Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-4839682-20131003142941/@comment-22525977-20131006054234

Abused children almost always have a really, really hard time getting to the point where they can even acknowledge how much they were damaged by their abusive parents. Children are programmed to rely on and trust their caretakers and one of the reasons parental child abuse is so awful is that breaking that trust leads to a whole host of psychological problems that last into adulthood and often require therapy to be adequately addressed.

It's not a matter of "growing up," it's a matter of Regina having lived through serious childhood trauma and not having the tools she needs to overcome that and become a survivor instead of a victim. Someone like you or I can look at the situation objectively and say that, yes, it's Cora who is really at fault, not Snow, but Regina is not equipped to make that same judgement. She genuinely needs professional help in order to heal to the point that she could.

Literature explaining what I'm getting at in greater depth can be found here, here (and elsewhere on that site—that page is an overview), and here.

BadWolf, because I missed this the first time:

Regina is actually a pretty awesome mother, thank you. I can't remember any instances in which she belittled Henry, let alone made a habit of it. She put him in therapy because she recognized that he needed someone to talk to and couldn't talk to her, which—I say this as a person who had severe and unfounded behavior problems (the antisocial kind, not the asocial kind) as an 11-12 year old and who was put in therapy for a year by my own mother—is the absolute best thing Regina could have done for him and must have been hard for her, considering how desperately she wants to be the only person he needs. She obviously adores him, lets him continue seeing his birth mother against her better judgement (it was a closed adoption—that restraining order Regina was threatening to get was not an idle threat), errs on the side of too little discipline until he starts putting himself and his therapist in extreme danger (the mine incident), and most importantly listens to him in season two when he points out that she's become a tyrant and then does her best to improve.

No, of course she's not perfect, but neither is Emma or Snow or Granny or any of the other mothers we see on the show or any mother in real life, and Regina's major flaws as a mother are emotional neediness and a difficulty letting go, things which she actively works to overcome throughout two, barring the period when Cora got her temporarily back under her thumb. And that absolutely does not deserve the villification she gets from Henry, particularly considering that she raised him and raised him well for ten years.