Why Emotionally Unstable Parents Raise Anxious Kids #Psychology #Parenting

How does a father's relationship with his own emotions affect his children? I might argue that the main factor which determines the emotional well-being of a home and all of the people who live in that home is the emotional self-regulation of the father. You're going to say, "What about mothers? Having a mother who's not well regulated is devastating, too." You're right, it is. Ideally, we want there to be both a mother and a father in every home and that both mother and father should be emotionally well regulated. That's the ideal, obviously. But, here's what I'm going to tell you and yes, it is gender specific. The role of a father is to provide stability. A mother provides nurturing. Not to say that there are not roles within which fathers provide nurturing and roles within which mothers provide stability, but the chief characteristic of their function in the home is that the father provides stability, the mother provides nurturing. Those are two separate needs. They're both incredibly important needs, but there is a division of labor. If a father is supposed to provide stability and the father is not able to manage his own emotions, go figure out how devastating that is for a home that the very person in the home who's supposed to be the source of stability is injecting instability.