When a Parent Needs You to Believe They Were a Good Parent

There is a particular kind of conversation that I see adult children get stuck in over and over again, and it is one that can become incredibly painful because on the surface, the child is trying to talk about something fairly specific. Maybe they are trying to tell a parent that they felt criticized a lot growing up, that they did not feel emotionally safe coming to them, that they felt parentified, or that there are things happening in the relationship now that they can no longer keep participating in. Often, these adult children are not coming in swinging. In fact, usually the opposite is true. They have thought about the conversation endlessly. They have softened their language, rehearsed what they want to say, made sure to acknowledge everything their parent did right, prefaced the conversation with some version of, “I know you loved me,” or “I know you did the best you could,” because they already know—consciously or not—that the conversation is dangerous. They know that if they are not incredibly careful, the parent may not hear the thing they are actually trying to say.

The child says, “When you criticized me in front of other people, it really affected me,” and the parent hears, “You were a terrible father.” The child says, “I did not feel like I could talk to you when I was struggling,” and the parent hears, “You failed me.” The child says, “I need something about our relationship to change,” and the parent hears, “Everything you did for me meant nothing.”

And suddenly the conversation is no longer about the child’s experience. It is about whether the parent was a good parent.

Most parents want to believe they were good parents, and I do not think there is anything particularly pathological about that. Parenting is enormously consequential. People pour years of their lives, money, time, labor, worry, identity, and hope into raising children, and of course most parents want to believe that the love they felt translated into something their children actually experienced as love.

There is a meaningful difference between wanting to have been a good parent and needing your child to reassure you that you were one.

A parent with a relatively stable sense of self may still feel devastated hearing that their child was hurt by them. They may feel defensive at first. They may remember events differently. They may even disagree with parts of the child’s interpretation. But there is enough room psychologically to eventually hold something more complicated: I loved you. I tried. I did many things well.

There are things I did not understand. There were things I got wrong. There may be parts of your experience I do not remember the way you do, and they are still your experience. I can be a person who loved my child and a person who hurt my child. Those two things do not erase one another.

For some parents, that degree of complexity is almost intolerable. The distinction between I did something that hurt you and I am a bad parent collapses very quickly, and once that happens, the conversation is no longer really about accountability. It has touched something much deeper in the parent’s own self-concept.

This is where shame becomes so important.

Shame is not simply feeling bad about something you did. Shame says something about what you are. If someone has a very fragile sense of self underneath whatever identity they have built around being good, generous, loyal, sacrificing, progressive, devoted, or “one of the good ones,” then criticism can feel much bigger than criticism.

It can feel annihilating. The adult child may be asking the parent to look at one painful relational pattern and the parent is experiencing something closer to: I failed. I am unwanted. My children reject me. I am not the person I believed I was.

And people defend very hard against that kind of shame.

This is where we often begin to see the familiar defenses. The parent explains what really happened. They tell you that you are remembering it incorrectly. They remind you of what you were like at sixteen. They point out everything they sacrificed. They tell you that other parents were much worse. They tell you that they stayed, that they worked, that they paid for things, that they drove you everywhere, that they supported you, that you have no idea what they went through.

Or the conversation shifts completely.

“I cannot believe you would say that to me.”
“You make me sound like some horrible father.”
“After everything I have done for you.”
“You have no idea how much I sacrificed.”

Sometimes the parent becomes so wounded by the child’s pain that the child ends up taking care of the parent for having brought it up.

This is one of the things that can be so confusing for adult children of emotionally immature or narcissistically defended parents. They go into the conversation hoping—perhaps for the hundredth time—that this time their parent will understand, and they leave the conversation apologizing for having hurt their parent’s feelings.

The original injury disappears.

I think it is important to be precise here, because not every defensive parent has narcissistic personality disorder, and not every parent who struggles with shame is a narcissist. But there is a pattern of narcissistic defense that can be very relevant in these families, particularly when a person’s self-esteem depends heavily on being reflected back as good, generous, moral, needed, sacrificing, or exceptional in some way. Sometimes the grandiosity is obvious. Other times it is much quieter and more relational. It sounds less like, “I am better than everyone,” and more like, “I am a good father. I stayed. I sacrificed. I did everything for my family. I am one of the good ones.”

The identity itself may be deeply important because somewhere underneath it is a much more painful self-concept that the person does not know how to tolerate.

One of the places this dynamic becomes especially visible is in the way ordinary parental responsibilities can slowly get reframed as extraordinary acts of sacrifice that the child is expected to repay emotionally.

A parent may remind their adult children that they stayed. That they worked. That they paid for things. That they did not leave. That they showed up to events, made birthdays special, took vacations, provided opportunities, supported them financially, or remained involved after a divorce. And many of those things may genuinely have been loving. Parenting requires enormous sacrifice. I do not think acknowledging that cheapens the child’s experience.

The problem comes when there is a ledger attached to it.

I did this, therefore you owe me gratitude.
I stayed, therefore you cannot criticize how I treated you.
I supported you, therefore you should want a close relationship with me now.
I gave you more than I had, therefore your pain is unfair.

At that point, care begins to become transactional. The parent may have genuinely loved the child, and may genuinely experience themselves as generous, but there can also be an implicit attachment contract underneath the generosity: I will be the good parent, and you will reflect my goodness back to me.

That is often why birthdays, holidays, family gatherings, and other punctuated celebrations can take on such an outsized emotional significance in these families. Those moments are not only about being together. They can become opportunities for the family to reaffirm the parent’s importance in the system. Participation becomes loyalty. Enthusiasm becomes love. Gratitude becomes proof.

And when adult children begin differentiating—spending holidays elsewhere, developing their own traditions, choosing different values, having partners the parent does not like, needing more distance, or simply becoming less available—the parent may experience that not simply as change but as rejection.

For an adult child, this can be incredibly disorienting because what looks on the surface like “Dad really loves birthdays” may also carry the much heavier emotional assignment of: make sure Dad feels loved enough, make sure Dad feels centered enough, make sure Dad knows he mattered.

That is a very different burden.

At that point, care becomes transactional. There is an implicit attachment contract underneath the generosity: I will be the good parent, and you will reflect my goodness back to me.

There is another layer I think is important in these families, especially when the parent has their own significant attachment injuries or childhood trauma.

Sometimes the parent has built their entire adult identity around not becoming the people who raised them. Maybe they were abandoned, humiliated, sent away, neglected, hit, criticized, or emotionally ignored. Maybe becoming “the good parent” became one of the central ways they made meaning of their own life. They stayed because someone left them. They provided because they did not feel provided for. They became progressive because they grew up in rigidity. They became involved because their parents were absent.

And those differences matter. It may be completely true that they did better than their parents.

But “better than what I had” and “what my child needed” are not always the same thing.

That is a very painful distinction for some parents to make.

When their adult child says, “There were things that hurt me,” the parent may immediately reach for the comparison: you have no idea what my childhood was like, I never hit you, I never left, I gave you things I never had.

Again, all of that may be true. And the child may still have been hurt.

There is something developmentally important about being able to hold both. My parent may have genuinely interrupted parts of an intergenerational cycle, and they may also have recreated other parts of it in ways they could not see. They may have loved me very much, and their shame may have made accountability almost impossible. They may have sacrificed enormously, and some of that sacrifice may later have been used as emotional leverage.

Complexity does not require us to make someone entirely bad in order to take seriously what they did.

One of the most recognizable adaptations in adult children of these parents is how sophisticated they become about communication.

They learn to approach very carefully. They anticipate the parent’s reaction before they speak. They rehearse. They add disclaimers. They explain the context. They make sure they are not being unfair. They remove anything that might sound accusatory. They acknowledge the parent’s childhood, the parent’s intentions, everything the parent did right, and then finally they try to say the thing they actually came to say.

Many of them are extraordinarily articulate.

And because they are articulate, they can spend years believing the problem is somehow one of articulation. Maybe I said it too harshly. Maybe I caught him at a bad time. Maybe I should have emphasized that I know he loved me. Maybe I should use different language, or tell him more about why this matters to me, or try it with a therapist in the room. Maybe if I can say it in exactly the right way, he will finally understand.

This is often an excruciating thing to begin accepting, but sometimes there is no perfect sentence.

The obstacle is not necessarily the way the child is communicating. The obstacle is that the child’s reality produces an emotional experience inside the parent that the parent does not have much capacity to tolerate.

You can deliver feedback with tremendous compassion and still encounter defensiveness. You can be very careful and still be accused of cruelty. You can validate someone’s intentions and still have them experience your pain as an attack on their character.

At some point, the adult child may have to ask a different question. Not, how do I say this so that he finally understands me? But rather: what happens to me when I keep trying to be understood by someone whose defenses require not understanding this?

That is a very different question.

As a trauma therapist, I think understanding why people become the way they become matters. I do not think we have to flatten people into villains in order to name harm. Someone can be deeply shame-defended because they were themselves rejected or humiliated. They can be emotionally avoidant because emotional vulnerability once felt dangerous. They can be rigid because complexity overwhelms them. They can need to be “one of the good ones” because underneath that identity lives an enormous amount of inadequacy.

All of that can be true.

And they can still hurt people.

Sometimes adult children become almost too good at understanding their parents. They can explain the attachment injury, the trauma history, the emotional immaturity, the generational context, the reason their parent cannot tolerate criticism. They can produce a beautiful formulation of why Dad is the way he is.

And meanwhile, they are still sitting across from someone who cannot hear them.

Understanding is useful when it helps us stop personalizing another person’s limitations. It becomes less useful when it repeatedly asks us to abandon our own experience in order to preserve compassion for theirs.

You are allowed to understand why someone becomes defensive and still decide that you are no longer willing to participate in conversations where your reality is put on trial.

You are allowed to understand their childhood and still stop overexplaining yourself.

You are allowed to recognize that they are wounded and also recognize that they wound other people.

You are allowed to know that someone loves you and still be honest about the limitations of the way they know how to love.

There is a particular grief in realizing that the person from whom you most want acknowledgment may be the person least capable of giving it to you.

Especially if you spent childhood being told who you were. Selfish. Difficult. Dramatic. Manipulative. Ungrateful. Too sensitive. If your parent was the authority on the meaning of your behavior for long enough, it makes sense that part of you would still be looking to them for the final verdict.

Was it actually that bad?
Am I remembering correctly?
Was I really difficult?
Am I being unfair?
Do I have the right to be angry if they still think they were a good parent?

I think this is where some of the deeper work begins.

Not in deciding that the parent was all bad. Not in erasing whatever love, joy, generosity, traditions, sacrifice, or real connection also existed. And not necessarily in giving up on the possibility of repair. Parents do sometimes change. People soften. They enter therapy. They develop greater insight. They become more capable of complexity than they once were.

But your own healing cannot remain entirely contingent on that outcome.

There may be a point when the developmental task is allowing your experience to become legitimate without waiting for the parent to certify it.

I know what happened to me.

I know what it felt like to be me in that family.

I can understand that my parent was wounded without requiring myself to pretend that I was not wounded by them.

I can believe that they loved me and also believe myself about the ways I did not feel emotionally safe.

I do not need to prove that they were a bad parent in order to acknowledge that there were ways they failed me.

And perhaps most painfully: I do not need them to agree with my version of childhood before I am allowed to take it seriously.

If any of this resonates with your own family history, I offer individual therapy and trauma-informed care in Pasadena and via telehealth across California.