Name the ONE WORST THING parents often do to diminish, even destroy a child's self worth and his/her
chances of ever fulfilling his/her potential?
A parent who is a "Dream Killer" can wreck havoc during a child's formative years. It's a destroyer of confidence and self-esteem when the people who brought you into the world tell you that you can't become what you want to become.
Yeah, I've seen that. One person I met was told he was an unwanted child and was treated that way. He turned out to be totally antisocial and liked to fight. Another was told he'd never be whatever it was he suggested he wanted to be. That went ugly.
Parents impose their failures on their children They do not let the child be self. They see the child from the eyes of their personal experiences in life.
Yes, SO MANY parents DO this on a habitual basis.
Beat them when they are too small to defend themselves. Then use constant threats and intimidation over petty things. Never give compliments or praise, only criticism, anger and hatred. Never apologize even when they are wrong. It all comes because of the parents low self worth.
I am kind of embarrassed to share this but my family destroyed my self-esteem and I have learned the hard way not to share things with them as they (my mother) squashes my dreams and even minimizes my achievements. I am 47 years old and this has affected me in my professional and personal life. I have raised three children on my own and finished three college degrees too. I am the only one in my family with a high school diploma and a college degree. The way I had been treated has caused me to doubt my own abilities and has lead me to low wage jobs below my skill level.
There are soul destroying parents who purposely destroy, ruin, or diminish their children's dreams, goals, and self-worth. Many of such parents have a subconscious/underlying envy of their children.
I agree with Aniket who said parents who impose their failure on their children.
My parents were loners and didn't really have friends of their own. The genesis of this was that their parents (my grandparents) considered them their favorites in each of their families. My father and grandmother (his mother) were really mean to his sister because he was the prince in his family. We would go to my aunt's house, and my father and grandmother would expect her to wait on them. It was ugly. The situation was similar in my mother's family, with my mother being the princess of that family.
Consequently, people outside the extended family didn't enjoy being around my parents, and my parents didn't have friends of their own. Most of the extended family didn't like them either, but my father was the only person to go to college in either family and made more money, and it always seemed like they were intimidated and that's probably why they never spoke up.
My oldest sister got the brunt of my parents' abuse, especially from my mother. When she started kindergarten, my mother began to actively encourage her schoolmates to make fun of her. And this lasted years. My sister basically believed something was wrong with her and that she was somehow unlikable. My mother did the same thing to me but later, starting when I was about 9, so it did not affect me as much because I could see what was going on. My mother's behavior was motivated by her jealousy because she never had any friends of her own.
My older sister has been estranged from everyone for a couple of decades. There isn't closeness among the other siblings that are technically still talking to each other. While we were all growing up in that abusive environment, we were constantly throwing one another under the bus because none of us wanted to be the focus of either of our parents' rage. As a result, my other siblings and I don't have much of a family bond, and we just see each other once or twice per year, and it's fairly perfunctory.
For some reason, it wasn't until after my father died that it occurred to me that all these peripheral adults who were aware of what was going on when we were children did absolutely nothing. We went to a religious school, where they just reinforced lessons like, obey your parents, etc. there was one time that our family doctor told my mother off, one of the few times I saw someone actually challenge my mother. I'm thankful he did otherwise I would have thought I was crazy.
by Grace Marguerite Williams 12 years ago
What are the 10 things parents ROUTINELY do to destroy a child's self-confidence?
by Sumi 9 years ago
Whose sacrifice is the MOST in child's career growth. Mother or Father?
by Readmikenow 2 years ago
The GOP bill is a response to growing anger across the country about access to information on everything from school curricula to safety and mask policies to the prevalence of gender ideology and critical race theory in the classroom. Parents’ anger over these issues at school board meetings led to...
by Charlu 12 years ago
What do you think is one of your child's greatest accomplishments and how proud are you of them?I don't care if they are 2 or 52 what is it? OK, now when's the last time you told them how proud you were of just that?
by Patricia Scott 10 years ago
If you were to list the qualities of a good parent, what would they be?
by cardelean 14 years ago
What do you think is a parent's role in the education of their child?
Copyright © 2025 The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers on this website. HubPages® is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
Copyright © 2025 Maven Media Brands, LLC and respective owners.
As a user in the EEA, your approval is needed on a few things. To provide a better website experience, hubpages.com uses cookies (and other similar technologies) and may collect, process, and share personal data. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so.
For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: https://corp.maven.io/privacy-policy
Show DetailsNecessary | |
---|---|
HubPages Device ID | This is used to identify particular browsers or devices when the access the service, and is used for security reasons. |
Login | This is necessary to sign in to the HubPages Service. |
Google Recaptcha | This is used to prevent bots and spam. (Privacy Policy) |
Akismet | This is used to detect comment spam. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Google Analytics | This is used to provide data on traffic to our website, all personally identifyable data is anonymized. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Traffic Pixel | This is used to collect data on traffic to articles and other pages on our site. Unless you are signed in to a HubPages account, all personally identifiable information is anonymized. |
Amazon Web Services | This is a cloud services platform that we used to host our service. (Privacy Policy) |
Cloudflare | This is a cloud CDN service that we use to efficiently deliver files required for our service to operate such as javascript, cascading style sheets, images, and videos. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Hosted Libraries | Javascript software libraries such as jQuery are loaded at endpoints on the googleapis.com or gstatic.com domains, for performance and efficiency reasons. (Privacy Policy) |
Features | |
---|---|
Google Custom Search | This is feature allows you to search the site. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Maps | Some articles have Google Maps embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Charts | This is used to display charts and graphs on articles and the author center. (Privacy Policy) |
Google AdSense Host API | This service allows you to sign up for or associate a Google AdSense account with HubPages, so that you can earn money from ads on your articles. No data is shared unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Google YouTube | Some articles have YouTube videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Vimeo | Some articles have Vimeo videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Paypal | This is used for a registered author who enrolls in the HubPages Earnings program and requests to be paid via PayPal. No data is shared with Paypal unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Login | You can use this to streamline signing up for, or signing in to your Hubpages account. No data is shared with Facebook unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Maven | This supports the Maven widget and search functionality. (Privacy Policy) |
Marketing | |
---|---|
Google AdSense | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Google DoubleClick | Google provides ad serving technology and runs an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Index Exchange | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Sovrn | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Ads | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Unified Ad Marketplace | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
AppNexus | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Openx | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Rubicon Project | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
TripleLift | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Say Media | We partner with Say Media to deliver ad campaigns on our sites. (Privacy Policy) |
Remarketing Pixels | We may use remarketing pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to advertise the HubPages Service to people that have visited our sites. |
Conversion Tracking Pixels | We may use conversion tracking pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to identify when an advertisement has successfully resulted in the desired action, such as signing up for the HubPages Service or publishing an article on the HubPages Service. |
Statistics | |
---|---|
Author Google Analytics | This is used to provide traffic data and reports to the authors of articles on the HubPages Service. (Privacy Policy) |
Comscore | ComScore is a media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers. Non-consent will result in ComScore only processing obfuscated personal data. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Tracking Pixel | Some articles display amazon products as part of the Amazon Affiliate program, this pixel provides traffic statistics for those products (Privacy Policy) |
Clicksco | This is a data management platform studying reader behavior (Privacy Policy) |