Why It Hurts When Your Parents Try to Parent Your Kid
If you read my previous blog about How to Break Generational Trauma, you know I believe we’ve inherited patterns that shape our families, our expectations, and the way we love. This time, though, I’m talking about the smaller day-to-day parenting decisions that we intuitively make because of buried pain.
It’s about the unsolicited advice our parents offer that may come with good intentions, but actually upset us in ways we can’t explain. The quiet revolutions that happen at bedtime, in the kitchen, or during a meltdown. The choices that don’t make headlines but silently rewrite what “normal” looks like for our kids.
In this article:
When Your Parent’s “Helpful Tip” Feels Like a Trigger
Our Adulthood is a Reflection of Their Parenting
After Kids Raised Kids, They Parent Parents
What Stings the Most is They Can’t Admit Fault or Change
Co-Sleeping With My 2-Year-Old Heals My Inner Child
When Your Parent’s “Helpful Tip” Feels Like a Trigger
This whole reflection started because my mom told me I should stop co-sleeping with my son. It felt like it came from a place of judgment, wrapped in a tone that assumed I don’t know how to be a parent. Every millennial parent I know has heard some version of this:
“Let her cry it out.”
“You’ll spoil him with too much coddling.”
“She’s manipulating you.”
“You shouldn’t talk to him like he’s an adult.”
“If you said that to me, you would have gotten a spanking.”
The delivery might vary but the message is the same: you’re doing it wrong. If you want to set boundaries without starting a war, read my post Why Grandparents Think You’re Doing Everything Wrong.
That pressure to parent like they did is more than annoying, it’s triggering. Because their parenting beliefs clash with our lived experiences. And that’s where it cuts deep.
Not because of the criticism, but because their words carry the weight of our childhoods. It’s not oversensitivity. It’s our nervous systems remembering old wounds reactivated by familiar practices.
Our Adulthood is a Reflection of Their Parenting
When my mom says, “He needs to learn to sleep alone,” it echoes all the times I was force-fed independence, from being a latchkey kid in second grade to being left home alone when she went on vacation by middle school.
She wasn’t doing these things out of neglect. She was following the cultural playbook of her time. But just because everyone is jumping off a bridge, doesn’t mean you should too.
She insists her parenting prepared me for adulthood, and, yes, I became very independent and mature as a result. But I also developed:
Anxious attachment
Codependent behaviors
External-validation seeking
The science backs this; inconsistent caregiving and neglect can lead to anxious attachment in adulthood. Parenting styles that force emotional independence too early (or don’t allow safe dependence) often speak to codependency or boundary chaos.
When I talk to friends my age about our childhoods, there’s this unspoken theme we all recognize: we didn’t feel cherished; we felt tolerated. Our parents didn’t tell us we were a nuisance, but we absorbed it anyway.
So, it’s no surprise that Millennials have higher rates of diagnosed depression, anxiety, and substance abuse compared to older generations.
After Kids Raised Kids, They Parent Parents
What makes it complicated is that their advice isn’t entirely baseless. It worked for them, in their time, with their circumstances. But they’re not passing on honed parenting philosophies. They’re handing down coping mechanisms.
Many of our parents went straight from being someone’s child to raising children of their own. They never had time to build a sense of self before being responsible for someone else’s. And I can see now how resentment can grow in that space. Not hatred, but a kind of trapped frustration.
Those of us raising kids in our thirties and forties have a different starting point. We’ve had years to figure out who we are before becoming someone’s parent. We’ve had our selfish years. And that makes it easier to give without feeling like we’re losing ourselves.
What Stings the Most is They Can’t Admit Fault or Change
As soon as I turned 18, she told me, “You’re adult now, you can’t blame me for your [behavioral] problems.”
Which reminds me of this comedian’s joke:
“People say you should stop blaming your parents by 36, but if you were in a building with a screwed-up foundation, would you really feel safer on the 36th floor?”
I know she’s protecting herself. If she admits I’m right, she’s admitting she did something wrong. Even though she was doing what every parenting expert, neighbor, and cultural norm told her to do.
So, she tells herself I’m wrong instead. It’s easier that way.
What hurts isn’t that she did those things. It’s that, even now, she won’t say, “I didn’t know another way, and I accept that there are better practices now.” Acknowledgment doesn’t erase the past, but it softens it. It bridges the distance between who we were and who we’re trying to be now.
That acknowledgment I need from her? I’m learning to give it to both of us. I’m fixing the foundation.
Co-Sleeping With My 2-Year-Old Heals My Inner Child
We co-sleep because my son has epilepsy, and I need to monitor him. I would never forgive myself if he had to go through one of his seizures alone. And, much more, if my failure to respond to him timely resulted in permanent damage.
But even if he didn’t, I’d still want him close. My husband and I enjoy his middle-of-the-night cuddles, even if it also means the occasional headbutt. It’s also showing him, “You’ll always have us. You don’t have to earn security.”
Breaking cycles doesn’t mean us vs. them. It means us plus our children.
You’re not overreacting to a comment. You’re responding to decades of conditioning.
You’re not clinging to your child. You’re giving them what you never got.
You’re not spoiling them. You’re soothing generations of unmet needs.
While some might think I’m raising my son to be dependent. I’m actually raising him to feel safe enough to be independent, so one day he won’t need to heal from me.
