As parents, most of us do the best we can, with the knowledge we have at the time. As children, sometimes the knowledge that our parents didn’t have, that they couldn’t possibly be expected to have at that time, harms us. Both those things can be true.
I speak this as an adult child who was parented in ways I wouldn’t dream of parenting now. I speak this as a mother who knows there are days when my best falls short. I’m not perfect. I’m human. As are my parents. I imagine my own children will one day look back and see gaps in what I provided, blind spots in how I understood them, moments when I got it wrong despite trying to get it right. I hope they show me compassion and know that I love them and tried my best.
Yet many adult children are now looking back on their childhoods with new knowledge and are finding them wanting. Armed with psychological frameworks and developmental research their parents never had access to, they’re measuring their upbringings against modern standards of emotional attunement, mental health awareness, and parenting advice.
This examination can lead to genuine healing and necessary accountability. But it can also create a particular kind of pain—a pain where good-faith parents who tried their best feel condemned for not knowing what they couldn’t have known, while adult children struggle to reconcile real wounds with parents who genuinely loved them.
Before we go further, let me be clear: this isn’t about dismissing abusive or neglectful parenting. Real harm deserves acknowledgment and accountability, full stop. Parents who were cruel, violent, emotionally sadistic, or truly neglectful caused damage that no amount of context excuses. And even well-intentioned parents can cause harm that requires acknowledgment and course correction once they become aware. As the saying goes, “know better, do better.”
This article is about the space between cruelty and imperfection. It’s for parents who tried their best with what they knew and are now being judged by standards they couldn’t have met. And it’s for adult children who are willing and able to reconcile the knowledge that a parent can do their best, and their best still might leave scars.
Understanding these impossible expectations doesn’t erase anyone’s pain. But it might create space for conversations that allow both generations to see each other more clearly.
1. That their parents should have been emotionally perfect despite having no model for it themselves.
Many adult children now recognize the importance of emotional validation, attunement, and processing feelings together. This awareness is valuable—we know now that emotional presence matters profoundly for child development.
But many of our parents grew up in the “children should be seen and not heard” era. Their own parents never asked how they felt. Crying was met with dismissal or punishment. Vulnerability was weakness. They had no model for the emotional parenting we now know children need.
Breaking intergenerational patterns without a roadmap is extraordinarily difficult. We now have therapy, parenting books, podcasts, support groups. And more. Our parents had none of that. Just love, and the vague sense they wanted to do better than their own parents, with no clear path for how.
Does this erase the pain of growing up feeling emotionally unseen? Absolutely not. Children who weren’t helped to process their feelings, who learned to hide their emotions, who felt alone in their inner world—they carry that. It shapes how they relate to themselves and others for decades.
But parents who grew up emotionally neglected and still tried to be warmer with their own children, even if they didn’t know how to fully get there, were doing something genuinely hard. They were trying to teach what they were never taught.
2. That their parents should have instinctively known things that required professional knowledge they didn’t have access to.
Our understanding of child development has exploded in recent decades. We now recognize neurodivergence much better, understand trauma responses, identify mental health conditions earlier, and know how profoundly early experiences shape us.
But much of this knowledge simply didn’t exist—or wasn’t accessible—when many of us were being raised.
The child who struggled to focus and was called “lazy” might now be recognized as having ADHD. The child punished for “overreacting” might now be understood as having sensory processing issues. The anxious child told to “stop being so sensitive” needed strategies their parents had never heard of.
In many cases, parents noticed their child struggling. They asked teachers. They consulted doctors. They followed the limited expert advice available to them. And that advice often turned out to be wrong, incomplete, or harmful. But they didn’t know that at the time. Most parents were making reasonable decisions with the information they had.
Does this give back the years a child spent struggling without proper support? No. Does it erase the internalized shame of being told something was wrong with you when, actually, your brain just worked differently? Absolutely not.
But it might help distinguish between parents who didn’t care and parents who cared deeply but were working with inadequate tools.
3. That their parents should have been completely healed and self-aware before becoming parents.
The expectation that people should resolve all their issues before having children would, if universally applied, end human reproduction. Nearly everyone becomes a parent while carrying some unresolved trauma, unexamined patterns, and areas they haven’t yet recognized they need to work on.
The uncomfortable truth is that many people don’t realize they need healing until something forces them to confront it. And for many parents, that something is their own child. For example, the parent who never noticed their anxiety until they had an anxious child. The parent who didn’t recognize their conflict avoidance until their teenager started pushing back. The parent who didn’t see their people-pleasing pattern until they watched their child struggle with boundaries. The parent who didn’t realize their own undiagnosed neurodivergence until their child was diagnosed autistic, ADHD, or both (AuDHD). That’s certainly been my experience.
Parenting is the mirror that shows us ourselves—often for the first time. Many parents often only begin their healing journeys because they want better for their children. They recognize patterns affecting their kids and seek help. They do uncomfortable, difficult work motivated by love. But previous generations often had far fewer resources available for that work.
At the same time, it’s important to acknowledge that children who grew up navigating a parent’s unprocessed trauma, who became emotional caretakers, who shaped themselves around a parent’s triggers—they carry burdens they shouldn’t have had to carry. Being collateral damage in someone else’s unhealed wounds is painful, whether that person was trying their best or not. It’s why the pattern of intergenerational trauma is so difficult to break.
4. That their parents should never have made mistakes or should have gotten it right the first time.
First-time parents have never parented before. They’re learning as they go. Every parent makes mistakes with their first child that they wouldn’t make again, not because they loved that child less, but because experience taught them what actually mattered.
The strict rules that seemed crucial with the first child often loosened with subsequent children. Parents learned through experience which battles mattered and which were anxiety-driven overcaution.
For oldest children, this can feel deeply unfair. They often had stricter curfews, more hovering, less freedom—and then watched their younger siblings get away with things that would never have been allowed for them. That experience of being the “practice child” is real and can breed lasting resentment towards both the parents and siblings.
But in most cases, parents weren’t playing favorites. They were learning how to parent by parenting. No one expects someone to pick up an instrument and play it perfectly the first time. Yet we somehow expect parents to arrive at one of life’s most complex challenges with immediate expertise.
5. That they were owed a childhood free from the consequences of their parents’ own limitations and circumstances.
Parents are human beings. They get sick. They lose jobs. They go through divorces. They experience depression, anxiety, and grief. They face challenges they didn’t choose and circumstances they couldn’t control.
Children who experienced instability—whether from divorce, financial crisis, frequent moves, or a parent’s illness—experienced real disruption to their sense of safety. That instability affects development and well-being in lasting ways. As someone living with a chronic illness (that I wasn’t aware of before I had children), I’m all too familiar with this. There are more days than I’d like when I simply cannot get down on the floor and play. Do I worry that my children aren’t getting the mother they deserve? Absolutely. Can I do anything about it? Not so much.
The same goes for parents who went through a divorce that undoubtedly affected their child. They were making a complex decision between two adults in an unsustainable situation. And parents who lost jobs or had to relocate for work generally weren’t choosing to uproot their children for fun.
The expectation that parents should be invulnerable to normal human difficulties denies their full humanity. Most parents did and do their best under genuinely difficult circumstances. They aren’t just supporting characters in their child’s story—they are complete people with their own struggles.
Understanding this doesn’t erase the impact on the child. Of course it doesn’t. But it might create room to see parents as people who were navigating their own difficulties while trying to minimize the fallout on their children, even if they didn’t always succeed.
6. That financial provision and stability weren’t demonstrations of love worth acknowledging.
Many adult children dismiss financial provision as “the bare minimum”—just what parents are supposed to do. But keeping children fed, housed, clothed, and safe for eighteen years is enormous, exhausting work. The sacrifices required, the stress endured, the jobs parents hated but kept because their family depended on them—all of this often becomes invisible, especially when it was done well.
This often reflects a generational divide in love languages. Many parents of the previous generations showed love primarily through provision and sacrifice. To them, that was love. Tangible, daily love.
But many adult children now recognize love primarily through emotional expression, quality time, and verbal affirmation. Neither is wrong. But when we only count our preferred love language as “real” love, we erase decades of genuine love expressed differently.
Of course, financial provision alone cannot meet all of a child’s needs. A child can be materially comfortable while being emotionally starved. And emotional neglect causes real harm, even in materially stable homes. But again, we simply didn’t know as much about the importance of emotionally attuned parenting in years gone by as we do now.
7. That their parents should have known the “right way” to parent (when even experts can’t agree on what that is).
As parents, we are all making it up as we go along. Many of us lie awake at night second-guessing our decisions. Should we have been stricter? More lenient? Somewhere in the middle?
The issue is, no one really knows what the right way to parent is. So we consult experts, friends, family members. And everyone has a different opinion. And it seems like that opinion changes with the wind. Attachment parenting versus scheduled routines. Hands-off versus hovering. Co-sleeping or separate rooms. Gentle parenting or natural consequences. Screen time limits that shift with every new study. We listen to the experts, follow the advice, and still wonder if we got it wrong.
What’s more, what’s right often depends on your individual child, but the experts and research rarely allow for that. So, many parents follow the ever-changing advice of experts when, in reality, that advice is based on a very particular type of child, and it simply doesn’t work for kids who are different, whether that be due to neurodivergence, temperament, sensory needs, or any number of other factors.
Parents are often figuring this out through trial and error, often getting it wrong before they realize they need to throw away the parenting textbook, ignore the experts, and figure out what their particular child needs.
Yet, despite this, adult children may look back and feel their parents “should have known better” or made different choices. In an ideal world, they would have done. But the reality is that often we can’t know what’s best until after the fact.
8. That parents should have prioritized their child’s emotional needs over basic survival needs.
It’s a harsh reality that some families operate in survival mode. Working multiple jobs to keep everyone housed and fed. Grinding themselves down just to maintain basic stability.
When you’re parenting in survival mode, missing bedtime stories or school recitals isn’t something you’re choosing to deprioritize. Often there’s simply no choice. The rent has to be paid. Food has to be on the table. The lights need to stay on.
The child, of course, doesn’t understand economic necessity. They only know their parent wasn’t there. That absence leaves a mark, regardless of the reasons behind it.
But understanding the context can help adult children distinguish between a parent who was stretched beyond capacity and a parent who simply didn’t care. Survival-mode parenting isn’t the same as neglect. Parents who ground themselves down to keep everyone stable, who still showed up as much as they could within impossible constraints—they were doing the best they could.
9. That their parents should have had the values and awareness that have only been widely adopted in recent years.
As a child, I was smacked when I “played up”, just like many of my friends of that era. I was made to eat everything on my plate, because there were “starving children in the world.” Did these things leave a mark? Almost certainly. As an adult, I struggle with people pleasing and emotion regulation under stress, and I developed disordered eating in my adolescence that lasted throughout my 20s until I sought treatment and found a better relationship with food. Will I do these things with my children? Absolutely not. Do I blame my parents for not being better? I do not.
Why? Well, because views on discipline, food, mental health, gender, and everything in between have changed dramatically over time. My parents operated with frameworks that were considered appropriate—even recommended—then, but are now recognized as harmful.
To be clear: the scars adult children carry because of these practices deserve full validation. The prevalence of a harmful practice doesn’t make it less harmful to the person who experienced it.
But many parents genuinely believed they were doing right by their children. They consulted experts. They followed prevailing wisdom. They had no access to the research that now reveals those approaches for what they really are.
Finding peace often means holding both truths. For parents, it means acknowledging the specific harm caused, even if “everyone did it then.” For adult children, it means distinguishing between parents who caused harm through cruelty and parents who caused harm through ignorance.
This doesn’t mean forgiving harm that feels unforgivable—that’s a deeply personal choice. But it might mean understanding the difference between malice and limitation.
Moving forward…
The path forward often lies in distinguishing between reasonable human imperfection and genuine, intentional harm. Between limitations shaped by circumstance and choices driven by cruelty. Between parents who failed despite trying and parents who didn’t try at all.
For adult children, this might mean grieving what wasn’t received while acknowledging what was. Recognizing that unmet needs don’t always equal intentional neglect. Seeing parents as complete people with their own struggles, not just characters in their story. It might also mean accepting that understanding context doesn’t require minimizing harm, and that setting boundaries—or even choosing distance—can be the healthiest choice when a relationship continues to wound.
For parents, this might mean acknowledging the impact of their limitations without drowning in shame about circumstances they couldn’t fully control. Understanding that their adult children’s examination of their childhood isn’t necessarily an attack on everything they did. It might also mean validating their perception of their childhood, even when you see it differently. Sometimes the most healing thing a parent can say is simply: “I hear you. I’m sorry I hurt you. I wish I had known better then.”
For some families, this mutual understanding leads to deeper, more authentic relationships. Parents and adult children find ways to talk about the past with honesty and compassion, acknowledging both the love that was present and the wounds that were real. They build new patterns of relating that honor both people’s experiences.
But that won’t always be the case. For other families, the gap between what was needed and what was possible may remain too wide to bridge. An adult child may be able to accept that their parents did their best with what they had, yet their best still wasn’t enough for them to have a healthy relationship now.
For parents facing this reality—particularly those who have acknowledged any harm caused, but find it’s “too little, too late” for their child—the pain is especially acute. The work becomes about accepting what cannot be changed while leaving the door open for reconciliation should your child ever choose to walk through it. This means respecting their boundary without pressuring them, continuing your own growth not as a bargaining chip but because it’s the right thing to do, and finding peace in knowing you tried your best—even if your best wasn’t enough for your child.
