20-The Golden Robot Child

“What happens when a child starts asking why?”

In this episode, I reflect on growing up as what I now call a golden robot child — the kid who learns early that being good means being compliant, helpful, and never disrupting the system.

I share stories from my childhood in New York City, my parents’ marriage, and the way my mother’s anger unexpectedly became the spark that helped me question the roles I was taught to perform.

This episode is a personal reflection about curiosity, family systems, and how the questions we were once afraid to ask can eventually become the beginning of freedom.

Come follow me on instagram @MentalLoadCoach and subscribe to my newsletter here. Mental Load Owners- Dismantle gender norms in your household by applying to my group coaching program, GlassWing. GlassWing is a program where we look inside first to see what our relationship to the emotional burden of the mental load looks and feels like. Then we examine ways that we contribute to upholding the dysfunction like overfunctioning and maternal gatekeeping. Then move towards our partners and have conversations that are less charged with urgency and intensity so there's a bigger chance that collaboration in the mental load can take place. Apply for the group coaching program and let's dismantle gender norms together so we can collectively create a more equitable future for our kids. 

Transcript

1:16

Hey, it's Angela and I'm back for another episode. I am going to talk about curiosity, and it's based on my latest Substack article that I wrote on curiosity and. How I grew up as the golden robot child. I have been thinking a lot about curiosity because curiosity is supposed to be this beautiful trait that kids have, but in some families, curiosity is actually dangerous. I didn't realize that growing up curiosity was a strength. I grew up thinking that it was something that thought you were in trouble or that it was really irritating. Sometimes my kids really irritate me when they ask a lot of why questions, like, why does this happen? Why does that happen? And honestly, I'm just like, can you please shut up about it? I don't tell them that, but I definitely. Think that it's so annoying to be asked why for everything. And the funny thing is the person that actually introduced me to curiosity indirectly was my mom. And with my mom, I learned a lot of things indirectly, and what I learned was that why was not a safe question. If you ask why enough times in some families, you basically become their problem. Critical thinker about my safety, critical, think of thinker about my spaces, but not really a critical thinker in terms of my social location and my power dynamics that I was impacted by. As a result of the hierarchy, I was really needing to be aware of my public spaces and how. I was showing up in them, but inside my family system awareness was not very encouraged, which is interesting because those two collide in a weird way. I grew up with a very, what I thought was a very anxious mom. Now, I could see systematically across the board. Actually a lot of moms were really similar to my mom, but honestly I felt my mom was the exception and she was extra worried. I grew up with a large extended family, and honestly, I really thought my mom was the exception because I saw them raise their kids and they were not as anxious as my mom but I remember my mom showing me these Chinese newspaper articles. About how dangerous it was to paint your nails, how dangerous it was to drink cold water, which by the way, I saw on TikTok recently that drinking hot water is the new cool thing to do. And I'm laughing because that was exactly what my mother told me growing up about how warm water. Aids in your digestion, how it opens up blood vessels in your stomach. Of course, she never told me those things. But now that I am a parent and I do my own research about environmental toxins or toxins in our everyday products like candles, which by the way are not fully clean burning. Unless you do organic beeswax candles, 100% beeswax, which actually not all candles can be organic because bees fly around everywhere and they don't make organic wax necessarily. But that is a really weird A DHD tangent there. I'm gonna bring it back. I, she used to tell me all the time, and this is how we would interact like this is. Our, the tone of our interactions. Basically her telling me, me telling her like I'm gonna do something, or me just doing something without telling her, and then her coming back and saying, no, you can't, or no you shouldn't. And I would just associate my mom as a big buzzkill. That's how I picture my mom. My mom was a walking buzzkill. She would be. For me, symbolize a kill joy. Someone who is going to see someone's joy and then kill it. A murderer of someone's joy. That's really how I felt around her and how I experienced her worries as a way to control me and a way to take away any sense of fun I had in my life. And looking back, I realized, okay, I see why my mom was saying what she said. Oh, and by the way, the other thing was I really always needed to have a warm jacket and to leave the house with a warm jacket, and that was something that she would not compromise on. And now I realize that she wasn't being dramatic. She was carrying the entire. Emotional burden of being the sole worrier of the mental load in my family. Now, she didn't call it mental load. She called it worry, and worry was basically the language that she had for clearing the responsibility of the entire household. She always told me, I love you. By worrying about you, I love you by being responsible for you. It is my duty to make sure that you have a coat when you leave, and that you're warm, and that you're not exposed to environmental toxins as much as possible. At least self-inflicted toxins and your wellbeing makes me happy. I was so resentful about that I hated that she hinged her happiness on my wellbeing. That was something that I deeply resented her for and didn't ask for. She imposed on me seemingly and the funny thing is now that I look back at it, she was not really good at playing with me, asking me questions at engaging me in the activities that I liked. Her main way of co communicating with me or interacting with me or connecting with me was through worry and through making sure I had what it needed, I needed for academic success and financial stability in the future, which is in her mind, signing me up for all these extracurriculars and I. I absolutely resented her for that. I felt completely disconnected, misunderstood, and really alone in my family, even though she was so hardworking on behalf of me and come to find out much later in life, she actually paid for a lot of my activities. My dad really didn't contribute anything to it, A lot of working parents see the split where the wife or the person that identifies as a female they not only do the emotional labor and the mental load caring, but they also pay for a lot of the expenses related to the kids. Anyways, I what is interesting to me? About this dynamic is that my mom was incredibly compliant most of the time in their relationship. If my dad asked for something, she would be his handmade, basically a servant, and basically really serving him hand and foot, and that was her living up to her. That was her performing her gender roles. And then out of nowhere she would just explode from holding it all in. From being the servant, from my dad, not really pitching in as much. And then I would observe them, get into this fight like you don't do enough. And my dad would be like, not saying anything. Give her the silent treatment and stonewall her. And that would be really painful to watch. And so the weird thing is the next day they acted like nothing happened. So that was a cycle that I saw repeatedly. Something that I wanna introduce you to that I came up with was the concept of a golden robot child. The golden robot child is someone who was considered an easy child, compliant child. Low maintenance child. Doesn't question, parents, doesn't feel their feelings. As a golden robot child is absolutely adored by extended family and immediate family as much as they could be by critical people. But the price of being adored is that you never disrupt the system. If you disrupt the system by questioning the system or having feelings or presenting a problem that your parents need to solve. Then you are basically not playing the role that you agree to. One of the most dangerous questions a golden robot child can ask is why are things the way they are? And with my mom in those explosions, she held in a lot of her anger until she couldn't hold it in anymore. She lived in a deep sense of resentment. And she really villainized my dad for being the problem. So that's what I saw growing up, that men are not to be trusted. Men don't pitch in, men don't. Men are the king of the castle, basically, and we live to serve them. It's uncomfortable to admit us now, but I started hating my dad at a pretty young age, and my mom didn't really hold back with that. But what I realize now is that my mom's anger actually woke up something inside of me, which is my own anger. And I remember feeling really angry on behalf of my mom, towards my dad, Now I work with couples and I see this dynamic everywhere that there's, one person that carries a mental load. And carries and does the mental load, basically like the daily grind activities and the intermittent activities, the daily grind being like the cooking, the cleaning, the diaper, changing, the packing, the lunches, and then the intermittent stuff being like school forms and, doctor's visits, lawn care home maintenance stuff. The stuff that comes up. Intermittently, like women do everything in the family, and there is a sense that we are performing our gender right? Like when we do this, it is a cultural mandate that we're carrying out to do gender And what people don't realize is when we do what we do, what people see is the smallest part of the job. For example, when you are. Applying for getting math tutor for your child, applying for a math tutor and signing up for a math tutor is like the smallest part of the wheel. That the process, a big part of the process first happens when you notice that your kids' grades are dropping. When you notice your kids' grades are dropping, then you track the grades, right? Like you're doing homework with the child. You're tracking their process improvements and dips, and then you track their test scores, and then you notice the dips. And then when you notice the dips, you email the teacher, you schedule a time to meet, or you email back and forth for options around after school tutoring programs or just, more homework help, et cetera, and then you land on. The decision to actually do the tutoring and then you assess your budget, you do your research about local options or online options, out school, whatever it is, kuman, and then you actually sign up to do it after you've done a ton of research. But all of that, the thinking, the anticipating, the planning, the noticing happens. When you're driving, when you're in the shower, it happens all day long and that's just one plate that you're spinning. What I notice is that women who, people who are identifying and assigned female at birth are socialized to do all this work If you grow up as a golden robot child, you become a golden robot adult, and the themes are really similar. Compliance becomes identity performance. Performing expectations. You do your gender. You do the gender that you're socialized to do, not who you present to be, and you do the emotional labor. What I notice is people who are golden robot children become golden robot adults and they feel the emotional burden. A lot of people that I work with were golden robot kids and they grow up to become robot, golden robot adults. And we get into these relationships that perpetuate these gender norms. And even though we didn't start the gender norms, we feel the impact of them. Notice that. We notice that people who are assigned male at birth. I end up disengaging with the mental load after the second child is born. You could be very hands-on with a first child, but the research and data shows that men tank their involvement with the family. After the second child is born, they do much less childcare and tasks. Physical and intermittent, and they women end up carrying way more of the emotional load now than they did in the seventies. So this is a staggering statistic, is the amount of childcare and cognitive labor that we do now as working parents who are women identified is more. Then moms stay at home. Moms in the seventies did, so I hope that can really, you could really sit with that for a moment. Working parents, working moms do more of the mental load, cognitive load now than stay at home moms did in the seventies. Let's get curious about that. This is like the main dynamic that I work with in my. Coaching and consulting and therapy practice is the imbalance, right? What's interesting is that healing often starts with the exact same things that we're taught not to do, which is curiosity. Balancing the mental load starts with curiosity. Curiosity about the family system, curiosity about roles, curiosity about burdens. And in a strange way, I owe my curiosity to my mom. Her anger gave me permission to look inside to see what am I angry at? Curiosity used to feel dangerous to me. Now it looks like freedom. So anything in this episode resonated with you. You might wanna ask yourself a simple question. What questions were you taught not to ask? I. How are you showing up today that is perpetuating what you knew in your childhood to be safe and comfortable versus uncomfortable, and how can we start moving out of your comfort zone, our comfort zone, to challenge the status quo and to notice how can we move towards. More gender balance, gender role balance. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to talking to you next time. Take care.