RA>I suspect it comes from some generations of disrupted family life.  My
  >grandparents didn't know parenting from a hole in the ground.  My
  >mother's growing-up years were gruesome as a result.  I give my mother
  >credit for trying to do better by me and in some measure doing that,
  >although the shortcomings were traumatic for me.  My mother
  >definitely wanted to do better by me than her parents did by her,
  >and it hurts her to deal with not having been a perfect parent.  Thing
  >is, we don't automatically know how to parent.  It is a learned skill
  >that usually isn't taught to people.  When all else fails, we tend to
  >fall back on the patterns we were exposed to when we were growing up.
  >It was probably almost inevitable that my mother made some of the same
  >mistakes with me that her parents made with her.
I think, for many Indians, the poor parenting skills come from the
forced disruption of family life by the colonizing powers.  We lost
something like 90 or 95 percent of our people in a couple of hundred
years.  That resulted in massive disjointing of family systems.  Then
the kidnapping of our kids at a very young age, and sending them off to
boarding schools, further disrupted the sytem.  I think many Indians
re in a position of having to re-create the family unit.
                    Sondra
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 þ SLMR 2.1a þ One more such victory and we are lost -- Pyrrhus, 279 BC
--- Opus-CBCS 1.7x via O_QWKer 1.7 
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