When my wife and I were kids this was normal now it is abuse?

[Manifestor_of_Light]

87. I suffered the opposite. My parents were jailers.

I suffered from extreme overprotection. There is such a thing as too much overprotection. I constantly told my parents they were overprotective and got rebuffed. I was a very bright child (three standard deviations above normal IQ) but I was a status symbol for being smart and playing musical instruments.

This was in cheap postwar suburbia. I grew up in the sixties and I was told not to play outside.

I was told not to play with the neighbor kids. Most of them were real snotty anyway. She didn't want me to dress like the other kids either. She got handdowns that were funny clothes. But she would buy herself purses and hats and belts she didn't need. I constantly asked for an allowance and never got any money. I was told "But we buy you everything you need." I was told I was too lazy to do chores. However, I couldn't clean house because that would mean I would have to throw away some of my mother's junk, and she would freak out over that. So the dishes got washed and the clothes and the sheets, but actually throwing stuff away was not done. She wrapped all the kitchen utensils in plastic bags because we had roaches and rats, and the house was dirty and not sealed. We didn't have adequate air conditioning in a humid subtropical climate so summer was hell. It started in April and ended in October or November. My parents had a window unit in their bedroom and a window unit in the front office. Because of the heat and humidity and a nearly 12 month growing season, I had a perpetually runny nose from allergies but they didn't have any medicine for it back then.

If I snuck outside, that was BAD. My mother would use a shaming tone of voice and scold me for "RUNNING OFF".

A few times she or dad would run outside with a bamboo switch shrieking my name looking for me. I would hide between houses with my friend and laugh at her because she looked like a complete idiot. I think I was in high school at the time. I was terrorized by them with a bamboo switch but I could run faster than they could.

When I was in fifth grade I went to a Girl Scout meeting with another kid. I begged her to join because it was the only time I could be around my peer group and not get picked on, because there was adult supervision. Nope, she had a problem when she was running a Brownie troop when my older sister was little so she would not let me. So she didn't want to provide me with alternatives for kids to hang out with.

I didn't babysit either, because I knew nothing about babies or children. The first time I changed a diaper in my life was when I brought my child home from the hospital after childbirth when she was four days old.

Part of being in a dysfunctional family is isolation. My mother was a hoarder. I couldn't have my own bedroom. I couldn't have friends sleep over because there was not an extra bed. I couldn't have friends over for birthday parties. Mom had taken over one of the three bedrooms with her junk. I slept in a double bed with my sister. Didn't get my own room until she went off to college, which was when I was in about the 9th grade.

I read lots and lots of books because there was nothing else to do. Or else practice my musical instruments. I also got very depressed in the summer because I had no friends where I could hang out at their houses. I cried a lot. We didn't go on vacations because they were frivolous and cost money. The only social life I had was in orchestra in high school.

My parents drove me to school and picked me up. Which was OK because it was too far to walk in junior high and high school. I didn't want to ride a bus because I would have undoubtedly been picked on just like I was picked on at school.