Are Parents to Blame for What They Can't See?
The Rise of Soul Mate Parenting: A further discussion of my article for The Washington Post on 11/17/24
“You didn’t see that I was depressed when I was growing up and I suffered as a result. I can’t have a relationship with you because it’s too triggering. Please respect my boundaries.”
The sentiment stated above is one I commonly observe in adult children’s letters to their now-estranged parents. In these communiques are accusations that the parent failed to get their child treatment or help and that they suffered needlessly as a result.
Parental shortcomings can have real consequences, but these statements often assume that past failures make future reconciliation impossible. This perspective suggests that parental relationships operate, at least in part, like an emotional meritocracy—where parents must continually prove their worth to remain part of their child's present or future life.
This growing emphasis on parental worthiness mirrors another cultural shift—one in which modern parenting increasingly resembles the 'soul mate' ideal once reserved for romantic relationships. In this paradigm, parents are expected to be therapists, learning specialists, coaches, and emotional support systems all at once. They are supposed to anticipate and address every potential issue that might impede their child's long-term happiness. They’re required to diagnose any potential problem or liability that might cause their child later in life to be unable to live out their full potential, and to achieve that ultimate ideal in an individualistic culture, “happiness.”
To complicate it further, this framework offers the now grown child a blank slate to imagine who they might have become with different or “better” parents. Part of the adult child’s ability to leverage this complaint and consequence stems from the parents’ own efforts to give the child the life they either never had or believe would best benefit their child; an endeavor achieved at enormous costs to parents.
Over the past four decades helicopter or intensive parenting has become the norm across the classes in the U. S. and in other countries with high rates of social inequality such as the UK and China. Parents are sacrificing time with friends, hobbies, even spouses, not only to give their children a happy life, but a close relationship.
Ironically, parents in the upper classes may be especially worried about the obstacles to creating successful and happy adults today. In her study of parents across the classes, Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper observed that affluent parents often fixate on their children’s struggles and even seek out problems to worry about in an attempt to anticipate future obstacles to their children’s success and happiness.
While it’s easy to caricaturize anxious mothers and fathers, Cooper’s observations highlight the task required of soul mate parenting today, regardless of class: Be hypervigilant to anything that might limit or restrict your child’s happiness and go at it, hammer and tongs.
What adult children might owe their parents seems less obvious. As the University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard told me in an interview for my Atlantic article: A Shift in Family Values is Fueling Estrangement: “Today, the boundary of parenting is unclear. If receiving shelter, food, and clothing is enough, then most of us should be grateful to our parents, irrespective of how our lives go. However, if parents are supposed to produce happy adults, then, fairly or not, adult children might hold parents responsible for their unhappiness.”
Yet, try as we might, we are destined to hurt our children. We hurt them in the same way that they will hurt their own, not only with impatience or anger, but with what they can’t see in them or in themselves as parents.
In a healthy society, those realities would be treated as unfortunate though unavoidable features of family life. Adult children would factor in—not only the hurt caused by the parents—but the love and sacrifices made on their behalf. As the poet Audre Lorde writes: “I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as of her hidden angers.”
Barring extreme traumas, adult children would be treated with compassion not contempt. They would be helped to understand that parenting is a fog of war where mothers and fathers do the best they can based on their own traumas, genetics, social class, marriages, or luck.
There would also be greater emphasis on how the child themselves might have made parenting more frustrating, eliciting from the parent the opposite of what the child wanted or needed.
“Do you think I should have a kid?” wondered a young woman.
“Depends on the kid,” responded her friend.
To illustrate: a child who has ADHD or autism spectrum disorder or oppositional defiant disorder likely would not get the same kind of tender attentive response from a parent that their laid-back, easy-going emotionally intelligent sibling got; not because the parent is inherently flawed or prone to preferential parenting, but because the child’s challenges didn’t elicit the same kind of behavior in the parent.
Acknowledging these realities does not mean excusing harm, but it does invite a broader conversation about healing.
It is of course, natural for an adult child to wish their parent had been better equipped to respond with grace instead of irritation or worse—and reasonable to hope the parent now acknowledges, with empathy and compassion, how their limitations affected the child. However, it is unfair to suggest that estrangement is the same thing as saying that the parent got what they deserved.
Some caution and humility is required by both parent and child, since standards for parents constantly change and evolve. Today’s soul mate parenting is tomorrow’s ho-hum entitlement. My parents didn’t need to be all in my business, ruining my afternoons with their infernal scheduling, their worry about my future, their insecurity about how they were faring as mothers and fathers. They were both early college dropouts so they wouldn’t have been able to craft the careful portfolio of social, psychological and educational assets that would grease the gears to a great college great job great life that was the fateful obsession of so many parents in my generation and every generation since.
But they didn’t have to be soul mate parents because they lived during an era of record low social inequality where corporations and government helped them with affordable health care, reasonable tuition, grants, and loans, where pensions were a common form of thanks for lifelong work and where children could be expected to do better than their parents did.
Parents and their offspring can no longer count on businesses nor government to support them in the way other Western democracies do for their families. As the historian Stephanie Coontz told me, the erosion of our social safety net created an erosion of the psychological safety net, a consequence that leaves many parents and children alike feeling anxious and insecure. Or as sociologist Eva Illouz writes, “What is wrong are not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but the set of social and cultural tensions and contradictions that have come to structure modern selves and identities.”
Perhaps the real issue is not whether parents or children are right, but whether we can move toward a culture that allows for both accountability and forgiveness in family relationships.