“What if this child continues to act this way? If he doesn’t change, when he grows up, he will be such a trouble for me! " a depressed father told me.“Even if I set rules, he will not follow, and there is nothing i can do. He used my tools and didn’t put them back. He will just mess up my garage…” he continues to complain.As if he could only sit and wait for bad things to happen to him.He complains and he blames and he criticizes, but with each round of complaints, he feels more powerless and helpless.It turns out that this father grew up as an obedient son himself. He was told that he just needs to sit there, be a good boy, and things will be taken care of for him. When he tried to solve his own problems and explore possibilities, he was discouraged and told that he was making his mother’s life difficult. It would be better if he just listened and obeyed. He had hands but he didn’t need to use them because he would be hand-fed; he had a good head on his shoulders but he also did not need to use it because mother will think ahead for him so he could have an easy life. When bad things happen, all he needed to do was yell help, and someone, just someone, will come to his rescue. Since he wasn’t given the chance to learn how to solve his own problems and when bad things happened to him, he would feel very victimized and started to complain and feel deprived and depressed.He is like those dogs in Pavlov’s lab. He has learned to feel helpless. He has learned, from experience, that the moment he tries to save himself, he will be punished. So he has learned to just sit there in the face of problems, instead of embracing them and taking steps to solve them.When he became a father himself, this attitude would greatly affect his ability to be effective with setting limits for his son, and be proactive in disciplining and guiding the young boy.The Bible talks about generational curse and I see it everyday in my clinic.