A recent study has suggested that women start turning into their mothers at the age of 33, while men become their fathers when they're 34. Dr Ray O'Neill is Assistant Professor in Psychotherapy in the School of Nursing, Psychotherapy and Community Health at DCU and he spoke to RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime about why we may find ourselves mimicking our mothers or copying the way our fathers do something. (This piece includes excerpts from the conversation which have been lightly edited for length and clarity - full discussion can be heard above).
"It happens the moment we're born", says O'Neill. "Sure as soon as the baby arrives in the yard, someone will say 'oh, since she just like the mother, hasn't he got his auntie's eyes, isn't he just a chip off the old block?' As soon as we start in this earth, people start putting their stories on us and some of them fit and some of them don't fit."
O'Neill says one interesting finding relates to becoming parents. "When we become parents ourselves, we have to confront exactly how much of our mothers or our fathers we become. It's a big adult moment and it can happen at any age, depending on those big life moments like death, or starting a job or getting your first pay. The only adults we ever knew as kids were indeed our moms and our dads.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Today With Claire Byrne, clinical child Psychologist David Coleman answers listeners' questions on parenting
"Our journey in life is like that line in The Empire Strikes Back. We do become our parents, but ideally we become the best of them. We manifest what was best about them. People can sometimes have huge anxieties around becoming a parent, particularly if parents has been a source of pain or disappointment or grief or loss. But it's about becoming the best, and our parents, for better and worse can inform that."
Awareness is key if we want to avoid the bad things and all the stuff that we might've felt when we were children that we wanted to avoid. "Even when we're determined not to be like our mother, or not to be like our father, we're still stuck in a relationship with them so, awareness is the key. And not to punish yourself or teach your parents for emulating their behavior when you find yourself nagging or cleaning the skirting boards or whatever it might be.
"We do have some kind of idea of an ideal notion of parents and a lot of parents across the whole spectrum fall short of delivering good, solid parenting. That can often cause anxiety. I don't want to be like that parent who was a source of pain, or neglect, or disappointment. But it's like Ireland's becoming independent just over a hundred years ago. We still got caught up looking to England and Brexit is evidence of that. There is no such thing as getting away from the past.
"There's this huge anxiety around disappointing children or not being the good enough mother or the good enough father. It's humanity, it's where we meet each other. It's in sharing our shortcomings and our failings, and the good parents, particularly as the child moves through adolescence and teenage years, sits down with their son or their daughter, their child, and just says 'I could've done that better'."
