Dear Dr. Respler,
I am a 16-year-old girl and I want to have your opinion on pessimistic parents versus optimistic parents. I am the oldest of 4 children and our mother is very pessimistic. She always sees things in a negative light. Baruch Hashem, our father is just the opposite. He is usually optimistic. My parents seem to get along, although my mother is often very critical of my father in front of us, and that hurts me.
I used to bring friends home for Shabbos, but I stopped because I was embarrassed by my mother’s remarks to my father.
When I would excitedly come home from school with a school project, my mother would say that it’s going to take a lot of hard work and even then I might not get a high grade. Later my father would quietly tell me that if I work hard, he is sure that I will succeed and come out ahead. Gradually I spent more and more time after school with friends at their homes and always on Sundays.
Now with the corona epidemic, all that is in the past. My mother is almost paranoid about me going out to see any friends, even with our masks on. And I hear my parents arguing about this all the time. I miss my friends terribly and I am going crazy with all this negativity.
A Teen in Distress
Dear Teen in Distress,
I am sorry that you are going through such a distressing time. These times are harder for everyone, but being home, in a negative atmosphere, only makes it harder. While you likely cannot change anyone else’s behavior, you can try to make your home as positive as you can by working on your own perspective and your own behavior. Being optimistic and pessimistic are behaviors or patterns that are both learned and inherited. Some of it is in our genes and others are learned by our experiences. How we see the world is generally learned by our early experiences and colored by our inherent way of being. Generally, we pass this onto our children. Of course it is preferable to be an optimist and to see the world through a positive and rose colored lense. However, if we have one or two parents that are always complaining or seeing the negative in every situation, it can definitely be harder to be positive.
You are lucky that you have one parent to model positivity for you. You are already 16 and seem wise beyond your years. You can decide to be a positive person no matter what. You can also decide to model this positivity for your siblings to give them a better chance to be positive people as well. We can teach optimism with a happy and confident attitude, with positive words, and with encouraging phrases. if you act like an optimist and try to push yourself to see the positive in every situation, you will become an optimist and seeing the positive will come easy to you. Even if you have a hard day or are hit with some challenges, you can always have hope for a positive outcome and try to make the best of the situation you are given.
You can try to find the good in your current situation as well. If you try to make your house a happy and positive place, even amongst this negative and trying time, you will find this situation more bearable. This will be tough, especially when you cannot be amongst your friends and in a joyful environment, but you and your father can try to make your home a happy and loving place. Use music to help elevate the mood and make day to day life as fun as possible. Teach your siblings to find the silver lining in all situations. Everything has a positive side to it and we can train ourselves to be able to discover it. Hatzlocha in this trying time and we hope that with some of these ideas, you and your father can make your home a happy place again!