In a previous article, we looked at the kinds of trouble people with mild intellectual disability or borderline intelligence often run into in adult-to-adult relationships.
So what happens when people with the same traits build a family of their own and become parents? What unfolds inside the relationship with their child? In this article, we look at it through eight scenes that show up in real caregiving.
① The Inability to Read the Other’s Feelings
In the previous article, the reunion case showed how a weak ability to imagine “how the other person is feeling” surfaced as interpersonal trouble. In caregiving, this often appears in a different shape: “the parent cannot pick up signs that the child is in trouble.”
A scene where the parent inserts herself into the child’s friendships:
Mother: “There’s a girl named ◯◯ in your class, isn’t there. Bring her over to the house. I heard her father is a doctor.”
Child: “Um… I haven’t really talked to her much…”
Mother: “What? You’re not friends? You should be more outgoing — that’s why she doesn’t like you. When I was your age, I always had friends around me.”
Child: “I’ll try to talk to her sometime…”
The mother cut the child off.
Mother: “Not ‘sometime’ — talk to her tomorrow! That’s the kind of attitude. Ahhh, this is why I hate kids with gloomy personalities.”
The child’s “I haven’t really talked to her” is a report of social reality. Underneath those words sits the child’s actual feeling: “My relationship with her is too thin to invite her to the house. I’d really rather not.” But for this parent, that feeling is unreadable, and does not register.
The child’s feelings, right in front of her, become invisible to the mother. In their place, the child’s words are received only as “resistance to the parent’s plan.”
Next is the difficulty of having one’s words land as “something that should correct me.”
② One-Way Assertion
In the previous article, the parking-lot case showed how, even when the neighbor pointed out concrete problems, nothing landed — the assertion stayed one-way. The same structure shows up in caregiving.
A scene with a child running a fever:
In the middle of the night, the child got up, saying, “My head hurts and I feel nauseous.”
The mother said, “You’ll be fine if you sleep. I’m tired too — don’t wake me up this late,” and sent the child back to bed.
The next morning, seeing the child swaying as he tried to put on his uniform, the mother urged him along: “You’ll be late. Hurry up.”
Late morning, the school nurse called: “He has a fever of 38°C. Please come pick him up.”
When the mother arrived, the school nurse asked, “I heard he was unwell from last night. How was he this morning? Did you give him anything?” The mother tilted her head: “Aren’t we making too much of this?”
Nurse: “Mother, his temperature is 38°C.”
Mother: “A child can run a fever like that. He’s not strong, that’s all. I went to school with that kind of fever myself. If you keep going instead of skipping, you build up real stamina.”
Nurse: “Mother, things aren’t the same as in our day. If it’s flu, he could spread it to the other children. Please take him to a clinic today.”
Mother: “Hmm. We aren’t communicating, are we. Fine. I’ll just take him home now!”
Nurse: (Which one of us isn’t communicating, exactly…)
“One-way assertion” is, at its root, a state in which the circuit for taking in new information is not running. So even when the nurse says, “his temperature is 38°C,” the mother’s conclusion does not change. “I went to school with this kind of fever” — her own experience has become the absolute standard, and facts presented from outside have no power to revise that “right answer.”
The one who said “we aren’t communicating” and walked off was, in fact, the mother. But inside her own sense of things, she is the victim — the one who wasn’t understood. Because she has no awareness that the one not getting through is herself, only the feeling of “no one understands me” remains, and the mother’s view does not shift.
③ Double Standards
In the previous article, the workplace vacation-request case demonstrated the pattern of “if I do it, no problem; if someone else does it, it’s a problem.” Caregiving runs on the same pattern.
Let us look at a scene where five minutes late and two hours out happen in the same household.
A scene over the curfew:
The child came home five minutes after the agreed time.
Mother: “Where were you wandering off to? Breaking curfew is the start of going off the rails. People who can’t keep time — that’s the thing your mother hates the most.”
The child looked down in silence. She had been talking with friends in the park, and it had run a little long.
A few days later, in the evening, the mother said, “I’m just stepping out for a bit,” and left. Dinnertime came and went. It got dark. The child sat alone at the table, watching the clock.
The mother came back two hours later. “I’m hungry — is there anything to eat?” she said.
The child could not bring herself to say, “You’re late.” She already knew what would happen if she did.
Now a scene where “the side that is allowed to leave food” and “the side that is not” sit at the same table.
A scene over leftover food:
Mother: “No picky eating. Eat all of it. Leaving food is the most disgraceful thing there is.”
That was the rule of the house. If the child even pushed vegetables to the edge of the plate, the table was slammed and the shouting began.
One day, the mother ordered delivery. She took one bite and said, “This isn’t what I imagined. Doesn’t taste right to me.” More than half went uneaten, and the container went into the trash.
The child watched in silence.
Where did the words “leaving food is the most disgraceful thing” go? The same person who had just shouted about not keeping time was the same one who came home two hours late. The mother noticed neither.
The same action gets a different rule depending on who does it. The child sees the contradiction. But she never says it out loud. The mother does not know what that silence means.
④ The Inability to Explain
In caregiving, this shows up as “doesn’t teach, doesn’t explain, only gets angry at the result.” Let us look at a scene where the child is making a summer-vacation craft project from a book.
A scene over a craft project:
The project required handling a screwdriver and a craft knife — too difficult for an elementary-school child to finish alone. The child was struggling. The parent, watching from beside her, ignored it — did not show the child how, did not explain anything. The child held the screwdriver, kept trying things, and could not get it to work.
Then the anger came. “How long are you going to dawdle on something like this? Honestly, whatever I give you to do, you can’t get it right.”
The mother kept saying, “Why can’t you do it? Just read it. It’s right there in the book,” and never actually showed her how.
Asking a child to handle tools she has never used, on a project she has never tried, with only a book to follow, is a high-difficulty task. But inside this parent, the logic closes neatly: “I told you to do it as the book says = I taught you → if you can’t do it, that’s your fault as a child.” The thought “my explanation might have been insufficient” does not arise. What arises is only anger.
Between adults, you can say, “Could you explain a little more?” or “Could you show me how that part is done?” A child does not have that option, and gets left alone with it. The only framing left to the child is, “I’m the one at fault for not understanding.”
⑤ The Inability to Say “I Don’t Know”
In the previous article, there was a scene where the person was told to do something, could not say “I don’t know,” and answered “yes.” In caregiving, the parent does not see the limits of her own knowledge. She asserts things as fact, and the circuit of “I don’t know — let me check” never engages.
A scene where a school form rebounds onto the child’s health:
The school sent home a “food allergy confirmation form.” It read, “If your child has an allergy, please describe it specifically. If you are not sure, please confirm with a medical professional.”
The mother wrote “none” and submitted it.
The child’s skin sometimes turned red after eating shrimp. But for the mother, this had not connected to the concept of “allergy.” In her mind, it filed under “kind of has a weak body.” The line “if you are not sure, please confirm” was not received as something directed at her.
Shrimp was on the school lunch menu. The child ate it. By the end of the day, something was clearly wrong with his body.
When the homeroom teacher contacted the mother, she said, “I have no way of knowing if he has an allergy. There was no problem with leaving the form blank as ‘none.’ I filled it out properly.”
“I don’t know” had not, in fact, occurred. Because there was no awareness of “I might not be able to tell whether this is an allergy,” the answer became “none” rather than “unsure.” Even after what happened, the mother does not consider that the entry was a mistake. “I filled it out properly” is not a lie. She really believes it.
This is a different problem from ④ “the inability to explain.” ④ is the limit of the ability to teach. ⑤ is the limit of the ability to recognize what one does not know. Knowing what you know and what you do not know is, by itself, a high-level cognitive operation.
The child, from accumulating experiences like this, learns something. “My mother is a person who cannot say ‘I don’t know.'” That recognition takes shape quietly. Without ever putting it into words, the child gradually stops asking.
⑥ The Absence of Common Sense
At work, this trait surfaced in the form of workplace trouble. Inside the household, “the parent’s own absence of common sense” gets carried directly into how she raises her child.
Society has countless rules about “this is how you do it in public” — rules so basic that they almost never get spoken aloud. But cognitive constraints often mean that many of these are never internalized as “obvious” by the time the person reaches adulthood. In caregiving, that gap shows up directly in how the parent treats the child.
A scene about not looking for a restroom while out:
Child: “Mama… I have to go to the bathroom.”
Mother A: “There’s no bathroom. Just go behind those bushes over there.”
Child: “Wait… but…”
Mother A: “Hurry up. Don’t act like you’re some big deal. Nobody’s looking at you, it’s fine!”
The social norm — “you cannot do that in a public place,” “a child’s sense of modesty should be protected” — is not present in this parent. The basic norm, “you go to the bathroom in a bathroom,” has not been internalized as something self-evident.
What does the child learn from this experience? A sense of “shame,” of “this is not normal,” does grow. But without the words to voice it, only the confusion piles up.
A scene where what the parent should obviously do simply gets relayed to the child instead:
A scene over a school-trip envelope:
Child: “Teacher said to bring the envelope with the field-trip money tomorrow.”
Mother: “Okay.”
The next day, the child arrived at school with nothing.
Teacher (by phone): “About the envelope I asked about yesterday — the money has to be put into an envelope and submitted.”
Mother: “Oh, I told my child properly.”
Teacher: “Preparing the envelope is a task for the guardian. It’s too much for the child to handle on their own.”
Mother: “What — I’m supposed to do it? But I told my child.”
By the next day, most parents would have already prepared the envelope. The moment the child says “the teacher told me,” they react automatically: “Got it, I’ll put the money in.” For most parents, that is automatic.
In this parent, that route does not exist. “Whatever the child reports goes right back to the child.” That completes the processing. The question, “whose job is it to prepare the envelope,” does not arise in the first place.
⑦ Memory and Consistency Cannot Be Maintained
At work, this showed up as the trust-eroding pattern of “what I said last week and what I’m saying today don’t line up.” At home, it pours down on the child as “what gets said in the morning is different from what gets said by evening.”
A scene where the rule about video games changes between morning and evening:
A scene over video games:
Mother: “You can play video games when you get home from school today.”
After school, the child started playing.
Mother: “What are you doing? Who said you could play games?”
Child: “You said it this morning, Mom.”
Mother: “I never said that.”
Child: “You did. Definitely.”
Mother: “My child is a liar. Plays games on her own and then blames me for it. Now no games for a week!”
The child set down the controller. In the morning, permission had certainly been given. But there was no longer anything she could say.
Did the rule change? Or was it never said in the first place? The child has no way to check. Inside an inconsistent standard, the only lesson the child takes away is, “Maybe I was the one who was wrong.”
⑧ When Pointed Out, the Parent Becomes the “Victim”
At work, when a mistake was pointed out, a story would surface inside her: “I am the victim.” At home, this becomes the logic of “It’s the child’s fault that I’m being abusive.”
The moment she is placed in an unfavorable position, a story is born: “I am the victim.” And the anger that comes with that story turns toward whoever is least able to fight back — the child.
A scene where, when pointed out, the parent flips into being the “victim”:
A passing comment in the park:
While walking near a park with her mother, the child noticed a family with four children playing nearby.
The mother laughed and said, “Look — four of them? Wow, they really do that, huh.” She said it within earshot, completely unaware that anything was wrong with saying it.
The child did not really understand what her mother meant, but the mother of the other family glared at her with a furious face.
Child: “Hey, that person is making a really angry face…”
Mother: “It’s the truth, isn’t it,” and would not back down.
The other mother walked over: “I’ve been able to hear you. Why am I being told something like that by a stranger?”
“Wha — what is this, all of a sudden? I was just talking to myself!”
“You were clearly directing that at our family, no matter how you look at it.”
“I didn’t say anything! Are you treating me like the bad guy?!”
The child felt nothing but embarrassment.
Only the fact “I was called out” remains in memory. The chain of cause and effect — why she was called out in the first place — is not understood. How her words landed for the other person, how the scene looked to onlookers — the circuit for that perspective does not engage. As a result, being called out gets converted into the experience of “I was attacked.”
The option, “Maybe I was the one at fault,” does not even rise into view. What remains is only the one-directional story of “I was unfairly accused.”
What Was at the Root
Lined up side by side, ① through ⑧ each looks, on its own, like a story about “an odd parent,” “a forceful parent,” or a “toxic parent.” But, as we noted at the close of the previous article, these are not problems of personality or upbringing. They are the “outcome” of difficulties that arise from cognitive constraints — mild intellectual disability and borderline intelligence.
In ①, the child’s feelings and signals do not reach the parent. In ②, whatever is said, the parent’s conclusion does not change. In ③, the rule for the parent and the rule for others are different. In ④, the child does not get taught how to do things. In ⑤, the child is not allowed to say “I don’t know.” In ⑥, the standard of “normal” diverges from the world outside. In ⑦, yesterday’s rule is different today. In ⑧, the parent’s anger turns toward the child.
Adults can put distance between themselves and someone they don’t get along with. A child has no such option.
The development of the child’s heart itself is, quietly and surely, taking on the impact.
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