A common trend among families with a young adult on the spectrum is the situation where one parent becomes the "good" parent and the other the "bad" parent. From what I can tell, the bad parent is mean, makes bad decisions, and is antagonistic based on my client's report. The good parent, on the other hand, is the one that can talk to my client and help them get what they want. If parents make a decision that affects my client, the good parent is almost always chosen to tell my client.
My clients tend to be "black-and-white thinkers." Parents have to make unpopular decisions or ones that seem to favor one party over the other. Indeed, running a household means making a lot of very difficult decisions. Feelings about one's parents are often extremely complex and can take years to decipher or reconcile, and in order to manage the complexity my clients reduce the reputations of individual parents to good or bad in a black-and-white way. To reconcile the fact that parents don't always make bad decisions, in two-parent households, one parent becomes good and the other bad. Sometimes these roles can switch, but they're generally stable. The situation is probably much more complicated than this, but this is my nutshell summary.
There are a number of problems with this type of categorization. First, and most importantly, it doesn't match reality. Labels are meaningful and influence how we reason, so incorrect labels lead to wrong conclusions. I have seen good decisions criticized and good advice and needed support turned down simply because it came from the so-called bad parent. Even good action that came from the bad parent can cause my clients misery.
Second, my clients are cutting in half the effectiveness of the parenting dyad and artificially reducing it to 50%. It's like driving a car with two flat tires, and you're the one who punctured the tires. Why would you cut your resources in half, and especially if you might be wrong about the character of the so-called bad parent?
Third, being the good parent is a huge burden. Some parents report initially feeling good about the special relationship they have with their child. They're the one who can get the child to do things others can't. With that ability comes double responsibility though. And, it's a burden your spouse (your partner) cannot share. Good parents report feeling isolated from their spouse.
One thing I encourage parents to do in such a situation is to fail to participate in it. Many parents feel obliged to tolerate the false good/bad parent belief in their child, and when they want their child to know something will send in the good parent. Similar to the advice that parents should never lie to children, parents should be careful to send the message, even passively, that they agree with the false belief of their child. In many cases parents must actively confront it by simply stating they don't agree. Way more important than individual pieces of information delivered in the preferred way is the ability for a young adult to see both parents as trustworthy, caring, competent, and ultimately motivated for their child's good.
In my work I help clients process their feelings about parents and independence. I help them link experience to belief, engage in perspective-taking, and set goals. Ideally I like my clients to see their parents as highly skilled, heavily resourced allies. In most cases I encounter, parents and their children have very similar goals.
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