My older son said it to me about three years ago. Not those exact words, but close enough. We were sitting in his kitchen after Sunday lunch, his two kids playing in the garden, and he was telling me about a parenting book he’d been reading. Something about emotional attunement, about how children need to feel seen rather than corrected. He was animated, excited even, the way he gets when he’s found something that makes sense to him. And then he said it, casually, like he was commenting on the weather: “I just think our generation is breaking the cycle, Dad. Doing things differently.”
I came across a video recently from The Artful Parent called “Millennial Parents Were Set Up to Fail” that explores this exact paradox from the other side—why even well-intentioned efforts to parent differently can produce their own anxieties—and it helped me understand what my sons might be carrying that I can’t quite see from where I’m standing.
He didn’t mean it as a weapon. I know that now. I knew it then, somewhere underneath the sudden tightness in my chest. But in that moment, sitting at his table with a cup of tea going cold in my hands, what I heard was: You were the cycle. You were what needed breaking.
The Verdict That Isn’t One (Except It Feels Like One)
Here’s what nobody prepares you for in your sixties. You’ve done the work. You’ve retired, you’ve started therapy—later than you should have, but you started. You’ve apologized for specific things. You’ve sat with your adult children and listened without defending yourself, which is one of the hardest things a parent can learn to do. You’ve read about the particular exhaustion of being raised by a parent who was doing their best but whose best was still damaging, and you’ve recognized yourself in some of it. You’ve tried to grow.
And then your child uses a phrase that the whole culture has decided is unambiguously good—breaking the cycle—and you’re supposed to nod and feel proud. And part of you does. But another part of you, the part that got up at five in the morning for thirty years and drove to a job that was slowly hollowing you out so your kids could have shoes that fit and a house that was warm—that part wants to say: What cycle? I was trying. I was doing what I thought was right with what I had.
I didn’t say that. I’ve learned, mostly through my years in HR watching people talk past each other in mediation rooms, that the first response is rarely the useful one. So I nodded and asked him more about the book. But the feeling sat with me for weeks.
Two Truths That Don’t Cancel Each Other Out
My therapist—a woman about fifteen years younger than me who has a talent for saying things I don’t want to hear—put it simply when I brought it up. She said that two things can be true at once. My son can be making genuinely healthier choices for his children and I can have been a loving father who made real mistakes. The existence of one doesn’t erase the other.
That sounds reasonable when you write it down. It’s much harder to feel it in your body when you’re the one being improved upon.
Research backs up how complicated this is. A 2021 study in Developmental Psychology found that when adult children renegotiate family narratives—reframing their upbringing in therapeutic or corrective terms—parents often experience what the researchers called “narrative displacement,” a sense that their version of family history is being overwritten. It’s not that the children’s version is wrong. It’s that the parents’ version isn’t entirely wrong either. And there’s grief in watching your story get revised by people you love.
I think about this when I see my son with his boys. He gets down on the floor with them. He names their emotions—“I can see you’re frustrated”—in a way that would have felt alien in my household growing up, or even in the household I ran. I didn’t do that. I said things like “Come on now, you’re alright” and “Big boys don’t cry.” I said them because my father said them, and his father before that, and none of us stopped to ask whether they were true. We just passed them down like furniture.
So yes, my son is breaking something. And the something he’s breaking includes me.
The Weight That Firstborns Carry
It’s my older son who says these things. Not the younger one. The younger one texts me memes and football scores and doesn’t seem to carry the same weight. I’ve written before about the things firstborn children quietly carry, and I see it in him—this sense of responsibility for the family’s emotional renovation. He’s the one who reads the books, goes to the workshops, does the work. And he’s the one who, without meaning to, holds up a mirror I can’t always look at comfortably.
I pushed him toward engineering when he was eighteen. He got the degree, never used it, became a teacher instead. Makes a third of what an engineer would make but has never been happier. He calls me every week, which is more than I ever called my own father. And sometimes on those calls I hear him parenting in the background—patient, calm, present—and I feel two things at once: pride that nearly splits me open, and a quiet sorrow that I can’t fully name.
The sorrow isn’t self-pity, though it can look like it from the outside. It’s more like recognizing that you built something with the wrong tools. Not because you were lazy or cruel, but because those were the only tools anyone handed you, and you didn’t think to ask for different ones. Research on intergenerational parenting transmission shows that most parents replicate roughly 60 to 70 percent of the parenting behaviors they experienced as children, especially under stress. We default to what we know. That’s not an excuse. But it’s an explanation, and explanations deserve to exist alongside accountability.
What I Wish I Could Say Without It Sounding Defensive
There’s a conversation I want to have with my son that I haven’t figured out how to have yet. I want to tell him that I’m glad he’s doing things differently. Truly glad. I want to tell him that when I watch him kneel down and look his four-year-old in the eye instead of talking over his head, something in me heals a little, even as something else aches.
But I also want to tell him that the cycle he’s breaking wasn’t all bad. That inside it were Sunday mornings when I cooked his favourite breakfast even though I was exhausted. School plays I rearranged my work schedule for. Years of showing up to a job I didn’t love because I believed—rightly or wrongly—that providing was a form of love, too. I know people who gave up their own dreams to raise kids carry quiet regrets, and I’m no exception. But the giving up was also a giving. It was imperfect love, but it was love.
I worry that the “breaking the cycle” language, for all its therapeutic value, flattens something. It turns a complicated, messy, decades-long effort into a single diagnosis: harmful pattern. And the person inside that pattern—the one who was also harmed by the generation before, who also did their stumbling best—becomes a cautionary tale rather than a full human being.
A study published in The Journals of Gerontology found that older adults who feel their life narrative is rejected or minimized by their children show significantly higher rates of depressive symptoms and diminished well-being. It’s not about whether the criticism is valid. It’s about whether there’s room in the new story for the old storyteller.
What I’m Learning, Slowly
Linda, who is wiser than me about most things emotional, told me something last year that I keep turning over. She said: “He’s not saying you failed. He’s saying he wants to do even better. And the fact that he can want that is partly because of what we gave him.”
I think she’s right. I think the capacity my son has to reflect on his childhood, to read those books, to choose differently—that didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a home where, for all its imperfections, he was stable enough and loved enough to grow into someone who could look back honestly. You don’t break cycles from a place of total damage. You break them from a place of enough. And maybe being “enough” is a kind of success that doesn’t get celebrated because it’s not dramatic. It’s just the boring, daily things—showing up, keeping the lights on, staying married when it would have been easier not to.
I still take my grandchildren to the park on weekends. That’s non-negotiable. And sometimes, sitting on the bench while the three-year-old discovers mud for the hundredth time, I think about my own father, who died when I was in my forties and never once said he was proud of me. I think about how I swore I’d say it to my sons, and I did, but maybe I also passed along silences and rigidities I didn’t even know I was carrying. And I think about how my son, right now, is probably reading another chapter of another parenting book, trying to be better than me, which is all I ever wanted for him even though it stings in ways I can’t always admit out loud.
The other day, on one of our weekly calls, my son paused in the middle of telling me about something his oldest had done at school. And he said, almost shyly: “I think I got my patience from you, Dad. The way you’d always let us finish what we were saying.”
I held the phone away from my face for a moment so he wouldn’t hear my breathing change.
That’s the thing about cycles. They’re not all one thing. They carry damage and they carry gifts, tangled together so tightly you can’t separate them without a kind of grief. And the grief isn’t about wanting your children to stop growing. It’s about wishing the growing didn’t have to include outgrowing you.
I’m still learning to sit with that. Most mornings, on my walk, I manage. Some mornings, like the ones when I think about how families rebuild themselves into shapes that don’t always include you at the center, I have to sit on my bench a little longer before I’m ready to go home.
But I go home. And I call my mother on the way. And when my son rings on Sunday, I pick up on the first ring, because that’s the cycle I’m keeping.
