Why Didn't My Mom Give Me a Happier Childhood?

Maybe Because No One Gave Her One

Photo by Senjuti Kundu on Unsplash

We’re at a fraught cultural moment.

Many adult children are distancing themselves—or cutting off contact entirely—from parents who had traumatic childhoods of their own.

Often, these are parents who did markedly better than their own parents: who broke cycles or tried to. Who raised their children with more intention, stability, and presence than they ever received themselves.

It’s not surprising that when these parents are told they were emotionally abusive or neglectful, they feel bewildered—especially when they see the difference between the lives they gave and the lives they lived.

Their understandable impulse is to say: “You want to know what abuse looks like? It’s what I grew up with. I would’ve killed for the childhood you had.”

The tragic truth is that parents who experienced childhood trauma are more likely to struggle with parenting—not because they don’t care, but because they lacked the supports, role models, or economic and emotional scaffolding that good parenting so often requires. They may carry unprocessed pain. They may be reactive under stress. They may be doing their best—and still falling short.

So I understand how an adult can look back on their childhood and feel grief, anger, or longing. Or who believes their life might have turned out differently under different circumstances. Or wants to talk honestly with their parent about ways they felt unseen, unheard, or harmed.

What I object to is the notion that parents who were deeply wounded in their own childhoods are now being brought to the gallows by their adult children—who believe the parent could’ve and should’ve done better, despite not having the resources, role models, or other protective experiences to have made that possible. That their failure to parent with the fluency or sensitivity their adult children now expect is cause not just for disappointment or conflict—but for exile.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

The issue of what we owe our parents is at the heart of this.

I’m often asked in interviews whether I think estrangement is good or bad, justified or unjustified?

Sitting in my office every day with sobbing estranged mothers—and sometimes fathers—I’ve concluded that those are the wrong questions.

The questions should be: Is it right to end a relationship with a parent when you know that it will ruin their life? When the loss may plunge them into depression, shame, and lasting emotional injury? When, for all their flaws, they still loved and tried in ways no one ever tried for them?

“Yeah, well, they should’ve thought of that before they had children,” is a common refrain.

Perhaps. But that statement assumes a lot.

Can anyone truly anticipate how their own childhood traumas will resurface when they become a parent?

Can they know in advance that their partner will later betray them—or alienate them from their children?

That their children may bring temperaments, neurodivergence, or other challenges that make parenting exponentially harder? That the emotional skills they never learned will be required of them on a daily basis?

Is the best we can offer struggling adult children: Walk away. Protect yourself. Let your parent pay the price of imperfection?

Even if their child can’t offer empathy, shouldn’t the rest of us?

Photo by Bekah Russom on Unsplash

I know the research. Many adult children do try—sometimes for years—before walking away. I’ve seen that in my practice.

But I’ve also seen plenty who don’t try. Those who refuse to give the parent a chance—a second, third, or fourth—to repair or make the relationship one that feels healthy and respectful of the adult child or their spouse.

Those who don’t recognize that the parent needs time and patience to learn how to respond and communicate in ways that feel second nature to their children.

Those who insist the parent go to therapy without providing any kind of guidance about when they’ll resume contact or check back on the parent’s progress.

Our American love affair with the needs and rights of the individual conceals the sorrow left in the wake.

It is often driven by the belief—mistakenly—that someone who didn’t learn these skills decades ago should already know how to apologize, how to validate, how to attune to every wound.

We need a different conversation

One where parents are encouraged to take responsibility for the harm they caused, absolutely—and where adult children are also asked to reckon with the harm they inflict by cutting a parent out of their lives entirely.

When we treat estrangement solely through the lens of the adult child’s self-actualization and individual healing, we risk mistaking irreversible rupture for progress—and abandoning parents who were expected to heal generational wounds—without ever being given the tools or time to do so.

To learn more, visit me at www.drjoshuacoleman.com

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