Parents Who Clash Most With Their Grown Kids Usually Struggle To Admit Their Own Childhood Was Complicated
Do not wait until your deathbed to speak more authentically to your adult child.
fizkes | Shutterstock I work with many estranged or low-contact adult children and their parents who are hoping to work through their issues and potentially reconcile.
After years of this work, I have realized that the parents who clash most with their grown kids usually struggle to admit their own childhood was complicated.
What I mean by that: The parents who have the hardest time reconnecting with adult children are those who insist their own family of origin was “perfect” or that it was so terrible that it “made your childhood look like a picnic.”
It is essential to see your own childhood more objectively and understand how it shaped you, in a value and judgment-free way. When parents can look in at their past clearly and in a nuanced way, without “throwing their parents under the bus” (as many parents see any look into their own past as “blaming” their parents who “did the best they could”) or casting them into a villain role, they are finally able to see what patterns they learned at home that have contributed to their difficult relationship with their own child, putting them on the path toward potential repair.
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Many parents deeply struggle with parenting if they have had difficult, enmeshed, or disconnected relationships with their own parents.
When your adult child reminds you of your own mother, or a spouse (or divorced coparent) with whom you have conflict, you start reacting to them not just because of their current behavior/attitude but, on a subconscious level, because they stir up old insecurities and sadness about your relationship with this other person. If you always struggled with your sister, for example, then it is likely that you will bring some of the baggage from that relationship into your interactions with your daughter.
This is also useful to think about in the context of your own marriage or divorce. If you have or had a difficult marriage, this is likely because you picked someone like your parents. When your adult child “is acting just like their mom/dad,” they are also then acting like one of your own parents. It is most useful to think about your family of origin when you are attempting to introspect about why your adult child triggers you, versus the intellectual shortcut of “It’s because they are just like their dad/other parent.”
For example, if you always felt you were disappointing your mother, it will feel very personally triggering to feel that you are disappointing your child. If you had a cold and disconnected relationship with your father, you likely fear this happening with your own child, and are triggered by them saying they do not want to spend time with you.
Sibling relationships are also important to think about, as all family relationships in childhood give you a template for how you view and act within relationships as an adult. This whole field of study is called attachment theory.
If you were never able to make your relationship healthy with your own mother or father, you can feel almost desperate to make the relationship with your own child into a loving and healthy one.
When your adult child repudiates your life choices and makes very different choices themselves, this can make you feel angry and panicked.
You are experiencing attachment panic, which often looks like you begging for more time together, to be prioritized, and to be respected, while your adult child is asserting themselves by saying that they have different priorities now that do not include you. The more control you try to exert, the more they pull away, which is called the pursuer-distancer dynamic.
The more the preoccupied attachment parent pursues the avoidant adult child to have a closer relationship, the more smothered the adult child feels. If you have been in a pursuer-distancer dynamic with your own parent or your partner or ex-partner, you can recognize overlap with what is going on right now with your adult child.
As you, the parent, understand more about why you are experiencing attachment panic with your adult child, and set this against a larger context of your prior life experiences, you will be able to interact more calmly, take their behaviors less personally, and potentially create a relationship that is about the two people that exist right now, instead of one that is sabotaged by the shadows of your past. Therapy can help you dig deeper into your own family of origin experiences, not to villainize your parents/siblings, but with the goal of a clearer understanding of how you were impacted, and how you were implicitly trained to relate to others.
Understanding that you learned to act in certain ways from your upbringing can teach you that there are many other ways you can learn to relate that may work better for you and your adult child.
The parent-child relationship can look very different across families, and a healthy goal is to have a happy and positive relationship, rather than one that looks a specific way that you were trained to associate as the only possible option.
By the way, if your adult child has ever entreated you to go into your own therapy, this means that they see you as someone who cannot introspect and cannot be objective about their own motivations and behaviors. If you can situate your behaviors and thoughts in your family of origin, this will not be perceived by your child as an excuse, but as you finally admitting that you may not be “right,” and that your ways of thinking and acting were the ones you chose because they are what you learned.
In my experience, estranged parents often say that their parents and families of origin were “fine” or even “perfect.” The more you idealize your family growing up, the more your adult child views you as some kind of anomalous monster that was raised perfectly and, in contrast to what they themselves experienced, is unable to be a loving and healthy parent.
This view is amplified by positive experiences your child may have had with your parent, their grandparent. Ironically, your parent likely acted similarly with you as you act toward your adult child, but is much more accepting and loving toward your kids, their grandchildren.
You must stop cutting off your nose to spite your face and refusing to admit that your parents did anything less than perfectly.
Sadly, I have seen parents who are so loyal to their own parents (even those who are deceased) that they refuse to think deeply about patterns that they learned at home, which then sabotages their current relationship with their own children.
As a personal example, it was a very long time before I was told that my mother was never told “I love you” by her own mother, my loving (to me) grandmother. This completely changed my understanding of why my mother never said “I love you” to me as a child, and I would never have guessed this without my mother’s disclosure, as my grandmother said “I love you” to me frequently when I was a child.
My grandmother certainly loved my mother, but was raised with a great deal of early life trauma, including emigration to the United States at a young age, and losing her family in the Holocaust. This trauma history was combined with the fact that being too verbally affectionate to a child was considered to tempt fate or attract the “Evil Eye” in many Old World cultures.
By the time her grandchildren were born, my grandmother had grown older and was able to be more openly affectionate than she likely was as a younger woman, so I never would have thought that she also struggled with saying “I love you” within the mother-child relationship.
Understanding that my mother was following the pattern laid out for her helped me to take things less personally and have a larger context for understanding her behaviors as a parent. Instead of thinking that my mother uniquely did not love me and who I was, I saw her as someone who was following a template.
Instead of assuming that she would have said “I love you” if I were different, I understood that she would not have said this to any child. This changed the frame of this pain from my childhood. It is a lot easier to forgive a parent for doing what they themselves experienced than to forgive a parent who you believe finds you disappointing or unacceptable.
I have seen similar epiphanies in my adult child clients when they learn of their parents’ family histories. If your father was absent because his own father was as well, it is a lot easier to understand, and can be a huge moment where you realize that his behavior was not about you at all, but him subconsciously repeating what he knew.
It is not disloyal to your own parents to give your child more objective information that explains why you act as you have. It is a gift to your child that can allow them to see you as a separate person who deserves empathy and who wasn’t doing things to you to hurt you, but because that is all you knew how to do.
On the other side, some parents use their own difficult upbringings as an excuse for their own behavior toward their child.
They suffered through abusive, neglectful, or otherwise traumatic childhoods, and use their own history as a counterpoint for their own parenting, which is not “as bad” as what they themselves lived through.
The different ways for communicating about your history to your child can be understood as an Excuse vs an Explanation. If you use your parents as an excuse, you say things like:
“I guess I yelled at you some, but believe me, it was better than what I got. My dad would beat me every night.”
“At your age, I was completely cut off financially. I would have died before I asked my dad for money.”
“My mother left me, and all I have tried to do is be there for you, and still it’s not good enough.”
These sorts of excuses will seem dishonest and unempathetic to your child. Instead of seeing their perspective, you are stuck in the role of victim. Your child has a point: just because your own childhood was worse does not mean theirs felt easy. Many estranged parents say that their adult child is “playing the victim” without seeing how the language of victimhood was learned from how you yourself spoke about your own family and early life.
Using your parents as an explanation can transform your child’s understanding of you and your relationship overall, healthily and positively. An explanation would look like:
“I learned to yell at you so much because I lived in a violent home. I was scared of my dad, and I didn’t understand how to discipline without some form of violence. I’m sorry. At the time, I thought that yelling was better than beating, but the yelling itself was terrible as well, which I pushed out of my mind because I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I have realized that I used to make passive-aggressive comments to you about still being ‘on the payroll’ because my father was very rigid and self-absorbed about money. He cut me off completely at 18, and I was very anxious about how to survive. I didn’t want to do that to you, but I had no model of how to give money to an adult child in a positive way. Instead of figuring out why I felt so uncomfortable, I made fun of you for accepting what I was offering, which was unfair.”
“My mother left me, which made me feel unloved and abandoned. I have tried to be there for you, but I have no role model for how to be a mother. I fear that I have swung too far in the other direction and inserted myself in every aspect of your life in an overwhelming way. I did not learn how to parent from my mother, so I am trying to learn more now. I wish I had thought about it in this way sooner.”
If this resonated with you, use it as a springboard to introspect more deeply about your family of origin and its impact on your current relationship with your adult child.
Take the scary step of getting into therapy to finally work through your own past and use that clarity to move the needle on your difficult dynamic. And do NOT get into therapy that makes things worse.
Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten, aka Dr. Psych Mom, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and the founder of DrPsychMom. She works with adults and couples in her group practice, Best Life Behavioral Health.
