Growing in Grace Series: Experiencing Childhood in the 1970's

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Hello and welcome to Growing with Grace, a video series on the ABCs of Parenting Adult Children YouTube channel. My name is James Moffat, and I will be your host. Today we're talking about something many of us lived through but rarely named out loud: the parenting culture of the 1970s and why so many of us carry wounds from it. This isn't about blaming our parents. It's about understanding the world that shaped them and the impact it had on us. This is going to be a video series with 10 episodes, maybe more. That's what we're going to start out with. It's 10 episodes. So the 70s were a different world. Parenting was survival mode, not emotional development mode. Kids were expected to be seen and not heard. Emotional needs were often dismissed as weaknesses. Corporal punishment was normalized, even encouraged. Parents didn't talk about feelings because they never were taught how. We had chores and expectations on how those chores would be accomplished. If we did not do those chores correctly, it was treated as disobedience and we were punished. Sometimes the punishment was physical or verbal in nature. I remember how my mother would love to slap us in the face and give us hour-long lectures on how ruthless we were. She loved to throw our past mistakes in our face and use them as a roadmap for future failures. My father had a drinking problem and a temper that you did not want to get on the wrong side of. That was a warning she loved to hold over our heads. In other words, he'll punish you for what you did wrong when he gets here. In other words, she would punish us for doing something wrong. And then she would say, hey, you just wait until your dad gets home. I'm going to tell him what you did. And then he'd punish us. It was the same thing in school. If we got in trouble at the principal's office for whatever, and we got paddled for it, they used paddles back then. And uh when we would get home, we get we it was double jeopardy. We get in trouble at home, too. We get in trouble at home for getting in trouble at school. I guess getting in trouble one time is not enough. Our parents did not know how to demonstrate love towards us as children. Their love was conditional upon our obedience and doing as we were told. I don't think they ever just said, I love you. They never said we love you for who you are. Let's talk about the authoritarian model of parenting. Obedience was the highest value. Rules were strict, but explanations were rare. Don't do as I do, do as I say. That was kind of the mantra. Love often felt conditional, tied to behavior. Fear was used as a tool to maintain order. Our parents constantly reminded us of the fact that we were adopted. My sister and I were adopted from an orphanage in a Schaffenberg, Germany. My sister was two years old when she was adopted. My dad was in Frankfurt, Germany. Uh he was stationed there in the U.S. Army, met my mother at a bingo game in Austria. They tried to uh they got married, had children, couldn't have children, so they decided to adopt. They adopted my sister Tanya first. Then they came back about a year later and adopted me. Uh the nuns told my parents that they weren't supposed to say anything, but my sister Tanya had a blood brother in a crib across the orphanage. So my dad walked over and picked me up out of the crib, and he had a little Austrian hat on his head, and apparently I picked it up and threw it across the room and laughed at him. So he fell in love with me and decided to get me too. Yay. I was pretty happy about that. I am still happy about that to this day. So there was a children's home about 15 miles north of Quinlan, Texas, and they assured us that if we did not do what we were told and be obedient, it would be easy for them to drop us off there. The children's home was called Bold's Home, B-O-L-E-S. After all, they adopted us and they could drop us off just like our biological mother did in Germany.

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So we kind of had that hanging over our head.

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Why this parenting style hurt so many of us? It taught us to hide our emotions. It made us afraid of disappointing people. It created adults who struggle with boundaries. It left many of us feeling unseen, unheard, and misunderstood. It shaped our identity in ways we're still untangling. I grew up with low self-esteem. I had a very poor self-image because my parents spoke so much negativity into my life. I was constantly talking down about myself. I believed that I was not a good person. I believed that I did not have a good future to look forward to. My self-worth was determined by the worthlessness my parents always told us about. Being good meant towing the line and meeting expectations. Our parents expected nothing short of perfection.

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So here's what I want to tell you. Let's talk about negativity.

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Speaking negativity into your child's life is not good. Please don't do it. Speak positivity into their life. Speak positively into their life. Encourage them, empower them, and give them the tools they need to be productive members of society.

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Let me repeat that.

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Speak positivity and positively to your children. Always let them know that you love them for who they are. Not for who they're going to become.

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But accept them for who they are and love them. So understanding without excusing. We can acknowledge the harm done, but we don't have to demonize our parents.

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We can understand their limitations without minimizing our pain. Without making excuses for what they did. I know, and probably you know, if you're listening to this, if you're a baby boomer and you were raised in the 70s, you know that most of our parents would be under the jail for some of the some of the crap they pulled with us, some of the corporal punishment that they meted out to us if we were disobedient in their eyes. We can hold compassion and truth at the same time. They were doing what they thought was right, but the impact was still real, and healing requires naming that impact honestly. You can't solve that problem until you identify it. So what's the problem? You're in a situation, you made a mistake, or something's happening to you that you don't like. So what's the root cause? What's the root cause of that problem? Identify the problem and then make adjustments. Do whatever you can to fix it. Do whatever you can to restore yourself from it.

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Do whatever you can to get healing.

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The only thing that saved me from the parenting of the 70s was the grace and mercy of God. Shortly before I left home, I had friends at school that were Christians. They told me about a God that loved me unconditionally. They told me that God wanted to have a personal relationship with me. They told me that my sins had been forgiven through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ on the cross. I said the sinner's prayer out of the woods at the age of 17 when one of my friends' father, who was a chaplain for the local fire department, led me in that prayer. Now, up until that point, I probably spent a good year, year and a half visiting with my friends at their families' homes. There were several people that were very influential in my life, very positive people. You know, kids I went to school with, they were believers. Their families were believers in Christ, and they were, you know, they were churchgoers. And I took to them like a moss of the flame. I was always going to them and talking to them about, you know, my problems, my issues, telling them that I was told that I was worthless when I wasn't. You know, and they knew. They knew I had a, you know, they knew that I was in a lot of trouble all the time and that I was not a happy child. And I wasn't. I wasn't a happy child at all. But God used them to get my attention, and He used them to provide me with a safe haven, a refuge. So as I said, that prayer was a culmination of my being loved and accepted by my friends and their families. They probably saved my life. If it had not been for them, I have no idea if I would still be alive. I had to learn the hard way that even though my sins were forgiven, I could not live my life according to my will or desires. God saved me for a purpose. Once I learned that I had a purpose, I was set upon a new path. That path was to learn how to serve God and fulfill his purpose in my life. I'm still learning how to do that today.

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What this means for us today, we can break the cycle.

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We can parent differently. We can heal the parts of us that were never nurtured. We can offer our adult children what we never received. We can grow with grace even now. What does that mean? That means that we've identified some of the bad parenting that we experienced in the 70s. Your baby boomer in your mid-sixties like me, you were raised in the 70s, you experienced a lot of the same things I probably experienced. And so you've got emotional baggage if you haven't addressed those issues. So you drug that emotional baggage, the rejection, the worthlessness, uh, all of the stuff, all of the emotional hurt that was uh culmination of your childhood. So you drug all of that emotional garbage with you into a marriage relationship and into your parenting, parent-child relationship with your children. Now, if you're like me, I recognized how horrible my childhood was, and I determined that I was not going to be those parents. And so I listened to James Dobson. My wife and I are believers, and we go to church and went to church at that time. And so I was listening to Christian radio and listening to James Dobson, who is a Christian psychologist, focused on the family is still around today. And I listened to a lot of his um radio shows, and I tried to incorporate uh some of his Christian uh parenting principles and teachings into my my parenthood and my parenting skills. I tried to add some of his principles and some of his values into my my uh raising my kids. And was I perfect? No. Did I make mistakes? Yes. Some, you know, we parent the way we were parented. It's just hardwired into us. You know, and I believe that I believe that my parents raised me the best way they knew how. They used the util the tools that they had at that time, which wasn't very many, but I think I think they meant well. And I'm thankful that they adopted me and my sister, and I'm I'm very thankful for the many things that they provided for us, even though they didn't provide us uh the emotional support and they didn't demonstrate love towards us like I kind of wish they had, but they didn't. And maybe that's because they didn't have that, they didn't get that either. So so if you if you don't have love and grace and mercy in your heart, how can you give that to somebody else? If you don't feel accepted and loved, you you can't make another human, your child, feel accepted and loved. So it's up to us parents to love our children. And it's up to us to stop speaking negatively to our children. Stop speaking negativity into their life. Don't tell your children they're worthless. Don't don't say any of that stuff. That doesn't mean that you can't have boundaries. That doesn't mean that you can't teach them your values. That doesn't mean that you can't teach them how to be uh positive, productive members of society. You know, uh between the age of one year old and you know, when they're born up until they're 18 years of age, we spend 18 years of our life pouring ourselves into our children and providing for them physically, spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. It's a whole package deal. And if you don't, if you don't do it, if you don't provide their needs in any of those areas, they'll get those needs somewhere else. They'll get them met somewhere else. So let me just encourage you to speak positively to your children and speak positivity into their life and encourage them and empower them to be the best that they can be. Alright? So this is episode one of a series of ten or so episodes. Thanks for joining me on Growing with Grace. This episode helped you understand your own story a little better. Subscribe and share it with someone who needs hope today.

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All right. Talk to you later. Love you. Bye bye.