This is an emotionally raw video reading of the essay I wrote about a very taboo but real dynamic in parenting: resenting our children for having access to things we worked hard to live without. When a child comfortably sets a boundary or demands emotional validation, it can trigger a parent’s subconscious grief because they were never allowed those luxuries at the same age. Naming this dynamic is a crucial step toward stopping generational trauma in its tracks. Below is the essay and transcript:

There are moments in parenting when you realize, with almost comic clarity, that the tools you brought with you are not going to be enough.

Nobody necessarily tells you this ahead of time. You can spend years feeling reasonably competent. You keep people alive, remember appointments most of the time, learn which child will eat which kind of pasta, figure out school portals that appear to have been designed by someone who actively dislikes parents, and generally move through family life believing that you know what you are doing well enough to continue.

Then your child tells you something you were never prepared to hear.

Maybe they come out. Maybe they tell you they are questioning their gender. Maybe they finally explain that the thing you have been calling laziness feels like overwhelm to them. Maybe a diagnosis gives language to behavior your family has been arguing about for years. Maybe they tell you that something you thought was harmless has been hurting them.

Sometimes the first thing that rises up in a parent is love. Sometimes it is fear. Sometimes it is confusion, defensiveness, grief, or the deeply uncomfortable realization that you do not have a useful response available. That moment does not tell me whether you are a good person. It tells me you have reached the edge of what you currently know.

A lot of adults were raised in families where emotional fluency was never really part of the curriculum. We learned how to function, how to keep moving, how to read a room quickly, how to know when someone was angry without anybody actually saying they were angry, and how to handle difficult feelings privately until they became manageable enough to put back on the shelf. Many of those skills were adaptive. They helped people survive homes, schools, marriages, workplaces, churches, and entire decades that offered very little language for what was happening underneath the surface.

The problem is that survival skills have a way of following us into places where survival is no longer the assignment.

You can become very good at compartmentalizing and still have no idea what to say when your child needs you to stay emotionally present. You can pride yourself on independence and still struggle when your teenager asks for reassurance. You can spend your whole life believing that feelings are private matters and then find yourself parenting someone whose well-being depends on being able to talk openly about theirs. That mismatch can feel like failure.

I think it is more useful to treat it as information. It is absolutely true that the world did not prepare many parents for these conversations. And now we know that. What happens after that realization is where responsibility enters.

There is a temptation, especially when we are uncomfortable, to turn our own history into an explanation that slowly becomes an excuse. “That’s just how I was raised.” “We didn’t talk about things like that.” “Nobody used those words when I was growing up.” All of those statements may be completely accurate. They may explain why something feels unfamiliar, why a conversation makes you anxious, or why your first instinct was to shut down.

But those statements and feelings do not get to influence what you do next. Your starting point is not a moral verdict. It is simply the place from which you begin. And that matters because shame is not particularly useful here. If I tell a parent they should have arrived already fluent in every emotional, queer, neurodivergent, and disability-related conversation their child might ever bring them, I am asking for something impossible. Most of us learned important things late. Some of us are still learning them now.

The useful question is whether we are willing to notice where our old tools stop working, because there is grief in that.

Sometimes your child’s emotional vocabulary reveals how little room you had for your own feelings at their age. Sometimes watching your teenager ask for a boundary makes you realize you were never allowed to have one. Sometimes hearing your child say, “That hurt me,” brings up the uncomfortable awareness that nobody cared very much when something hurt you.

And that can sting like a motherfucker.

It can also tempt us into one of the strangest dynamics in parenting: resenting our children for having access to something we worked very hard to live without. I think a lot of generational repair begins there. You notice the feeling. You tell the truth about where it came from. Then you make sure your child does not have to lose the same thing just because you did.

That may mean learning an emotional language that feels embarrassingly unfamiliar at first. It may mean getting used to sentences like, “I need a minute,” “I felt dismissed,” “Can we come back to this later?” or “I want you to listen before you try to solve it.” It may mean discovering that communication is a skill rather than a personality trait, and that being uncomfortable with a conversation is not evidence that the conversation should not happen.

This is one of the places where Gen X adaptability actually serves us well.

We have rebuilt our lives around technologies, workplaces, family structures, social expectations, and cultural shifts that barely existed when we were children. We learned email after writing letters. We learned smartphones after memorizing phone numbers. We learned how to work remotely, bank online, parent through school apps, and troubleshoot devices that cost more than our first cars.

We are capable of learning a different way to communicate with our kids. The harder part is accepting that some of what we have to learn may challenge things we once considered normal. Normal is a slippery word anyway. Sometimes it means healthy. Sometimes it means familiar. Those are not the same thing.

If emotional silence was normal in your house, your child asking for openness may feel excessive. If obedience was treated as respect, your child setting a boundary may sound like defiance. If nobody discussed sexuality or gender, your child speaking plainly about either may feel shocking simply because the conversation itself is new. And new does not automatically mean wrong. Sometimes new is simply the first time a family has had enough language to name what was already there.

I don’t think generational repair requires us to condemn every adult who came before us. I also do not think we need to romanticize what hurt us because somebody else was doing the best they could. Families are complicated enough without turning every conversation into a trial. We can acknowledge what shaped us and still choose differently. That is the part our children actually get to live with.

Maybe the world did not prepare you for the moment when your child came out. Maybe nobody taught you how to respond to a shutdown, a pronoun change, a panic attack, a request for accommodation, or a conversation about identity that seemed to arrive out of nowhere. But you’re here now. You know the old tools are not enough, which means that is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the part where you get to learn something new. And maybe, years from now, your child will move through a difficult moment with more language, more trust, and more confidence than you had at the same age.

If that happens, you may feel proud. You may also feel a little sad for the younger version of yourself who never got the same thing. Both can be true. That is what repair can look like across generations: giving your child something you once needed badly enough to survive without.

Thank you for making room for this conversation.