Ruth Hollman, 53, of Los Angeles, has struggled against depression most of her life but feels she has her symptoms under reasonably good control now. "I do have bad days, though, and there's no question I'm inconsistent with the kids. On bad days I'll ignore something they're not supposed to be doing. On better days there's a different rule. Of course I'm concerned. I have tremendous worry that they're going to turn out to be not OK kids."
Her 11-year-old son is in therapy because he has trouble controlling impulses and can be defiant about rules at home. He's been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and is improving with medication and therapy. "My younger daughter is just blossoming all over the place, but, still, you worry because you don't want your troubles to harm them."
Gary McMane, the Fontana father who believes his depression has hurt his three kids, feels he avoided inflicting serious harm for years by letting them know he needed more alone time on some days. That worked when their mother lived with the children. But when she left the home five years ago after a 20-year marriage, McMane plunged into a black hole. The kids — 9, 12 and 17 at the time — lived with him. "For days I would lie in bed and cry. They kept trying to console me; they just didn't see this coming. For a couple of months I was just disabled."
McMane took a leave from his job as a social worker and joined a men's therapy group that he credits with gradually bringing him back to mental health. "It ‘parentified' my older daughter, though. She felt she had to take care of the younger kids, and to this day she still kind of feels that way," he says. McMane talks with his children openly about what's happened.
He hopes that sensitive parenting — and seeing how he's turned his life around — will help them in the long run.
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