and enter into the world.

The psychology of the devouring mother archetype goes like this: I will dedicate my whole life and being to my child with no other preoccupations; once I fully invest myself in the child, then there is nothing left in me (as an independent person) or for me as a significant meaning in life except my child and therefore I will necessarily need my child forever; as the mother in the movie, in one of the scenes, malevolently says to the daughter, “You’ll be my baby forever”. For a baby to become adult, baby has to die. A mother having no other significant reality attached to her life or no other deeper alternate meaning (& independence) is more vulnerable to this loving but unintentionally damaging relationship towards the child. The movie brilliantly captures this idea, when in one of the intense scenes, the daughter replies to her mother, “You didn’t do this for me. You did this for you”. Alfred Hitchcock’s classic masterpiece The Birds, among other critical themes, also portrays the typical case of a “devouring mother” with similar genesis of a lack of an alternate substantial meaning and engagement in life. 

The meaning and the significance of the title should not be lost on us. It is not just that the kid has to escape the devouring mother, but she has to now “run” or learn to run by coming out of her crippled stage to face the outer world. Towards the end of the movie, when the daughter visits the mother in a hospital, where she has been moved to after a bloody encounter with police, finally says to her, “I think it is time for me to go”. 

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