Parenting a Child with BPD: Am I Helping or Hurting?

​If you have a child struggling with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) then you have probably had the experience of being told that you are hurting your child as you try to help them. A typical exchange might sound something like this:
 
Parent:             Would you like me to help you pick out your clothes for your wedding?
Child:              Why, you think I can’t dress myself?
Parent:             I just thought it would be a nice activity for you and me.
Child:              So you pick an activity that makes me feel incompetent. A great parent you are.
Parent:             I am just trying to be involved as a parent.
Child:              Just like my therapist said, you refuse to see me as an adult. You want to keep me a child forever.
 
For many parents of children with BPD this has left them unsure about how to respond to their child in almost all situations. Many experience a total lack of confidence in their parenting ability. This is not due to bad parenting on your part – this is due to a symptom of the disorder that requires specialized parenting techniques. Understanding this symptom and the techniques will make you a more confident and effective parent of your child with BPD.
 
Sufferers of BPD struggle with an underlying sense of self-loathing that they project onto those that they are close to. This causes them to feel that others are overly critical and disapproving of them. They listen for slights and put downs from you, often resulting in the self-fulfilling prophesy that you are demeaning them, although you have no such intent. In the example above the child may have convinced the therapist that the parents are demeaning and inhibitive of the child’s emotional growth.
 
This contrasts with the behavior of the typical sufferer of BPD who is demanding of others and frequently asks for favors or insinuates entitlements, such as for money, rides, child care, etc. Reconciling their demandingness of others while at the same time being disposed to seeing themselves as a victim requires an understanding of a form of codependency that occurs frequently in those who suffer from BPD. This type of codependency involves resistance to independence rather than embracing it. They see you doing things for them as affirmation of their worth. They see helping them as demeaning because it implies that they are flawed. An exception is areas that the child has no exposure to and hence does feel the need to defend their competence.
Your understanding of perceived victimization and codependency in sufferers of BPD will enable you to parent more confidently and effectively utilizing specialized techniques. In trying to help your child with BPD effectively you first need to determine if the help you are giving is helping the child become more functional and independent or whether you are enabling your child to avoid pursuing independence. This will allow for Selectively Supportive Parenting. This involves offering help only if it supports independence. Examples include facilitating education, skill acquisition, pursuit of health services, including mental health services, etc. Because your child has a condition that inhibits independence and encourages codependency you should never offer to help your child with anything that they might be able to do on their own. If you decide to offer help in a situation that does not inhibit independence, such as helping with a basic manual task, you would be best to phrase the offer as “may I help you___?”. This will minimize, but not eliminate, the chances that it will be perceived as a slight.
 
Parents of children suffering with BPD often find that conventional supportive parenting: offering support without scrutiny for codependency, is often ineffective or counterproductive due to the child’s resistance to independence. Parenting techniques are most effective if crafted specifically for use in families affected by BPD. Selectively Supportive Parenting is one such techniques. In addition, the following considerations will also be helpful in guiding parenting of a child with BPD.
 

• Do not offer to help the child with anything the child attempts independently.
• Avoid offers of help that can be interpreted as a challenge to competence.
• If your child has a therapist consider having direct contact with the therapist in order to insure that the therapist has a balanced view of the child’s functioning.

 
Introduction of these techniques into parenting style will be most effective if applied consistently and transparently. Reasoning should be clearly explained as to how resources offered are to be used and as to why resources are being denied when necessary.