Running head: MY PARENTING DNA 1

My Parenting DNA

Sheryl Gagnon

Brigham Young University-Idaho

Parenting 220

Holly Coutts

12/6/2018
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My Parenting DNA

Phase One

I come from a unique background. My mother was born severely premature. She was

brought home from the hospital in a Red Cross box and her parents were told that she would die.

She lived. Everything was underdeveloped except her heart. Her heart was strong and she was a

miracle. She is deaf, blind in one eye, and cognitively impaired. My father is also deaf. A typical

deaf person is not cognitively impaired. My father is brilliant in so many ways; communication

is not one of them. My parents divorced when I was eleven, after which, I lived with my

father. I interviewed them each separately with the use of a video phone.

Important Points I Learned

Both my parents stated that since my dad worked second shift most of my childhood, my

mom, JoAnn, was really responsible for the discipline, which they both defined as punishment. I

did not know that my mom got all her direction and guidance about rules and discipline from her

own mother. When a situation would come up, JoAnn would contact her mother to ask her

advice. She would do whatever her mother suggested. Most of the time that consisted of, “go to

your room”. There was no discussion afterward about what happened. Since JoAnn was a yeller,

I asked her if her own parents yelled at her. She informed me that her dad was a yeller. When she

was sixteen, her three older siblings had already moved out and her father had two heart attacks.

It was a very stressful time. JoAnn’s mother told her she couldn’t upset her father or make him

mad. It caused JoAnn a lot of stress. My mother said she knew yelling wasn’t good but would get

so frustrated she didn’t know what to do. She feels that little children should be loved, hugged,

and encouraged when they are upset.

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Each of my parents stated that they were not really involved with homework. We did our

homework without prompting from them. When I did a good job on a test or assignment my dad

would congratulate me, when I did not do well, he would simply say, “you can do better next

time”. He was very permissive and my mother was very controlling out of fear. My dad did not

really know how to deal with my feelings because he did not really know how to process his own

feelings.

Learning from Tone and Attitude

My parents were each relaxed and happy when talking about my childhood. They felt

like a lot of the questions were tough for two reasons. First, they are in their eighties, so

remembering was tough for each of them. Second, the language barrier makes it difficult for

them to fully grasp these deep concepts. I realized, from our conversations, that they really

had no idea how to parent or what to do. Even though they both felt they had good parents,

those same parents could not fully communicate with them, therefore they had no one to

explain anything to them. They both felt that they did the best they could with what they were

given in life.

Matching Their Memory to My Experience

I have always viewed my childhood experience a damaging and awful experience. For

me, talking with each of my parents brought new light from their perspective. My mother said

that when I was sad and crying, “I would tell you to calm down, and I would hug you until

you felt better. I would try to encourage you to go play with your friends again and it would

be okay”. I have no recollection of these kinds of memories. I remember all the yelling and

contention. My dad’s memories were mostly of when I was in my teens because after my

parents’ divorce, he switched to the third shift. This enabled him to come home and make me
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breakfast and be able to attend my after-school events. He said, “I set up rules but I only

talked with you about it, very little”. I agree with that. My dad was too permissive as a parent.

Beliefs to Continue

This is an extremely tough question because I don’t agree with most of my upbringing.

I did love that my dad was very supportive with my sports involvement and that we loved to

spend time together. That is something I carried on with my own children. It created a strong

bond between my dad and I that we did not have before my parents got divorced. My dad felt

that sports were really important for me to be involved in and that is something I carried over

with my own children as well. While my encouragement included music, art, dance, cheer,

and sports, I too felt that it was crucial to be a part of something bigger than yourself. The

other integral part of my father that I passed onto my children was the importance of

managing your money in order to take care of your family.

Change and Why?

I wish that my parents had set up clear boundaries and followed through with loving

discipline. I knew I would set up rules and boundaries with my kids, so that they wouldn’t

freely put themselves in the dangerous situations I found myself in. I really wish that my

parents would have had some kind of knowledge about how to raise children instead of just

“winging it”.

Phase Two

I was very curious to compare my parent’s interview with my sister’s memories of our

childhood. She is six years older than me and filled the role of care-giver for me in many of the

ways that our own mother couldn’t. I also wanted to compare my “little girl” memories with

hers.
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Important Points I Learned

My sister felt that our parents used a fear-based approach to child rearing. They took

direction from their own parents because they had no idea how to parent themselves. Trying to

control the children as objects was the only way they knew how to exist. They couldn’t

recognize our needs, feelings, or problems because they were not capable of knowing how to

identify that in themselves.

They had no power in their rules because they did not follow through. They used empty

threats. She reminisced, “I could complain or whine my way out of the punishment. There was

power in being a hearing child of deaf parents because you interpret for them. I helped control

their life. I could manipulate the situation, as a young child, to get what I wanted. But I also felt

incredible responsibility for them”. She recalled one time and convinced our mom that we could

only buy clothes at JCPenney and when she checked out, she put it all on a credit card. She

remembers later seeing our dad paying bills. He didn’t know how he was going to pay that bill.

He was quite distraught. “I promised I would never do that again. I took advantage of her

cognitive impairment to get what I wanted. I felt sick”, she recalled.

Learning from Tone and Attitude

I could sense that like me, my sister had agonized over her childhood but had made

peace with it. She was able to talk freely about our childhood and our parents without

animosity.

Beliefs and Practices to Continue

My sister shared that there really wasn’t a technique from our own parents to follow, not

really. There was no good boundary or follow through. She knew she would have to find her

own path in parenting. She had three children and then there were several years before she had
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three more. Two of her six died. With the first set of kids, she believed in the “spare the rod,

spoil the child” technique, which was not successful. “Then my son died”, she recalled. “I

realized life is short and you never know what will happen. I became too permissive out of fear

of losing another child”. With her second set of kids she changed parenting styles to include

having boundaries. She said, “I learned from good friends and a book I recommend to all

parents. It is written by a pastor named Danny Silk called, “Loving Your Kids on Purpose”. It

taught her to use natural consequences and think through the emotion instead of taking the easy

way out and punish.

Wishing a Do Over

My sister expressed wishing that our parents would have had rules and enforced the

restrictions. She said, “Mom was prepared for little kids but not older kids. I wish they were

more prepared to be parents instead of just figuring it out as they went along. I experienced so

much heartache.”