QUESTION: Our son is almost three
years old. His father is very good with him. He tries to spend as
much time with him as he can. However, my son is quite often hostile
to him. I don't quite understand this. When my husband tries to dress
him, he screams "No mommy do it". When he asks him questions sometimes,
he just tells him to "Go away". Is he jealous of my husband? Is this
normal? Do children grow out of this or is there some way we should
be dealing with this. My husband finds it very frustrating and so
do I. I don't want to be the centre of everything all of the time.
I would appreciate any thoughts you have on
this.
ANSWER: Your son is at a stage in which
he is having a "love affair" with the opposite sexed parent. The healthy
and natural resolution to this "oedipal complex" as it has often been
named, is simply that he comes to understand that he gets to have
both Mommy and Daddy, and that he can have a wife of his own someday!
Clearly, your son is not trying to make you his wife.
He is however competing with Dad for your attention during this period.
This classic phase can be interpreted to be a developmental working
through of two of the most powerful emotions we will ever experience:
love and hate.
In short, he is experiencing a crisis which, if resolved,
results in deep ego strength. D. W. Winicott, the famed child theorist,
calls this stage "the first maturity", which occurs between 2 and
5 years of age. He describes it as a developmental crisis which is
meant to prepare the child for handling the intensity and ambivalence
that is life. The drama of competition with the father allows the
child to experience two of life's primary emotional forces. He learns
to handle strong feelings by integrating rather than disintegrating
in the face of conflictual feelings. If this period is handled without
rejection by both parents, he learns to internalize mother's love
which actually frees him to identify and associate with his father
in some important ways.
Do not get lost in too much interpretation! The important
concept is that Dad not take the rejection of his son personally.
Your son needs to feel that Dad can tolerate the rejection without
losing his father's love. Your husband can take comfort in the fact
that he is an adult and his son is a child. You are clearly supportive
of your husband, and your empathy can go a long way in creating a
buffer for Dad's natural reactions. Support him, but share the emotional
meaning of this stage and its resolution as a higher purpose in raising
your child together.
Your son is doing his job in using Dad to represent
an emotion that he must come to terms with if he is to function well
in the world. It will also help future stages (such as adolescence)
if he experiences a taming of this very primal force. It is the father's
ability to absorb his son's aggression that allows the child to develop
internal strength and stability. If your husband did not experience
this with his own father, or felt serious rejection from his Dad,
this stage could be more challenging for him. And he may need greater
support in resolving his own issues with his father so he can remain
loving and nonreactive to his son's behavior at this time.
Your job is also to remain tolerant and neutral to
your son's clinging. Be clear that Daddy is an available and acceptable
resource. Do not give in to his demands for you to do everything for
him. Be loving and firm with limits and reflecting that Dad is his
option. But do not shame or rebuke him. You must absorb your son's
expression of dependency without reacting with rejection. If you succeed
in this, he will internalize your love and be more capable of independence
in the future. Simply accept his feelings as normal. But be clear
that you and Daddy love him and can equally address his needs, but
accept that he wants only you and for Daddy to disappear. (But not
really!).
When this stage resolves you will have one very calm
and confident child. This will be his first experience with resolving
the conflict of having strong, competing emotions. And he will have
won! If he wins, you all win. He will be capable of expressions of
love to you both and he will learn that this is a family in which
conflicting feelings can be expressed and resolved. A sense of well-being
is the result of experiencing love and hate in a family that is able
to contain and transform these primal energies, without making anybody
go away! Somehow, this tempers the polarities of the primary forces
inherent in life and renders us more capable of experiencing the ups
and downs of living with less distress and more equanimity.
And by the way, you should also congratulate yourself
on the stable and nurturing environment the two of you have created
in order for this natural crisis to emerge. Your son must feel that
you are safe people to express these strong feelings to you rather
than repress them. Now it is your job to prove him right!
