“Daddy has to work”: when we repeat our parents’ patterns

Saturday. Markus is at his laptop. Leo, six, stands in the doorway with a football and goalie gloves far too big for him. “Daddy, will you play with me?” – “In a minute. Daddy just has to work a little longer.” A minute becomes an hour, then two. Markus thinks: “I’m doing this for him.” What he doesn’t know: he heard this very sentence thirty years ago himself, in a different doorway, from his own father. First, see which sentence has travelled on in your family.

Passing it on from generation to generation

That parenting carries on across generations is well researched. A team led by David Kerr and Deborah Capaldi at the Oregon Social Learning Center followed boys from the age of nine into adulthood and later also observed their own children. How constructively the parents had treated the boys predicted how constructively those boys later treated their own children as fathers. But the researchers stress that the link was modest and explained only about ten to twelve percent¹. A large review of how attachment is passed on paints a similar picture: transmission exists, but it is only moderately strong².

That’s the reassuring message: transmission is not destiny. The uncomfortable one: it usually happens unnoticed. As early as 1975, the psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg described “ghosts in the nursery”, experiences from one’s own childhood that reappear in the parent role without mother or father noticing³.

Children copy what we do

In his famous experiments at Stanford University in 1961, the psychologist Albert Bandura showed that children adopt behaviour they observe in adults, even when nobody teaches it to them⁴. Learning from models applies to aggression just as much as to how we deal with work. A child who often hears “in a minute” and sees eyes fixed on a screen learns something about what matters. Quite often they then play “work” themselves, with a cardboard laptop and a teddy who has to wait.

Four inner patterns behind “I have to work”

The German OPD conflict model describes basic inner conflicts that shape how we behave in relationships¹⁰. In our psychodynamic reading, four of them often sit behind the pull of work. In MindMotion they are called patterns. Find out which one is strongest for you:

• Being Enough (self-worth conflict): “If you achieve a lot, you’re worth something.” Jeffrey Young’s schema therapy calls this unrelenting standards⁶. More in Self-worth.
• Responsibility (guilt conflict): work feels like a duty to the family, free time like guilt.
• Taking & Giving (care versus self-sufficiency): if you learned early to manage everything alone, you feel competent at the laptop and out of place romping around.
• Closeness & Space (individuation versus dependence): work creates a distance you wouldn’t otherwise admit you want.

A meta-analysis from the University of Georgia led by Malissa Clark found that workaholism is closely linked to perfectionism and goes hand in hand with more conflict between work and private life⁵. And as with every pattern, there’s a hidden benefit: as long as Markus is working, he doesn’t have to feel the quiet question of whether he is enough without achieving. That’s why the laptop feels safer than the ball.

What children really need: undivided time

Many working parents feel guilty about having too little time. The sociologists Melissa Milkie, Kei Nomaguchi and Kathleen Denny analysed time diaries from a large U.S. sample. For children aged three to eleven, the sheer amount of time with their mother was hardly related to how they developed. For teenagers, by contrast, active time spent together did count, for example with fewer delinquent behaviours and less substance use⁷. So it’s less about hours than about moments when you’re really there.

Tying the thread anew

What helps keep an old pattern from being passed on? The American psychologist Arietta Slade describes parental reflective functioning: the capacity to think about your own inner experience and your child’s. It is seen as one of the processes through which attachment experiences travel from one generation to the next, or don’t⁸. Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell show how parents can understand their own story so it doesn’t play along in the nursery uninvited⁹.

• Find the old sentence: which sentence from your childhood echoes in your “in a minute”?
• Set small islands: ten minutes a day, no phone, your child chooses the game.
• Be honest instead of putting off: “I need ten more minutes, then I’ll come” is better than a “minute” that never comes. And then really come.
• Compassion for yourself: your father probably got it from somewhere too. It’s not about blame, it’s about passing on something new. More in Still seeking your parents’ approval and Self-compassion.

How old family patterns can also show up as anger is described in Angry at your child. How close the bond with your own parents can still be in adulthood is covered in Enmeshed with your parents?.

How MindMotion picks this up

MindMotion is not therapy and doesn’t offer it. The app is a tool for psychological self-reflection, closer to coaching. In the Mind-Check you start from a concrete scene, such as last Saturday when your child stood in the doorway. Step by step you look at what you wished for, what you feared and where you know it from. That makes visible how your childhood, your inner pattern and today’s “in a minute” are connected. At the end there’s a small plan for next time. Start the Mind-Check, it works without signing up. Psychology in short stories is waiting in the video blog.

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