What happened to me?

July 15, 2006 6:25 PM

Did this lousy childhood happen to anyone else?

When I was growing up, my mother was so terrified of something bad happening to me or my sister that she kept us all but imprisoned in the home. Went to school, went out in our parents' very close company, but that was it. It was as if we had agoraphobia. (I came to call it agoraphobia by proxy.) This went on through high school, until my sister and I could flee the house.

It was a huge family secret, as these things usually are. I sometimes guess that when I got out in the world I would find that this had happened to someone else, and that it had a name. But so far, nothing, not even a teary Oprah episode.

I wound up in decent shape, though still angry sometimes. But today I remembered my guess that I would hear about this somewhere, and the fact that I never have.

So: Did this happen to you, or someone you know? What is it called? Is there somewhere that people talk about this?

posted by anonymous to Human Relations (35 answers total)

Try reading, Virgin Suicides.
posted by geoff. at 6:36 PM on July 15, 2006

I know someone whose mother behaved similarly, but it was because she wanted him to be an overachiever, not because she was afraid of something happening to him. Not exactly the same, but I wonder if it's rooted in the same problem.
posted by danb at 6:36 PM on July 15, 2006

When I was growing up, and even to this day, my mom was always so worried that something would happen to me. I was allowed to go out but I had to call her frequently. Even as a grown adult, she calls me every morning (I assume to make sure I didn't die in my sleep or get killed in a car crash on the way into work) and every afternoon/evening (to make sure I didn't get killed by a nutcase co-worker or in a car crash on the way home from work). It drives me crazy. If I want to take off for a weekend just on my own, without telling her were I am going, she'll go absoultely batshitcrazy calling and calling and calling everyone I know, etc. But, since I was allowed out it isn't exactly the same as your experience.

In high school, I did have a friend with parents like yours. She was never able to go out, unless she was with them. Even to the movies or out for lunch, it had to be with her parents. To this day I wonder if her family was in the witness relocation program.
posted by necessitas at 6:42 PM on July 15, 2006

I don't mean to be flippant but I do remember an episode of Oprah with some similar stories. One of them might have been about the parents being involved in a cult? Anyway, my point is that for every kind of insane, lousy, odd childhood there have been many, many people experienced it. Perhaps people are reluctant to talk about their miserable childhoods, but please don't take that to mean that it's a unique situation.
posted by apple scruff at 7:06 PM on July 15, 2006

This happened to one of my good friends, and she and all of her siblings have experienced varios social anxiety disorders...I always wonder if there's a connection there. Her younger siblings have it a little easier, as the older ones get on their mother's case about it. From what I understand none of the kids in the family had more than one or two friends until they left home, as they weren't allowed to go out of the house or even to friends' homes.
posted by SassHat at 7:21 PM on July 15, 2006

I think this is an extreme case of "Helicopter parent" syndrome....
posted by baylink at 7:38 PM on July 15, 2006

You might do some reading on Borderline Personality Disorder. Check DSM-IV and see how familiar the characteristics sound to your mom's. I grew up in a very similar situation. When I graduated high school and went to college (in my home town, still living with my parents), my mom's behavior became more and more unstable. When I got engaged, she went over the edge. She eventually attacked my wife and me and attempted suicide. I ended up not talking to her for around a year and a half. We talk now, but I keep a very safe distance between us, e.g. she doesn't know my home address.

I hope this isn't the answer to your problems, but if you think it is, you should definitely do some reading online and in books such as "I Hate You; Don't Leave Me." Best of luck!
posted by jxpx777 at 7:52 PM on July 15, 2006

My family life growing up was exactly the opposite - my Mom could not have cared less if anything happened to us.... and so terrible things did.

Count your blessings. Your mom was concerned.
posted by bradth27 at 8:05 PM on July 15, 2006

I have a good friend who was raised like this, so you're definitely not alone. I think the most appropriate place to talk about it would be to meet your friends out at a bar or a coffee shop.

And not tell your mom.
posted by anildash at 8:33 PM on July 15, 2006

I know a person whose mother treated her this way to the point of not allowing her to attend school past 9th grade. This young woman was, I was sure, bound to have huge emotional problems. But I was wrong, she's done very well for herself. She's a Hollywood producer, as a matter of fact. (Not that that necessarily indicates being emotionally well-adjusted. Heh.)
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:34 PM on July 15, 2006

It definitely sounds like your mom really needed some kind of therapy. It's normal for parents to worry about their kids. It's not normal to keep them from actually living a life. How does she treat you today, if she's still alive and you're still in contact?

The only people I knew who had experiences anything like this had very over the top religious parents (the type that home school today, and make sure that not an "inappropriate" inch of their children isn't covered by clothing, even while swimming).
posted by Meep! Eek! at 8:36 PM on July 15, 2006

Yes, from my grandmother. And then something similar out of neglect and impatience when I lived with my own parents, but not quite as bad. The reasons were different, but the effects were the same. I don't know of any names for either situation.
posted by dilettante at 8:36 PM on July 15, 2006

Dude, anonymous questions already have to get approved by an admin. Flag them if you like, but crapping in the thread is unnecessary.

On point, I think that overprotection happens to varying degrees. I have also read (somewhere, who knows exactly) that this is an increasingly common occurrence, simply because todays parents inherited it from their parents. Couple that with society's (and the media's) increasing obsession with safety (i.e. bike helmets, car seats), and you have a recipe for this sort of thing. If it doesn't have a name yet, it probably will soon.
posted by MrZero at 10:26 PM on July 15, 2006

I both agree and disagree with MrZero. Precisely because this sort of behavior is increasingly seen as perfectly normal — witness the youth-curfew laws sweeping the country — it doesn't have a name. I suspect a frightening percentage of parents would see nothing wrong with this behavior. That doesn't, of course, make it any less dysfunctional. But I think you're mistaken when you assume that you don't hear about it because it never happens; I think you don't hear about it because it's so very common.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 11:20 PM on July 15, 2006 [1 favorite]

Mr. Rogers' parents (mother, esp.) kept him inside for entire summers, in a combination of being completely overprotective and also very hayfeverish. I heard it on an NPR (or something similar) segment ages ago, as a biography.

Google results show some corroboration but nothing hard.
posted by disillusioned at 1:04 AM on July 16, 2006

I also knew a few kids who lived similar lives to this, but it never seemed to be pure agoraphobia--either extreme religious obsession, or extreme control issues, meant to keep the kids from ever making a mistake.

However I imagine that there are many more who had childhoods exactly as you describe--it's not that hard to imagine. But it seems like the thing the general population would be less aware of personally just because of the nature of the issue. We didn't know these kids in the school years, because their parents didn't let them have a social life. Now that they're adults, we still don't know, either because they've continued the behavior, or just don't talk about it.
posted by lampoil at 5:57 AM on July 16, 2006

I shudder to think that I know this, but, um...a family very like this was on an episode of "Wife Swap." They had three kids, they all slept in the same room when home, lived in an RV the rest of the time, were home schooled and never, ever out of their parents' line of sight. Ever. And whenever they parked the RV, they would run the license numbers of every car at the campground through the internet to make sure there weren't any kidnappers around.

So maybe you don't have a teary Oprah episode, but you got Wife Swap.
posted by jennyjenny at 6:45 AM on July 16, 2006

Jenny! Ha! I was so gonna say that...except she had a far sight more than 3 kids..maybe 5? 6?

And by the end of the show the girls could go on a date, but mom sat at a table where she could see them and after the date went to the bathroom she came over and smelled his hands to make sure he washed them.
posted by nadawi at 7:02 AM on July 16, 2006

Mod note: a few comments removed - please take complaints about the question approval process to metatalk or email
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:07 AM on July 16, 2006

You might want to read Theodore Sturgeon's wonderful novel More Than Human; a very moving subplot centers on a girl raised in an even more extreme version of your situation.

And I think this is an excellent use of AskMe; one of the very best things about the internet is its ability to let people know that they're not alone in their problems.
posted by languagehat at 7:12 AM on July 16, 2006

The last day of school when I was in 7th grade, a group of friends and I wanted first to go to a McDonalds, then go across the street to a shopping plaza. The street in question was a busy two-lanes-in-each-direction road, but with crosswalks and walk/don't walk lights at appropriate intervals. I called my mom to tell her of our plans, but she didn't want me to cross that street. After a bit of arguing back and forth, she agreed to let me go.

I could tell she was upset, however, so I told my friends. One of my friends had her older brother pick us all up and we went instead back to her house. I called home to let my mom know of the change of plans, only to have my sister answer the phone. My mom was on her way to the shopping plaza to find me, pick me up and take me home. I got a big huge lecture the next day, all because I wanted to cross a damn street like any normal kid.

Then when I lived at home after I graduated from college, I had an 11pm curfew. When I mentioned to my mother that there were 16 year olds who could stay out later than I, her response was "well, their mothers obviously don't love them as much as I love you." (At this point I got a second job and moved out as quickly as I could.)

My relationship with my Mom's better now but I still get angry when I think about it. My son's only five right now, but I get worried that I'll treat him the same way.
posted by Lucinda at 9:18 AM on July 16, 2006

This happened in my town, where a wealthy baroness kept her daughter basically imprisoned as a personal slave to her senior years. Once the ol' gal died, the daughter became a moderately famous artist.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:24 AM on July 16, 2006

The mother of the woman I mentioned became pathologically over-protective of her daughter after her husband died in a car crash. This was when my friend was pretty young, maybe five or six. But her mother's pathology increased to the point when, as I said, they moved to another town and she simply never registered her daughter for school.

My friend managed to get an education, of sorts, via self-learning and osmosis by virtue of being fairly bright. When I met her, when she was sixteen, her mother chaperoned her almost everywhere she was and never allowed her to ride in automobiles, excepting when the mother drove her.

In just a few years some of the truer dimensions of this relationship surfaced when the mother refused to work and the daughter, while going to community college full time, supported them both.

All through this my friend seemed surprisingly well-adjusted and while I worried that her mother would never let her grow up and leave home, she was much less worried about it than I and assumed that she would, regardless of her mother's pressure. And, indeed, she did.

Her cousin and I once talked about this and he told me their whole family worried about my friend and her childhood, but no one ever decided to do anything about it, including making sure she was in school. Perhaps because they were able to tell her intellectual development was progressing (relatively) normally and her emotional development was not, as far as anyone could tell, deeply perverted.

Basically, she was an intelligent and mature child who decided to accomodate her mothers' pathology (for a complex set of reasons) while refusing to let it screw her up.

And, as I mentioned, she eventually went away to university, got a degree, and became a succesful major Hollywood movie producer.

But, to me, all this says far less about the benignness of such child abuse than it does the extraordinary character of my friend. She was lucky to have the various personal advantages to survive this abuse and be a well-adjusted, functioning adult and most kids don't have these advantages. I think what her mother did was horrifying in many ways and unimaginably narcissistic and abusive. I certainly don't think that relatives and other people aware of these types of situations should stay silent about them.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 9:42 AM on July 16, 2006

I was just thinking that it's unfortunate that a parent would create such a life during her children's formative years for fear of "something bad happening" without realizing that house arrest isn't exactly something good. Not trying to be flip -- I know we're talking about someone with serious issues here. Just an interesting aspect of human nature that many can relate to to some extent.
posted by scamper at 10:38 AM on July 16, 2006

Lucinda, your folks sound like mine -- I had similar experiences to what you describe (complete with fixation on a particular street/intersection.) On at least one occasion, my father called the police because I was a few minutes late for curfew. If the phone wasn't answered when I stayed over a friend's house (because we were outside, or because the parents turned off the ringer after a certain hour, or whatever) he would come over to make sure I was okay. I won't even get into the calling home schedule I was expected to keep in college, with guilt and tears if I tried to negotiate.

I do have a good relationship with my parents now, but it's frustrating that they have very selective memory about this stuff. Now that I'm an adult I can set limits with them. It's not unusual to feel like I'm parenting them -- trying to teach them appropriate behavior.

Anonymous, I don't think that there's a name for your upbringing other than "severely overprotective parenting."
posted by desuetude at 11:51 AM on July 16, 2006

I'm the sister Lucinda mentions in her story. While MrZero is correct that some parents learn this behavior from their own parents, that wasn't the case with our mom. I've always chalked her anxiety up to neurological wiring. It's a fine distinction, I suppose, but I figured it was worth mentioning. In our case, meds and therapy after Lucinda and I had both moved out benefitted everyone involved. Mom still has her moments, but it's much easier to deal with.

Anon, you might want to look around the National Alliance on Mental Illness Living With Communities, in the anxiety disorder and/or OCD areas. I cannot personally vouch for them, but I have had friends who have benefitted greatly from NAMI programs -- both in-person and online.
posted by gnomeloaf at 12:10 PM on July 16, 2006

Sorta.

Alcoholic parents, growing up in a really small town (40 people!) classic white trailer trash. Nobody gave a shit, usually no food no parents, wtf. Total freedom to do whatever. To this day I'm amazed that I've still got all the proper parts, considering that we grew up with guns and explosives and other stuff kids find just so damn appealing.

Then at 16 grandparents adopted my little brother and I so we reverted from being to do anything we wanted to anytime we wanted to, to a SuperMax style lockdown. At least we ate three times a day after that.

Looking back, I'm still confused about the entire childhood thing so that's why I purposely don't think about it much. In far too many ways I'm still a kid and resigned to the fact that I'll never grow up.

I'm not angry about it anymore; now I've got more money than I'd ever need to buy all the toys I ever wanted but couldn't have when I was a kid. So it's ok then.

On the family side, I take care of Maw but she lives in the US and I live in The UK and I'm not totally sure I want to pursue a relationship much beyond weekly phone calls and monthly cash contributions to her well-being.

So more germane to your query: I don't think nor do I talk about it much. Used to think about it, but after several years I came to the conclusion that way lies madness. My fucked up childhood is something that happened some fourty years ago and I can't change what happened.
posted by Mutant at 2:20 PM on July 16, 2006

A friend of mine from college (whom I'll call Alex) had this kind of upbringing. His mother, from all accounts, used to be a pretty cool person before his birth, a traveler and a bit of a hippie. Then, during her pregnancy with him, something went neurologically or biochemically awry, and she wound up extremely fearful and over-protective, in a permanent state of imaginging "what if?" She is somewhat aware of the problem, and she is on some psychiatric drugs to try to help fix the anxiety, but they haven't really helped her.

As a result, Alex had an upbringing rather like yours. Alex's mother calls him every day, always with a note of fear in her voice. She wants to know what he's doing at all times. If he goes on a plane, which he used to do very very often for his work as a computer consultant, she will sit up and watch the news and wait until it lands, as a talisman against it crashing.

Alex recognizes that his mother is sick, but has decided to humor her, rather than let it control his life. He simply stoped telling her when he was traveling; he would visit me and my husband in Los Angeles and we'd hear him say to his mom on the cellphone "oh yeah, I'm in Central Park right now..." If anything, his experience probably has pushed him to be the person he is today: someone who has traveled to over 30 countries, has had some amazingly wild adventures, is gregarious and friendly and smart, and so on. He always has some cool story to tell.

For example, last year, he was stuck in Orlando during Hurricane Wilma (I think), staying in a lower-rate hotel that bordered EPCOT. Since the park was closed for the hurricane, he went outside the morning after the storm, jumped the fence, and wandered around EPCOT, and tried to get free beer out of the beer garden at the German station, etc. Then he spent the next few hours sitting in the hotel hot tub talking to some young magnates from Dubai about the Middle East and having fun with them. (For context's sake: Alex is Jewish and looks it.)

One time, when Alex was in Bangkok with friends - for fun! - the local prostitutes kept coming over and sitting on his lap trying to get him to buy their services, in which he was not interested, so he decided to relate to them a full and complete play-by-play of the 1986 World Series, until they went away in disgust at making a sale. He goes to giant outdoor musical festivals in Scandinavia, goes to NASCAR rallies in the South, backpacks through Croatia.

And all the while, his crazy mom has no idea he's out there putting himself in potentially dangerous situations having a shitload of fun that makes his other friends envious.

I think what has also helped him is having independent verification that his mom's perpetual state of anxiety and over-protectiveness is nuts. To that end, he has made MP3's of some of the wackier recordings she has left on his answering machine and put them up on his website, or remixed them. I've heard one of them - it's his mother almost crying into the phone that he should be careful! of the monkeys on Gibraltar, because they could carry diseases! and they could jump on your head!

(He was also supposed to be in Lebanon this weekend for another college friend's wedding, but the airport got bombed. I'm not sure what would have happened if he had gotten into the country before the airport was hit, but knowing Alex, he would have found an entertaining and exciting way out of the situation and, again, his mother would have never known.)
posted by Asparagirl at 2:31 PM on July 16, 2006 [2 favorites]

My parents weren't nearly as strict as the original poster's, but my mother was definitely overprotective. When I was about a year old, two paperboys were abducted by someone in my city, Des Moines. I dare not say who it was here since there'd be a fair share of random googlers since there are still conspiracy theorists about the whole thing -- the mother of one of the boys went pretty crazy and occasionally is in the news because she's "found" her son.

As a result, my mom was always really protective. I wasn't allowed to play in the front yard unless she was also out there or watching. I can't really remember going to visit that many friends outside of school unless my mom knew their parents and trusted them to be safe.

She'd always pick me up from school even when we still lived fairly close -- one time I was supposed to be running late and she left to take a friend of mine to his home. I figured I'd start walking home along the route she'd probably drive but made it home without seeing her. Luckily, I was able to call my dad from a neighbor's place (I didn't have a key with me) and have him go tell her that I was already home. If he hadn't shown up within the time I would have normally been walking out she probably would have been worried sick.

The overprotectiveness, combined with a natural high anxiety and some childhood allergies that made me want to stay inside have made me kind of a paranoid, insular person myself. I'd imagine that the anxiety could definitely be inherited, genetically as well as socially, if you're worried about that sort of thing. I think I turned out mostly fine, if still a little solitary, but I like it that way.
posted by mikeh at 4:54 PM on July 16, 2006

That's strange to hear about overprotective parents.... I can't relate at all.

My mom used to drop me off at say, the state fair, when I was 11, give me 20 bucks and say she would be at the entrance to pick me up at 5 p.m. She was always at least an hour late, and never regretted her tardiness. This was without anyone but my sister, and she would run off on her own the minute we got there....

She also did this when we wanted to ski... drive my sister and myself to the ski hill... drop us off... give us 100 bucks apiece, then pick us up at like 6 p.m.

The thing is, I am fairly well adjusted and much more a free spirit than my sister. Even though we experienced roughly the same thing.... (and I still have a great relationship with my mom)

Wow... I'm surprised I didn't catch on fire or get hit with a lawn dart back then.
posted by Benway at 6:38 PM on July 16, 2006

I'm in this sort of a situation myself. The first time I went on vacation with friends (at 21), my mother freaked out when she couldn't reach me on the hotel phone on the day of arrival, and she wound up calling my friend's parents and then screaming at me over my friend's cell phone. To this day she still denies that her response was inappropriate. She's done a bunch of other inappropriate things too (such as not telling me that my grandmother was terminally ill when I was 16) but always defended her action when I confronted her about it. And I got into half an hour arguments with my dad every morning over eating breakfast and going to school on public transportation versus getting a ride from him, even into university.

I had to go see a therapist to recognize that it's their problem and to disentangle myself from them. The funny thing is that most people that I talked to, even many of my friends, told me that I was lucky that I had such loving parents who were so concerned about my welfare. I'm not so sure about that. It definitely was something I couldn't casually talk about until very recently--there's some kind of a social stigma against thinking of over-protectiveness as also a type of abuse. I mean, who wouldn't want their parents to be involved and interested in their lives? But it's not always so clear-cut.

Now I just don't talk about my activities until I've actually done them. If there's no chance of them finding out, I don't mention it at all. I get accused of all manners of things however.
posted by elisynn at 7:04 PM on July 16, 2006 [1 favorite]

Benway: Mine was the same way, except that I never got a bloody dime. and my sister is 10 years older. My parents had no problem letting me go places and do things. It was great for my mom because it got me out of her hair so she could watch TV or something.

I believe that overprotective parents are definitely a generational thing. IE, parents in the 70's & 80's were more likely to let their kids do things.
Then that movie "Adam" came out, and parents everywhere shit a collective brick. These days it's worse, with the AMBER alerts and media reporting on $missing_white_girl_du_jour.

I've known people that did have overprotective parents, though. They were quite miserable. To many people, you look like a complete loser if you can't do anything "without mommy being right behind you." These were the kids that never got invited anywhere by other kids, never participated in sports, etc. Rather unhappy.
posted by drstein at 7:06 PM on July 16, 2006 [1 favorite]

The funny thing is that most people that I talked to, even many of my friends, told me that I was lucky that I had such loving parents who were so concerned about my welfare. I'm not so sure about that.

The problem occurs when a line is crossed and it's no longer about keeping a kid safe, it's about making a child/grown child responsible for their parents feelings. If I don't assuage my parents' irrational anxieties in the manner that they prefer, it's MY FAULT that they are terrified! hysterical! worried sick!

I believe that overprotective parents are definitely a generational thing. IE, parents in the 70's & 80's were more likely to let their kids do things.

Not necessarily. I was a kid in the late 70s-early 80s. We had the kidnapper-in-a-van meme, kidnapper-at-the-arcade meme, the cities were more dangerous than they are now, racial tension was higher (which trickled down to more distrust of random strangers of other races.)
posted by desuetude at 8:54 AM on July 17, 2006

For the record, my dad was (and is) this way, and I think it greatly contributed to my sense that I was somehow apart from other kids and innately disliked—'cause every time I started to get close to someone, my dad would freak out about the potential loss of control over me or the potential bad influence of that person or the dangers inherent in me leaving the house without my parents...etc. and not allow me to do things with that person. It also contributed to me becoming something of a workaholic in high school, 'cause activities and schoolwork were the only legitimate reasons I had (in my dad's eyes) for leaving the house, so I did a million activities so I could avoid being home/actually get out of the house. My dad's got, as they say, major control issues.

And it took me a couple years in college to realize that I was still pushing people away in the manner I was forced to in high school, even though I didn't need to! The habits were so ingrained that I perpetuated them myself, even after I was away at college. I only started moving outside of that mode of thought after I realized what was happening and took steps to put myself out there socially and get close to people—before that I'd essentially held everyone and everything at my university in abeyance.

And also for the record, once I got to college, I never went back home—I lived on campus every summer after I graduated from high school, taking extra classes so I could stay there. A lot of people wonder, I think, why I never did internships before my senior year in college—the reason, of course, is that I didn't want to have to deal with my dad to secure funding/accommodations/transportation for an internship, and I didn't want to risk having to stay at home for even a week before or after an internship. Perpetually staying at the university and taking classes was a better option.

It was bad enough being forced out of the dorms over winter break for a month—I'd pretty much spend that month in my basement room at home reading. Even this past winter break, during the middle of my senior year in college, when I was already 21 and soon to be 22, he didn't want me to stay out late, and sometimes blocked me going out at all. I just patiently bore it, because I knew it would be the last time I'd go home.

Now I have my own place, and my finances are entirely separate from my parents' finances. It is my sincere hope to never have to go home again, except to pick up my book collection and other things I have boxed up in the basement once I have more permanent housing.

So yes, anonymous, you're not alone.
posted by limeonaire at 12:28 PM on July 17, 2006

You may find something meaningful in this thread.
I don't know how your experience compares with SPrintF's but on the surface they have something in common. He's not the only person in that thread who talks about how their adult life has been shaped negatively by their parents -- some very touching writing there and maybe you will connect with some of it.
posted by louigi at 10:00 PM on July 30, 2006