![]() ![]() Alyson agrees that it’s often impossible to know what has caused the inability to parent adequately. “She would turn, suddenly and instantly and painfully she was completely unpredictable, and I never had a single intimate or personal conversation with her,” she says. For decades, says Angela, she kept her mother’s cruelty to herself and she believes there are others out there who suffer in silence from cruel parents, because to denounce them – even to friends – is taboo.Īngela has no explanation as to why her mother constantly put her down, telling her daughter she had never given her a moment’s pleasure and saying she should have called her “Devil” instead of Angela. The website has been built not just on Angela’s clinical observations but also her experience: her childhood, she says, was made miserable by her late mother, Florence, who was charming in company but cruel to her only child in private. She was completely unpredictable, and I never had a single intimate or personal conversation with her Angela, though, says she doesn’t think horrid is such a bad word to use people who have been the victims of bad parenting understand exactly what she and Alyson are talking about, she says, and she is one of those victims. ![]() My bugbear with the website, though, is this: why trivialise something as fundamentally dysfunctional as bad parenting and, more importantly, why create a forum that demonises parents, when surely the first ambition should be to get them to change their behaviour and become all any of us can ever hope to be, ie good enough? Alyson says that demonising parents isn’t the intention: the point, she says, is to target teens and young adults, and the concept of horrid parents, linking to Horrid Henry, seemed a good way in. “The gap between how these parents behave in public and how they behave in private, can be considerable,” says Alyson. And the damage these parents do can be insidious: while some bad-mouth their children, others camouflage their true feelings by praising their offspring in front of others. Sometimes, they say, all the children in a family are affected at other times, one child is singled out for this treatment, by one or both parents. They classify fewer types of horrid fathers, but these include competitive fathers (who can never let their children win at anything), angry fathers (who are frightening and create wariness in their children) and over-submissive fathers (who may leave home, immerse themselves entirely in a new life, and discard links with their past life, including their children). On their website, Alyson and Angela detail the characteristics of types of horrid mothers: controlling mothers (who want to run their child’s life entirely), overpowering mothers (who make decisions for you without asking), angry mothers (who find fault with everything you say and do) and neglectful mothers (who are emotionally distant and fail to prioritise your needs) among them. For them, someone or something else is No 1 – it might be themselves (narcissistic parents) or it might be an anger or obsession or need of their own, that eclipses the needs of their child. “But the crucial difference is that you apologise the capacity to stand back, to recognise you have made a mistake, and to say sorry, is key.” Horrid parents don’t do this because they haven’t done what is the top requirement of good enough parenting, which is to put their child at No 1 on their priority list. So where’s the line between being good enough, and being horrid? “Almost every parent can think of something they have done in haste and regretted later,” says Alyson. She was saying he was aggressive and angry and I could see how that attitude was going to make the little boy’s life difficult.” “The first time it hit me was when a mother told me her toddler was exactly like his father, who was physically abusive. The idea for the site came, says Alyson, from her realisation as a therapist that there were parents she saw in clinical situations who seemed determined to put their child or children down – “to diminish them, to rubbish them” – and she started to think about how she could support them. They have launched a website,, to help the victims – ie offspring – of these individuals to survive, so they can move on with their own lives and, eventually, become good parents themselves. The psychologist Alyson Corner and journalist Angela Levin believe there is. But is there such a thing as “horrid parenting”? Do mothers and fathers exist whose aim in life is to crush the children they brought into the world, whatever it takes? There’s no such thing as a perfect parent – all of us who have children understand that, and we all buy, gratefully, into the concept of “good enough”.
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