Nobody quite recovers from being a child: the asymmetry of power between parents and children always leaves a trace

by Tom Wooldridge  BIO

Photo by Annie Otzen/Getty Images

is a psychoanalyst, founding dean of the School of Psychology at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, and director of the Human Systems Lab, which explores the roles of AI and other emergent technologies in human systems. He is the author of Eating Disorders: A Contemporary Introduction (2023) and Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males (2016), and the editor of Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak (2018). His forthcoming book End the Food Fight: Replacing Control with Connection to Help Your Child Heal from an Eating Disorder will be published by Guilford in 2026.

Edited byPam Weintraub

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.They may not mean to, but they do.They fill you with the faults they hadAnd add some extra, just for you.– from ‘This Be the Verse’ (1971) by Philip Larkin

No one comes through childhood untouched or unscathed. One reason, says the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, is the asymmetry of the relationships in a child’s world. One person is big, the other small. One knows, whereas the other learns, and one gives, whereas the other needs. We usually envision this as well-intentioned or at least necessary and innocent. But Phillips says that the imbalance of power resulting when love and dependence are interwoven with frustration and envy could be seen as a form of sadomasochism.

I came to these thoughts gradually myself. As a postdoctoral fellow in early childhood, working with parents and children aged three and younger, I confronted the asymmetry in a raw form: a baby completely dependent on an adult struggling with their own needs and anxieties. After this, I provided long-term psychotherapy to adults, and patient after patient filtered their childhood experience – the way they were nurtured, held, frightened or overlooked – through the way they organised their world now. Becoming a parent myself provided yet another perspective: I could see the intergenerational transmission up close. Childhood never ends because it persists as an internal grammar influencing how we understand power, love and our own experience as adults. The question is not whether the asymmetry of childhood leaves behind a trace, because it does, but what we do with that trace.

As I see it, to say that no one ‘recovers’ from childhood is not to say that all are harmed. It is, rather, to suggest that being small with a powerful other leaves behind a trace. Early on, the child confronts the reality that closeness can be laced with coercion and that one’s own vitality can feel overwhelming to oneself or the other. In parenting, the line between protection and control, guidance and domination, is ever shifting. Even in loving families, children learn that someone else’s mood can tower over their world like a storm.

Phillips’s provocative argument asks us to reflect upon the residues of this asymmetry, with its intermingling of tenderness and intimidation, and how they become an aspect of our psychological structure. We all carry the emotional logic of being small, including the desire to be looked after without being overpowered, the wish to be understood without being shamed, and the worry that dependence makes us prey to someone else’s will. Childhood doesn’t end when we grow up because it persists as an internal structure shaping how we understand power, love and needs throughout the remainder of our lives.

Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers

Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers

Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.

A child does not encounter the world as a set of ideas but as a set of differences, whether size and strength, knowledge and mobility, even mood. From the beginning, the adult’s body looms large, a voice filling the room. In difficult moments, their absence is immeasurable. Before any explicit teaching, the child grasps that others can lift you, soothe you or restrain you, or disappear without notice. These contrasts are structured around who has power and who doesn’t.

This asymmetry is not inherently bad. On the contrary, it is the needed foundation of protection, learning and attachment. A child needs someone bigger, for their dependency is real, not symbolic. But because the child has no alternative way of understanding experience, they interpret everything, whether hunger or comfort or absence, as a commentary upon themselves. The adult’s attuned responsiveness is the measure of the child’s worth. The adult’s emotional withdrawal becomes evidence of failure, their irritation a mirror for the child’s badness. Asymmetry means that the child cannot resist reading the adult’s internal states as reflections of their own.

Adults regularly project onto children the traits they cannot stand to experience in themselves

In this context, children fantasise about being the big one. The toddler who kicks, bites, commands or protests is learning about power. The experience is fraught: dependence inevitably generates frustration, frustration leads to aggression, and aggression fuels guilt. In this swirl, children start to intuit that love and dominance are not cleanly separable. At times, being cared for feels controlling, while exerting control is a plea for care.

If Phillips focuses our attention on the echoes of this early asymmetry, the analyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl widens the frame. From her perspective, our culture is built around a mostly invisible prejudice against children, which she calls ‘childism’. For her, children do not just confront the inherent imbalance of size and authority. They must also face adults who hold unconscious and culturally sanctioned fantasies about what children are. Those fantasies, which include notions of children as bad, seductive, rebellious, fragile or contaminating, shape the way adults hold them in mind and interact with them long before any conflict takes place.

Young-Bruehl’s suggestion is disturbing because it reframes what we typically think of as ‘normal parenting’. What adults usually cast as discipline and guidance tends to hide deeper anxieties, such as their own unresolved dependency, their fear of being overwhelmed or their wish to feel capable. She describes how adults regularly project onto children the traits they cannot stand to experience in themselves, whether aggression, vulnerability, sexuality, disobedience or longing. In short, the child is the repository of what the adult has disowned.

The central thrust of her argument is this: children don’t grow into adulthood in a vacuum of benevolent caregiving. Instead, they develop in an environment of unconscious adult assumptions, all of which are enacted through projections, stereotypes and defences. The seemingly apparent ‘natural dependency of childhood’ is always shaped, in advance, by the adult’s fantasies of childhood. The child is not just small in comparison to the adult. The child is also interpreted, defined and restricted by inherited beliefs about what a child is.

Adults use children to manage their own childhood, writes Young-Bruehl in Childism (2012). They do not meet them, emotionally, as they really are but rather through the filter of their own, unresolved disappointments, humiliations, unmet longings and terrors. The child is an unwitting participant in the adult’s struggles to regulate feelings that were never made sense of in their own early life. This doesn’t necessarily require cruelty or overt abuse of........

© Aeon