One of the most complicated relationships you’ll ever have in your life is the one you have with your parents.
It’s full of hopes and love. It’s your starting place for learning and feeling what a family is, and what your family is. And chances are this is the family you’ll live with for the rest of your life. So you’ve got a lot riding on this.
But if you’re like most people, your relationship with your parents is also full of unfulfilled expectations, complicated emotions, years of unresolved conflict, and disagreements all the way down to the core of your values.
Something that often takes parents years (or even decades) to realize, if they ever realize it at all, is that your kids are not obligated to have the same values as you. Every parent, when they embark upon parenthood with the birth of their first child, fantasizes about who their child will become. And, without realizing it, we are always biased in favor of them becoming just like us. We picture our children living out our values, not the ones they find for themselves.
And that’s almost never how it turns out.
And that’s okay. Our children are not supposed to be just like us. That’s just not how life works. Our children are guests that we invite into the world, so that they may live here as who they are. They’re not supposed to be clones or copies of us; it’s more like they are strangers until we put in the effort to find out who they are. And then we help them fit into the world in whatever way is best for them.
But sometimes these natural differences lead to some very not-good dynamics and relationships. Sometimes they lead to accusations of failure, character conflicts, horrible disagreements, and resentment. They can lead to a lifetime of disapproval and dysfunction. A lifetime of “just putting aside our differences to keep the peace.” A lifetime of burying horrible arguments and anger just because “family is family and it’s the only one you’ve got.”
And of course that’s true, and you should fight as hard as you possibly can to have the most loving family you can. And to hang onto them when things are tough.
But there are better things to do with your family than keep peace. A family that simply keeps peace amid deep underlying conflict is a weak, undesirable family. A fragile family. And often a volatile one. It’s not a family that helps its members thrive; it’s a family that simply tries to allow its members to survive. That’s not good. You can do better than that. We all can.
What parenting is (and isn’t) made of
Let me lay out what I believe are the immutable laws of a parent-child relationship:
Your goal as a parent is to raise a competent child, not a happy one. If you spoil your child by continually giving them short-sighted “happiness,” you strip them of the ability (and the wholesome adventure) to figure out life for themselves. Your goal is to teach them how to become happy. Your job is to teach them how to find or create happiness through productivity and selflessness and challenge, not to make them happy yourself by providing something.
Your child is not going to be who you “hoped” they’d be. Period. This is a very safe assumption, and it’s one you ought to accept now. You shouldn’t be trying to turn your child into you; you should be curiously discovering who they are and figuring out how to best be of service to them. If your child needs certain skills and reinforcement that you don’t know how to give, your job is to figure out how to give that to them.
Your goal as a child is to earn your parents’ respect, not their approval. Those are two different things. Approval you earn by being what someone wants you to be. Respect you earn by saying "what you want me to be is wrong, I know of something that is truer and better for me.”
If you spend your whole life trying to please your parents, you will never grow up. You will always be nothing more than their child. And, as a side effect, they may never respect you anyway.
Respect is earned by no longer needing the approval of your parents. Your parents won't ever truly respect you until you show them that you're not seeking their approval. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't want to make your parents happy. Of course you should. It means that, even if your parents are unhappy, you've still made the decision to be happy. It means that your sense of self-worth hinges on things bigger than what they think of you. Because, at the end of the day, what your parents think of you really isn’t all that important.
By the time you reach 30 years old (or, hopefully, even earlier), you ought to have a relationship with your parents that, for the most part, resembles the relationship of peers. People who share ideas, calmly agree and disagree, exchange stories and wisdom, and recognize each other as competent adults. People who cooperatively share the load of leading and managing the family. And, here’s the hardest one… people who lean on each other in a healthy way. People who know what’s going on in each other’s lives and are there to help and support each other.
A sure sign of a good relationship with your parents is that they tell you what’s going on in their lives and they trust you to give some feedback and relate to them.
Unfortunately, it looks to me like most people don’t have this kind of relationship with their parents. That’s a shame. Parents don’t trust their children enough.
The spirit of the father
A son's duty in life is not to please his father. In a sense, a son’s duty is to overthrow his father. You see this play out over and over with some of the strongest men you know: they spent their childhoods living in their father’s shadow, struggling against his imperfect values and his loud weaknesses. And what they end up becoming is that which makes up for their father’s weaknesses. That which throws out the excesses of their own father.
And this isn’t an accusation against my own father, or anyone else’s. This is the kind of thing that probably hurts to hear because it applies to just about everyone. It’s impossible to have children and not damage them with your own weaknesses. Everybody has weaknesses, and everybody ends up going to excess in certain ways with their own children. It can’t be avoided. And then it goes on and on in cycles.
Almost all fathers cling to the illusion that their sons will be just like them. A son's job is to shatter that illusion and replace it with something equal or better. There are very few sons alive who actually ended up becoming who their fathers “wanted” them to be. Living under the illusions and desires of your father is the surest and oldest way to completely waste your life as a man.
And conversely, with girls, you see something equally challenging (and damaging). Young girls will spend years and years trying to make their father happy even when he does not encourage them, does not appreciate them, and even when he constantly puts them down. Even when he makes it clear that he either doesn’t see or doesn’t care who they are.
Why?
It’s not because his values match their own and they’re trying to prove it. In fact, their values may be opposite.
It’s not because they see him as the perfect man with the truest and most noble desires. In fact, they are perfectly aware of his enormous flaws, even if they won’t admit it.
And it’s not because they have chosen him out of a pool of other candidates. They didn’t have a choice.
It’s because seeking their father’s approval is their only shot at feeling the love and safety of the masculine spirit. At male attention and male approval. And chasing that desperately and hopelessly is better than not having a chance at it at all.
Young girls chase the approval of wonderful fathers; fathers who are paying attention. And that’s one of the most loving, tear-inducing things you’ll ever see. It’s movie-worthy, every time.
But young girls also chase the approval of fathers who simply don’t care. Fathers who aren’t paying attention. Even fathers who are using this chase as a way to feed their own bloated egos. To feel needed and powerful. And that induces tears for the opposite reason. You know how hopeless that girl is, but you also know she won’t stop. Because there’s no replacement; there is no other person in her life who can give her fatherly approval. No matter how much he hurts her and ignores who she really is, she will keep chasing. Because giving up would mean abandoning her journey for the warm safety of the masculine spirit. And she isn’t willing to give that up. It’s all she wants, because it’s what she doesn’t have.
And this is where daddy issues come from. This is why some young women seek approval through sex and phony behavior. Because everything they’ve tried before didn’t work, and they’re absolutely desperate for approval that at least somewhat resembles fatherly approval. It’s endlessly tragic, and it leads to a lot of broken lives.
You might even say sons are luckier than daughters. Because men can go on to create their own definition of masculinity. Their own image of masculine approval and strength. Daughters have no such luxury. They have to find it in someone else.
And it also doesn’t always end in the teenage years. Sometimes a woman will get trapped in this cycle, this chasing… and waste decades of her life chasing the approval. The approval of a father who has shown, over and over, that he’s never going to appreciate who she is. She will be a little girl trapped in the body of a 50 year old woman, thinking “one of these days my father will see me and appreciate me.”
Unfortunately no such day is coming. They will waste their whole lives chasing the approval of a man who was unworthy of them to begin with. He has no warmth to offer them, and yet they chase it thinking it’s there.
If you are a father, remember this: your daughter wants to be seen. She wants you to think she is acceptable — even if she still has some things to work on. Open your eyes and see her. Show her that she is acceptable. If you do not give this to her, she will spend her entire life seeking it in men who will use her and throw her away. That’s a pattern that, unfortunately, you can count on.
Boundaries — yes, with your own parents
Relationships with parents need boundaries, just like any other relationship does. You have not only the right, but the moral obligation to push back against parental tyranny and parental excess.
Something you often hear people say is “but my parents gave birth to me and raised me. How could I not be nice to them? I can just put up with it. I owe them my life.”
(Or, perhaps more often, you hear the parents themselves say this. As if they are calling in a debt.)
There are two things wrong with this.
Your parents made the decision themselves to have children. They did it because they wanted to. They didn’t do it at your request, as some sort of pre-womb favor. You don’t owe them a perpetual debt for that. And
This excuse divorces action from consequence. In no relationship, ever, should action be divorced from consequence.
If you have children, your job is to raise them with care and then treat them with dignity and respect. That is your job. If you don’t want to do that job, don’t sign up. Get a dog.
You should want to raise your kids lovingly into adults, and then treat them as adults.
What you want is to raise them with attentiveness and acceptance, encouraging them all the while, and, as they grow, keep looking for places where they are competent. And then, in those areas, treat them with the dignity of adults. The dignity and responsibility of decision makers. Let them take their own risks, let them figure life out. And that includes letting them experience pain voluntarily, because pain is the best teacher.
If you have a child who is 5 years old and is beginning to understand the concept of sacrifice, offer to pay her an allowance for doing some household chores. Don’t force her if you don’t have to; just offer it to her. Let her make the decision to sacrifice her time for a reward, and then tell her how she did a good job in sacrificing and earning, and that you’re proud of her. This will make her value sacrifice and feel dignified. I bet she will stand up straighter than you’ve ever seen after this.
If you have a child who is 11 years old and has a moral opinion about something, ask him why. Tell him to explain to you what he has noticed in life that makes him have this opinion. If necessary, correct him where he has missed something, or add something of your own to his observations. But trust him to make his own moral judgments. Willingly hand that responsibility to him. There is nothing better you can do for a child than trust him with something.
Good relationships are an earned privilege, not a demanded right
There are parents who never want their children to grow up. They want to perpetually control their children and lord unearned authority over them, even after they reach adulthood or the age of varying competence. These people never should have had children in the first place. What they wanted wasn't to raise good adults; what they wanted was to have people to control. Those are two different things. And I am quite certain that you know somebody like this.
You often hear Christians (or, really, anybody) talk about how men ought to be head of household and that women ought to be subservient to men. And of course there are all kinds of emotional, biological, and social reinforcements for this idea. A lot of men want a submissive wife. Because it makes sense to men and it makes them feel very good. And, in all fairness, some women want to be submissive. Some, not all.
But if you look back through the Bible, or if you just look around your own life at men with submissive wives, you’ll notice that the men have one thing in common. They are actually good men. They don’t just claim to be good men; they aren’t pretenders wielding fear as a weapon. They don’t throw the Bible in your face and say “see? You’re supposed to bow down to me, and if you don’t I can strike you.”
They actually are good men.
If that hurt to read, good. It should. Because most men, as far as I can tell, are completely unworthy of it. They spend so much time blowing their own trumpets that they forget to actually make their wives happy and secure. They forget to keep up their side of the deal.
And it’s the same way with being a parent and wanting obedient children.
Many men (and parents in general) use money, religion, fear, seniority, guilt, and other tools to buy their way out of basic decency. I know fathers who use money to buy their children’s self-respect away from them. As long as the money keeps flowing, they don’t ever actually have to be good fathers. Because the entire relationship is a transaction. A manipulation.
A useful question is this: if all of the tools this person uses to maintain the relationship fell away, and all they had left was the work they themselves put into it… would there be anything left?
That’s how you know if someone values you. If they put actual work into being good to you. Not tools, not leverage, not external forces; humble and honest work. Sacrifice.
By all means, if you’re a good parent, your children should obey you. It would probably be in their best interest to do so. If you have proven yourself to be a capable decision maker, a selfless provider, and a sturdy protector, your children would probably be well-served to follow your lead.
But if you are simply claiming to be a good parent, but in reality you are weak and selfish, then your children shouldn’t obey you. Because you are unworthy of it. You have not earned obedience; you’re simply demanding it. You expect all the glory of authority and all the shine of privilege, with none of the hard labor that earns it. And, if you’re like a lot of Christian men I’ve met, you’re using God as a weapon to scare others into giving it to you. It is probably in their best interest to ignore you — or even run away from you.
There’s a special place in Hell for people who wield God as a weapon against their own families.
People who demand respect and obedience do not and should not receive it. That is a basic law of human life. Authority over a loving family is given, not taken. If it is taken, the parent is living on borrowed time. Eventually he will lose everything. As he should.
The leader of a family is an elected servant, not an alpha wolf who conquers through force and fear. We are not tree-dwelling, feces-throwing primates; we are humans. The head of household is not in charge because he proclaims he is or because he killed the previous leader, but because he is looked to voluntarily for guidance and care.
If you’ve had a horrible boss at work, and then at another point had a great boss, you’ve already seen this. A bad boss demands respect and gives orders; a good boss is nothing more or less than an excellent servant to his team. A servant.
The ultimate boundary
Relationships (even, to some extent, marriages) should always exist under the condition of impermanence. Both people must always believe in the other, "I could walk away from this if it got bad enough." Otherwise, there is no way of keeping each other in line. There is no incentive to control one's excesses or behave with fairness and decency.
Some people say marriage solves these kinds of problems with its “for better or for worse” vows. But I can’t help disagreeing. I have seen one too many men (yes, I’m being hard on men again) who, upon marriage, feel they have won and they no longer owe their wife anything. And they stop trying completely. I’ve seen it in women too, of course.
I think the healthier dynamic is for both people to be sturdy enough and confident enough and secure enough that they could find something else if necessary. That forces them to continue earning each other. Clearly, in the modern age, vows to God are not good enough to keep us motivated. So we must use other incentives to keep each other in line. And, if both people wake up every day and voluntarily put work in and respect each other’s boundaries, they end up with the outcome we all wanted anyway: a marriage that lasts. A marriage where partners take good care of each other.
You see an interesting dynamic play out between men in friendships or other social situations. Men have an unspoken fear of each other. The silent threat of violence underpins all social interactions between men. "If you push me too far, I'm going to harm you. And if you don't think I can, keep pushing." This, more often than not, keeps men from trespassing too far against each other. It’s remarkably effective, even though violence is a scary thought. (It’s remarkably effective because violence is a scary thought.)
But between a man and a woman, no such safety net exists. No such silent de-escalation mechanism exists. A man has no choice but to put up with anything a woman throws at him. Unless… well, unless an opportunity presents itself to walk away from her. When things get bad enough, that is the only tool a man has. Abandonment. Resignation from the game. The admission of defeat. And the subsequent misery that comes with walking away from a woman — especially a woman he dearly loved and wanted to be with forever.
And so it is with all relationships. Including the relationship that children have with their parents. You must use every tool at your disposal to fix it and maintain it. You must be committed, with all the discipline and patience and problem-solving willingness that a good relationship deserves. You must be all-in.
But if all of that fails, you must be willing to walk away. It's not just a privilege, it's a moral obligation. You have a duty not to tolerate relationships in your life that destroy your values or make you a worse person. You have a moral obligation to have boundaries. And you have a moral obligation to have enough self-respect to walk away when someone violates them.
Even from your own parents.
And of course it's not about manipulating someone into giving you what you want; it's about boundaries. If you hang the impermanence over someone's head and use it to control them, they are the one who should be walking away from you. It's not to be used as a control mechanism. It's simply there to serve as a reminder: I do have boundaries. My self-respect is more important to me than you are. So don't make me choose between those two things.
Ask yourself this: would my parents accept wisdom from me? If I told them a story and then explained a lesson to them, would they accept it? If I pointed out something that was their own fault, and suggested a wise alternative, would they listen? Or would they reject it and try to then teach me a lesson?
If your parents would not accept wisdom from you, they do not respect you. They see you not as an adult but simply as an extension of themselves. And if that's the case, your relationship with them is likely not good. It is not founded in respect, but in authority. Or, at the very least, seniority. And, after the age of 20 years old, that’s a terrible basis for a relationship.
A parent who always thinks he’s smarter than his kids is a worthless parent. Any parent who refuses to grow and learn alongside his offspring is stale and useless. He’s not a peer worth having, and he’s not a parent worth listening to.
Another thing you hear people say in their own defense all the time:
“That’s just the way I am. Sorry.” (As in, I’m not sorry at all and I’m going to do exactly nothing to change this behavior.)
"That's just the way I am" is not ever an acceptable response to anything. Don’t ever let someone get away with saying that. When you have a family, you have a duty to be better today than you were yesterday. To recognize where you're weak or excessive, and work on it. For some reason, people see this as optional. It is not optional. It is your owed input into the mechanics of life and relationships.
You can teach an old dog new tricks. Most people just don’t bother trying.
The reason I wrote this piece is because I have known a tragically huge number of people in my life who have no boundaries with their parents (or with their boyfriends, or anyone really). They turn 25, 35, or even 45 with their parents still playing the same old power games and lording the same unearned authority and manipulation over them after decades. I have known one too many good people with toxic mothers and dinosaur, jackass fathers.
And of course your first defense should never be to cut your parents out. That’s not where you go first. First you communicate, make boundaries known, and look actively for respect and cooperation and love.
But if you never put your parents in their place, they will never know their place.
In defense of family
And here’s another reason you have a moral obligation to draw boundaries with them: your children have to grow up in this family. Your kids have to live with whatever you allowed to happen to your family. If you spend 40 years ignoring your mother’s insane outbursts or your father’s manipulative financial tactics, you are hurting your children. Because they, then, have to live (and raise their own kids) in a family in which pathological, abusive behavior has been tolerated. Or, worse, reinforced.
Every family needs one or two (or more) people who will draw lines and be the guiding spirit. Not the dominant personality, but the guiding spirit. Those are two different things. Every family needs one or two people who will gather everyone's attention and say: the way things are going right now is inexcusable. We need to be a better family than this.
It's not about suppressing individual identities. You still want your family to be full of unique individuals, unique insights, and unique goals. What it's about is coming to an agreement about what you will and won't tolerate as a unit. It's about drawing lines and saying "here's what we absolutely cannot and will not put up with in this family."
And that declaration is much more likely to be listened to if it's made by the guiding spirit of the family (the one people want to listen to) than if it's made by the dominant personality (the one people feel like they have to listen to).
So your goal, as the child of your parents, should be to earn that position. To earn the position of "my child to whom I would entrust this entire family." Your goal should be to become the one who will stand up for your family and say "we don't have to be perfect, but we do have to be better." And everyone listens, because you’ve earned the right to be listened to.
And your goal should be to become the person your parents would trust to take care of them in their old age. And they should want that too.
Drink water and don’t let anybody tell you you can’t,
JDR
If you give away your self-respect, everything else will be taken from you.