The Parent Guilt Trip Trap
Parents are known for their smothering, worrying and authoritarian attitude as their children are growing up, however it continues through adulthood.
We all love our parents and would do pretty much anything we can to make them happy since they have done so much for us and we love them, of course. “Pretty much anything” is a very necessary term however, sometimes parents can take their role to the extreme by guilt tripping their adult kids into doing what they ultimately want. It’s almost as if you have not grown into an adult. The 20’s and 30’s age range are when the guilt trips are given at its highest, it is also the age ranges when we as adult children fall for this trap the most. A person’s 20’s and 30’s are when life has just begun and times for experimenting multiple avenues or establishing stability are setting in, we also realize that our parents helped us get to where we are and we feel appreciative toward our parents rather than attitudinal like our teenage years. We want to show our parents that we are adults and able to take care of ourselves and in attempting to showcase that, we are still “parent pleasers”.
I have noticed that as parents get older, the more sensitive they become, especially when it comes to “family time”. Parents want to randomly spend every waking moment with their children, and if one of their children flakes on them or cancels plans for a legitimate reason, the children will definitely hear the brunt of the disappointment from their parents. It’s usually when you start to build your own life, whether it’s the direction they wanted you to follow or not, is when the familial requests and expectations are spewed out at you: coming over every week for dinner, giving a speech at your Mom’s birthday party or just taking time out of your schedule for whatever they like doing and wanting you to come along.
What parents don’t realize is that they’re still treating their children like a 3 year old instead of a 30 year old. Some of us are parents ourselves and the love for our parents is still there… we still want to take care of them and make them happy, however expectation is still a component in the relationship. The expectation to drop plans with our friends or skip that happy hour after work to do something that a teenager would be forced to participate in with their parents.
The older your parents are, the more the guilt trip escalates. They start to say statements such as “we haven’t spent time together as a family in a long time”, “why don’t you come by the house more often?”, “your friends are not your family, remember that”, any of these ring a bell? Something to the effect, right? You remember back on your childhood and think to yourself ‘they acted like I was such a pain in the ass growing up, now they want to hang out like best buds?’, it’s definitely an awkward pill to swallow.
Even in adulthood, we still quote one of Will Smith’s famous lines, ‘Parents just don’t understand’. Parents want their adult children to stop what they are doing and tend to them when they crave family time… they don’t understand hanging out with your friends so much, working too much or going on vacation frequently. Nor do they understand that all of our actions that they deem as doing “too much” are afforded to us as we get older and accumulate a family and/or the money to be able to do more things in life.
The only thing is that parents do understand. They have been our ages before and understand the want and desire to live life to the fullest and do all that you’re capable of doing. Maybe the children don’t understand yet. Yes, we’re older and more mature, well versed in work life and socially, however maybe we don’t understand because we’ve never been our parents ages before. They have experienced our age but not vice versa and maybe tending to them just a tad more for family time will make them smile a little brighter. Instead of feeling obligation and annoyance, maybe feel grateful that your parent is still alive. Relationships are about compromise, and the relationship with your parents is included as well, so don’t cancel plans all the time but set aside time so that they feel loved and give back a fraction of the compromises that they have made for you growing up as that will provide both personal and familial balance, in which a parent understands.
