When I say Kids being us I am not saying they don’t have choices, I ‘m
saying they are absorbing and responding to what they experience.  In another  post I
wrote about “Who watches who the most”?  (kid Predicting Us)  that describes more about kids observing us.

I think that kids not only learn our behavior  but even more they
“catch” our emotional structures or what makes us tick.   This Can be both good or bad.
Kids  catch from  not only our thinking, behavior and choices but also
they can experience what our inner experiences.   I’ve said to many, do you not think your kid knows your afraid, angry, lonely, excited, upset, intoxicated, and or withdrawing.   etc…

One way I explain this is that kids catch our emotional structures,
They not only see the end result our inner workings,  they experience the construction of
the emotion within  us.Those constructs lodge in their inner mind so that when they are in a similar situation they not act like us but experience what we experience.  We all probably have an example of this.

Have you ever caught yourself acting like your parent?  Or
emphatically trying not to act like  them.   That is what I call a learned emotional structure.
Researchers at the University at Buffalo’s Research Institute on
Addictions (RIA) and Old Dominion University (ODU) in Norfolk, Va., have found that when fathers recover from substance abuse, children exhibit significant improvements in psychosocial functioning.

Furthermore, these improvements may be enhanced if behavioral couples (HelpThruMarriage) therapy is included as part of substance-abuse treatment, they reported in the April issue of the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. This is the first study to examine systematically the secondary effects of behavioral couples therapy on children of substance abusing parents. In addition, it is unique in that both alcohol- and drug-abusing parents were included in the study and similar results, in terms of children’s psychosocial functioning, couples’ relationships, and father’s substance-use frequency, were found with both types of couples. Lastly, in contrast to previous research, children’s psychosocial adjustment was assessed both prior to treatment and at regular intervals during the year after treatment.