Before proceeding with this chapter, I want you to agree to take whatever parental guilt that you are carrying with you, and, for the duration of the chapter, dispose of it. You can picture it being stuffed into a box which is then buried, you can stoke up an internal bonfire that turns it to ash, you can zap it with a vaporizing laser...whatever works, do it.

Now that you've temporarily jettisoned your guilty feelings, you'll be prepared not only to accept, but also to take heart from, the statement that follows, a statement that is of supreme importance in raising a Good Enough Child: I contribute to the ways in which my child disappoints me and help to make that disappointment happen.

Notice that I am not saying that you are responsible for who your child is, or that it is your fault when she is experiencing difficulties or that you are solely to blame. But it's essential to realize that the behavior of children, and of their parents, does not arise in a vacuum, but is the direct result of the influence that you exert on each other.

Understanding this in the right way can be a very liberating, rather than imprisoning, experience, because once we know more about the ways in which we contribute to our children's irksome behaviors and attitudes, we're more than halfway down the road to feeling less vexed and more positive, and creating the climate for growth and change.

In what ways do we find ourselves creating the very family problems that so plague us? What puzzling mechanism impels us to make our own children into the instruments of our own unhappiness? Why do we sometimes persist in responding to our offspring in ways that so clearly make things worse rather than better? The beginnings of the answers to these questions lie in what we learned in the previous chapter-how we invest our children with qualities and characteristics that may or may not apply to them so as to familiarize ourselves with them enough to marshall the resources to raise them. Now, however, we will take this information a step further, and see how we not only attribute, but also amplify, these qualities and characteristics to the extent that they take on a life of their own.

Becoming a parent requires of all of us what I refer to as a "Reverberating Journey", a pilgrimage into our swirling, murky internal world, a world that ricochets with memories, fantasies and feelings that have lain dormant for years, regretfully or blissfully out of our awareness. .

The process of taking on the life-and-death responsibility of raising a child will invariably create a widespread disequilibrium that blurs the distinction between past and present, between real and unreal, between rational and irrational, between what lurks inside of us and what lives outside of us.

This journey is a necessary and important one, because the emotional energies that are churned up through our exposure to our own children are the very energies we will need to care for them effectively. The profound upheaval that results from the detonation of the depth charge of childbearing can reactivate connections between generations, heighten our awareness of our own childhood experiences, provide greater accessibility to our subconscious, and bring to the surface strengths and qualities that had been buried for years. Parenthood is a time in our lives when we become softened, when we are unusually change-able and teach-able, and because of this it is accompanied by great potential for healing and for creative renewal.

On the other hand, this resurgence of buried experience will not only fuel us, but haunt us. Old sorrows, hurts, anxieties and fears flare up in all of their original potency. We are reminded of recent or ancient struggles and conflicts that we would gladly forget. Long-silent voices clamor for our attention, and the grappling hooks of our unfinished business reach out to us from the deep, pulling us back down to the disturbing psychological locales that we thought we had escaped from.

How does this affect our relationship with our child? Perhaps our most paradoxical yet common parental instinct is to re-create, in our present, the emotional climates and narratives of our past. We do this through enlisting our children to act in scenes that we have artfully, but unconsciously, scripted for them.

By casting our sons or daughters in certain roles, and ascribing to them distinctive attributes, we get them to participate in a drama that, at its most elemental level, is designed to heal us. Our intent is not to exploit them, to ignore, misunderstand or repudiate who they are, but instead to mourn old losses, to grieve old wounds, to shed old burdens, and to re-work old pain so that it doesn't have to continuously get re-played in our relationships with those who matter to us. Through directing and engaging our children in our personal passion plays, we ultimately hope to understand ourselves and to make ourselves understood, to discover and claim, or re-discover and re-claim, who we truly are.

This does not happen magically, but through the reinforcement of certain exchanges between our child and ourselves, and the avoidance or suppression of others. Through our gestures and interactions, we do what parents have always done, which is to transmit a psychological heritage, to convey to our children what we expect from them, and what they are to think of themselves.

That's why D.W. Winnicott, the pioneering pediatrician and psychiatrist, used to say, "There is no such thing as a baby." Because your child is planted in the soil of your and your partner's inner world, and nourished by your collective pool of memories, dreams, and fantasies, his individuality does not exist independently, but unfolds and expresses itself in a way that is profoundly altered and affected by your shared emotional climate.

Let's use language as an example. Babies are cognitive and physically wired to babble, to produce a steady stream of nonsensical sounds that eventually become the building blocks for language. One day you are bent over the changing table, diligently replacing yet another diaper while your one-year-old stretches out his arms and watches you intently, all the while serenading you with a random assortment of phonemes.

Today's vocal assignment appears to be "D" words. As you toss the dirty diaper and start unfolding the new one, the doo-doo's and dee-dee's and doh-doh's tumble forth, until all of a sudden you hear one that sings like music: "Da-da". "Da-da!", you say in response, meeting his eyes, your own eyes shining, lifted as if by magic from the drudgery of diaperdom. "Da-da! That's me!" you exclaim, tickling his tummy and bending your brightening face closer down to his, while he whirls his arms and kicks his legs.

One of the major ways (besides imitation) that babies learn language is through this kind of selective reinforcement of his primitive attempts at verbal communication. The doo-doo's and dee-dee's and doh-doh's got him nowhere, but the da-da was a gold mine. You can bet that for now he forgets about the first three, but shines up that da-da and puts it right in the glass storefront of his linguistic memory so that it can be retrieved at a moment's notice.

Of course, when your wife is bending over the changing table, she'll get jazzed when she suddenly hears "ma-ma" rather than "da-da". And in another culture, where there is a different phonemic structure for "Daddy" and "Mommy", parents will brighten and respond to, and thus selectively reinforce, a different sound. The point is that much of a baby's verbal behavior emerges through a meshing of his innate ability to express himself with his parents' response, or lack of response, to these first expressions. The language that is eventually spoken is the result of the hundreds of thousands of interactions of this sort that take place.

This analogy extends beyond the realm of language acquisition, however. Every behavior that a child displays is in one way or another reinforced by his caregivers, a process that contributes to the unique trajectory that each individual follows. And the nature of that reinforcement, positive or negative, is determined by the emotional strands that entangle the baby, strands that originated long before he was born, before he was even conceived.

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