Are Adult Children Reinterpreting "Normal Parenting" as Trauma?

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Within the media and cultural conversations around estrangement, the same argument appears again and again: that today’s generation of adult children, most often assumed to be millennial despite the fact that estrangement occurs across generations, are increasingly interpreting “normal parenting” as trauma.

In this narrative, the adult child’s experience of the relationship is minimized as oversensitivity, intolerance of disagreement, not “getting their way,” or an inability to cope with ordinary family conflict. According to that view, adult children are characterizing mere relational discomfort as “trauma” and being encouraged by contemporary psychology to do so.

A supporting argument frequently invoked is psychologist Nick Haslam’s opinion paper claiming that “concept creep” has expanded concepts of harm and resulted in the “pathologizing of everyday experience.”

Absent in the discussion is Haslam’s contention that this expansion reflects what he described as a broader “liberal moral agenda,” introducing an explicitly political interpretation into what is often presented as a purely scientific claim.

Embedded within this argument is an assumption that “normal” and “healthy” are synonymous. Developmental psychology has never made that assumption.

Yet upon that false assumption rests many of the most common and persistently conveyed narratives surrounding estrangement.

“They’re adults now. The relationship is a two-way street.”

The attainment of adulthood does not erase the developmental relationship or the relational environment that shaped it. The adult relationship is simply a new phase of the same relationship.

Roles change. Level of authority changes. Reciprocity increases. But the relationship remains continuous.

The parent-child relationship is not, and never has been, a mutual relationship in the way other types of adult relationships are. It is nonconsensual and asymmetrical from its beginning, and that asymmetry doesn’t disappear simply because the child becomes an adult.

In fact, the claim that “the relationship is now mutual” is entirely incompatible with the equally common “they are your parents, you owe them a relationship.”

Adult parent-child relationships do not exist on equal footing because they do not begin at adulthood. The relationship already has a deep history. It already has ingrained patterns. It already has expectations shaped by years of interaction.

Its history is carried forward because attachment, trust, expectations, and relational patterns are cumulative.

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As is the erosion of them.

In ANY relationship, the impact of relational experiences accumulates over time. In a developmental one, that impact is exponential. The developmental asymmetry remains because the relationship carries its history forward.

Cultural expectations reinforce that asymmetry. Adult children are routinely reminded that “they’re your parents” and that honoring them remains a moral obligation regardless of the quality of the relationship.

No other relationship bears that expectation.

“They are rewriting history”

The history of a relationship is true and valid through the eyes of each person who experienced it. Parents and children will always have different perspectives of the same experiences precisely because they are viewing it from entirely different positions.

Parents who accuse their adult child of rewriting history are not only privileging their experience as being the default, they are denying that their child had their own experience and that their child’s experience doesn’t have to mirror theirs to be true.

It is probably one of the clearest indicators of a parent whose ego and identity is firmly anchored on their own perception of having been a “good parent” that they cannot acknowledge the experience of their adult child if it contradicts with that self image.

In reality, healthy parenting doesn’t require litigation over whose memory is accurate. Rather, it is based upon the parent having what is termed by author and clinical professor of psychiatry Daniel Siegel as “mindsight.”

“Mindsight at its most basic definition is the ability to see the mental world of the self and others. Mindsight is the mechanism beneath social and emotional intelligence.” (Daniel Siegel)

It is the ability to recognize that different people can experience the same event differently.

The accusation that estranged adult children are “rewriting history” assumes that there is a single authoritative account of the past.

There isn’t.

Developmental psychology isn’t concerned with establishing whose recollection is objectively correct but rather the subjective experience and its impact.

More importantly, healthy parenting recognizes that their child’s internal world is as real as their own and that the child has their own experience of the relationship. Healthy parenting is based on having attunement to and curiosity about those experiences.

It is also about recognizing the importance of reflective meaning making about those experiences.

That isn’t living in the past. It is processing its impact on the present.

Looking backward is not the same as living backward nor is it a process of revision. Reflection is one of the mechanisms through which the past becomes integrated and unhealed wounds become addressed rather than repeatedly reopened and relived.

“They didn’t tell me, I didn’t know, We were always close, The estrangement came out of the blue.”

Those are all very similar but yet distinct claims.

When a parent says, “they didn’t tell me,” they are making the adult child the custodian of the relationship.

That isn’t how developmental relationships work.

If mindsight is the ability to recognize that another person has an internal world separate from your own, then parenting requires something a bit further. It requires being and remaining attuned to and curious about your child’s internal world as it changes over time.

That doesn’t require special knowledge or skills. It just requires continued empathetic attention.

From the very beginning, the parent is responsible for being attuned to the needs of their infant child. Are they hungry, is their diaper soiled, do they have digestive distress? They need to pay attention to nonverbal cues to figure out what the baby’s needs are and respond, often via trial and error, accordingly.

Parents routinely reject the idea that they should have known how to parent because “there’s no guidebook.” But from the very beginning there never wasa guidebook. Parents learned by paying attention, trying, observing the child’s response, adjusting, and trying again.

That responsibility for attunement doesn’t disappear when the child’s needs become emotional instead of physical.

The importance of attending to the state of the relationship is no different than the importance of attending to physical needs. In fact, it is THE most important. The parent is responsible for identifying when their child is in emotional or relational distress — whether with them or with others or in response to events — and helping co-regulate them through it.

That is the job.

When a parent says, “I didn’t know,” they are announcing that they were not in fact monitoring the state of the relationship. They assumed it would be there. That they were entitled to it without active cultivation.

Again, that is not how developmental relationships work.

They require attentiveness and sensitivity by the caregiver to the state and needs of the child. Not on a one hundred percent perfect basis, but on a merely thirty percent “good enough” basis.

“Parental sensitivity is defined as a way in which a parent perceives the child’s communication signals, makes sense of those signals by understanding their meaning for the child’s internal mental world, and then responds in a timely and effective manner to meet the child’s needs. When the patterns of communication are consistent, predictable and filled with repairs when the inevitable ruptures in attunement occur, there is the creation of a working model of security.” (Siegel)

Repair is the key element, precisely because thirty percent accuracy means seventy percent inaccuracy. It is all about recognizing and responding to natural parental imperfections.

Demonstrating the ability to discern when there have been ruptures or misattunements, and repairing them, is critical to maintaining secure attachment. It provides the confidence and security that those misattunements will not erode the relational bond.

Attachment is not something established once in childhood and is then fixed in time. It evolves as the relationship evolves throughout the child’s development. A parent cannot assume that a relationship that once seemed secure will remain so, nor can they rely solely on their own perceptions to determine the state of that relationship.

Healthy parenting requires ongoing attunement, open communication, and continued curiosity about the child’s evolving inner world.

Because the relationships continue to evolve throughout development, it is on the parent to remain attuned to the child’s inner world and to their experience of the relationship and to the world around them.

The statements “we were always close” and “it came out of the blue” both contain unexamined assumptions.

Based upon whose evaluation was the relationship close? What basis does the parent have for believing the adult child experienced the relationship similarly?

The parent’s experience of closeness and the child’s experience of closeness are not the same thing.

An adult child who learned early on that people pleasing — attending to the needs of others over asserting their own — was what maintained connection with their parent while they were dependent minors may continue that behavior even while not ever experiencing true depth of connection.

Children adapt to preserve connection with parents and caregivers upon whom they depend and with whom they have a biologically wired need to maintain that connection.

They may have spent years attempting to create a deeper, safer, or more authentic relationship without success. To the parent who was never attuned to the true state of their child’s experience, the continuation of the relationship itself became evidence that the relationship was close.

To the child, it was always superficial.

The statement “it came out of the blue” carries perhaps the biggest assumption of all: that the estrangement itself appeared suddenly.

No relationship changes overnight.

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And developmental, historically dependent ones especially do not. They evolve through thousands of interactions, ruptures and repairs, or a historical lack thereof, memories of joys, disappointments and unrepaired wounds.

The parent experiences the estrangement as sudden because they are facing the adult child’s finally realized conclusion rather than having been attuned to the years of experiences that produced it.

“Parents did their best, They didn’t know any better, These concepts are all new.”

Parents doing their best doesn’t mean their best was good or didn’t inflict significant harm.

That is what accountability is all about. Being accountable for one’s imperfections and unintended harm, learning from that so as to not repeat it, and to repair from it.

It is on the parent to model that.

The argument that parents “didn’t know any better” depends on the assumption that this knowledge didn’t exist.

It did.

None of the concepts of developmental psychology are new.

In fact, they are foundational to its origins going back to the 1930s and Lewin’s “Field Theory” that behavior could not be understood in isolation from the environment in which it occurred and the decades of published scholarship across multiple fields of science that followed.

But parents don’t need to be scholars of developmental psychology to understand its underlying principles inherently.

That excuse is a nonstarter.

Caring about the experience of your child in the relationship doesn’t require a degree.

What was understood and what was popularized are two very different things.

Many of the parenting practices that have come to be recognized as emotionally neglectful, authoritarian, or even abusive weren’t considered normal because developmental psychology endorsed them.

They were considered normal because culture did.

If the product of “normal” parenting resulted in emotional suppression, authoritarian control, refusal to acknowledge the lived experience of one’s child and a chronic lack of repair, then the problem isn’t adult children “redefining trauma.”

Developmental psychology has never asked whether parenting reflected the prevailing norms of its time. It has always asked a different question: what kinds of relationships support healthy human development?

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Those are fundamentally different standards.

When adult children estrange as a result of the long-term effects of emotionally neglectful, chronically misattuned, or emotionally unsafe relationships, they are not redefining ordinary parenting as trauma. Nor are they asking anyone to redefine anything.

They are asking for their lived experiences to matter.

The problem was never whether culturally accepted parenting practices were normal.

The problem was using “normal” as the measure of healthy parenting.