No family is perfect though, is it.
Many perfectly happy people grew up in strange set-ups, with alcoholic parents, mentally ill parents, sick parents, poverty...life is damned hard for most of the world's population.
We are lucky when our children get nutrition, warm safe home, books and learning, medicine, toys, holidays AND love.
But even the children who don't get all these things are not all permanently damaged in the way that a child whose self is denied or rejected from early days is, and sometimes I feel the more NORMAL and non-abusive from the outside that family appeared to others and to that child maybe the harder it is to understand or accept they were abused.
I believe that what affects children most is the level of honesty and genuine feeling around them, for ( extreme ) example, a drug-user could be a better parent by providing the child with genuine affection and letting them be themself, than say a christian environment where a child is told what to believe ( even if they don't believe it ) or a household where everything looks perfect but actually the mother resents and dislikes her children and gets at them in small imperceptable ways.
It is the denial of the child's real self, and the forcing on a developing mind of another's reality- effectively not allowing someone to develop their own reality- that does the harm to many people whose posts I have been reading.
that they can say to their parents angrily: these are my boundaries! or this is important to me! and STILL NOT BE HEARD, be dismissed, laughed at, even as middle-aged adults who have spent years educating themselves and often their families -inside their buried-child-self is unheard and disappointed each time it is ignored.
It is the fact that they grow up unable to trust their own feelings or even to know when they are in agony, for all the times someone has told them the opposite or insisted they should not feel and certainly not express those feelings.
I could go on about this at length, for injustices are often done by social workers who perceive children living in poor, smoky, cramped conditions to uneducated parents as obviously neglected even where they are loved and happy where a child like me- who could see what was done to me? It was as invisible as I subsequently became.
And my kids sure ain't that!