Years ago, I took a friend's child to the library. One table over was a young mother with her son, around four years old. The librarian was helping them, and the mother was practically levitating with pride because her child was already reading.

As the librarian handed them the book they'd wanted, the mother opened it and said, "Show her how you can read!"

But the child didn’t want to, and shook his head no.

"Come on, show this nice lady how smart you are!" The mother looked at the librarian. "He really can read," she insisted.

The librarian bent down to the child and said, “It’s okay. You don't have to read out loud if you don't want to."

"No, he really can. I promise!” Then she sort of hissed at the boy, “Show the lady you can read.”

The boy looked terrified.

When the mother realized other people were watching, she doubled down instead of dropping it, announcing to the entire floor that her son could read.

Most likely, she thought she was praising her child. What she was actually doing was apologizing for her child being exactly who he was.

For a person without children, I’m asked for parenting advice more often than you’d think. By way of advice, I ask one question:

Are you raising the child you have, or the child you want?

To answer that, you first need to answer another question: Were you raised as the child you were, or as the child your parents wanted?

We don't always realize the hundreds of small ways we overlook our children. We ask them to prove themselves—often because their accomplishments reflect well on us. The demands we make send a message: What's valuable about them is what we think is valuable.

What gets overlooked is what our child values.

Adults assume we know more than children, so we don't take them as seriously as we should. But just because kids don't have the language to articulate what we know doesn't mean they don't know. Because they're still developing language skills, they're closer to their emotions than we are.

Kids know when they are being overlooked or dismissed. They feel it in their bodies.

In her seminal book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, psychoanalyst Alice Miller describes how children develop a "false self"—a version of themselves designed to meet their parents' needs. The child learns to hide their true feelings and present only what is expected. While this helps a child survive their childhood, it comes at a debilitating cost: they lose access to their own truth.

Let's say your anxious child is fixated on death—your death, in particular.

Your impulse is to tell them they don't need to worry; you're not going to die for a very long time.

But when you tell a worried child not to worry, you deny them their reality and replace it with a reality you wish were true. When you discount their real concerns, you teach them to second-guess their feelings.

Imagine confiding to your partner that you're unhappy in your marriage. They respond: "Oh, you don't need to feel unhappy. I don't feel unhappy."

It’s annihilating, right?

I am always amazed at the pride people take in announcing they are parenting their children how they wished THEY'D been parented—as though this were a good thing When we raise our kids in opposition to how we were parented, we're not raising the child we have. We're raising the overlooked version of our childhood self. That’s an imaginary child.

If you were overlooked as a child, you might rush to tend to every need of your child. You might be overcompensating for what you were denied, instead of assessing whether you’re rushing to fix things better left alone.

We rush to correct everything. We bend our children to fit into the existing structures and systems of the world, sending the message that how they are is wrong, and how the world works is correct. But what if we worked to widen the existing structures and systems to fit our unique children?

When we look at our children's struggles as deficits to fix, children often interpret those efforts—regardless of how good the intention—as a judgment on their existence.

Alice Miller observed that children will do anything to maintain their parents' love—including abandoning their true selves. In becoming the "perfect" child of their parents' dreams, they lose access to who they actually are.

Sometimes what eases our children's pain is simply being present and attuned. When we're busy looking for fixes, we're less available to mirror back that we accept the nuances of our child’s kaleidoscopic self.

Until next week, I will remain…