“But we turned out fine without all this talking about feelings stuff.”
My mom said this last week while watching me kneel down to ask my crying toddler what he needed instead of just picking him up and distracting him with a toy.
I get it: To her generation, this probably looks like overthinking everything.
But here’s what I’ve been trying to explain to her—and maybe to your parents too—it’s not that we think the way they raised us was wrong.
We’re just parenting with tools they literally didn’t have access to.
Think about it: In the 1980s, how many parents had therapists? How many had read books about attachment theory or childhood brain development? How many even knew that saying “tell me more about that” could help a kid process big emotions?
The therapy gap that changed everything
When I was growing up, therapy was something whispered about, reserved for “serious problems.”
My parents would have never considered going to therapy just to work through everyday parenting challenges or their own childhood stuff.
That wasn’t the culture: You pushed through, you managed, and you didn’t talk about it.
After my second was born, I dealt with postpartum anxiety that knocked me sideways.
The difference? I had a therapist, an online support groups, and resources my mother never dreamed of when she was crying in the bathroom thirty years ago, wondering why she felt so overwhelmed with a newborn.
This is about having actual professional support to understand what’s happening in our brains and our kids’ brains.
My therapist helped me see how my own strict upbringing was making me anxious about every parenting decision.
Once I understood that, I could work through it instead of just white-knuckling through each day.
Words our parents didn’t have
Remember when kids were just “bad” or “good”? When tantrums were “acting out” instead of dysregulation? When shy kids were told to “stop being difficult” instead of being recognized as highly sensitive?
The vocabulary shift alone has been massive; now, we know about emotional regulation, executive function, and sensory processing.
These aren’t made-up concepts to make parenting more complicated—they’re real things that help us understand why our kid melts down in Target or can’t handle scratchy socks.
When my five-year-old starts spiraling, I can say, “Your nervous system is overwhelmed right now. Let’s take some deep breaths together.”
My parents would have said, “Stop that right now or we’re leaving!”
Both responses might end the tantrum, but one teaches her about her own internal experience while the other just teaches compliance through fear.
Time as a luxury they couldn’t afford
Let’s be real about something else: Many of us have more time with our kids than our parents did because the world has shifted.
Remote work, paternity leave, flexible schedules; these barely existed when we were kids.
My dad worked sixty-hour weeks and came home exhausted, of course he didn’t have energy for long conversations about feelings.
Meanwhile, my husband works from home three days a week and can pause for lunch to help with a toddler meltdown.
That’s not a judgment on either of them as it’s just different circumstances creating different possibilities, and even the mental load is distributed differently now.
Our parents’ generation often had one parent (usually mom) handling all the emotional labor alone.
Now, many of us are actually talking about mental load, dividing it up, getting our partners involved in the emotional aspects of parenting from day one.
The internet changed the game
My parents had Dr. Spock and maybe a few other parenting books.
That was it; if those didn’t answer their questions, they called their own parents or winged it.
Now? I can search “three-year-old won’t sleep regression normal?” at 2 AM and find seventeen articles, twelve forums, and a few Instagram therapists explaining exactly what’s happening developmentally.
Is there too much information sometimes? Absolutely, but having access to child development research, gentle parenting techniques, and actual therapists sharing strategies online means we’re not parenting in isolation.
When my oldest started having massive meltdowns at four, I found resources about highly sensitive children that completely changed how I approached her needs.
My parents would have just labeled her “difficult” and pushed through because they didn’t have any other framework.
Breaking cycles with awareness
Here’s what really gets me: Our parents were often parenting in reaction to their own childhoods without even realizing it.
They didn’t have the language or tools to identify patterns and consciously choose different approaches.
I’ve spent hours in therapy processing how my strict upbringing affects my current parenting.
I notice when I’m about to repeat something just because it was done to me.
Moreover, I can catch myself and choose differently.
That level of awareness wasn’t culturally available or encouraged for our parents’ generation.
When my mom gets defensive about our different approaches, I try to remember that she did the best she could with what she had.
She didn’t have Instagram therapists explaining child development, partners taking paternity leave, or a therapist helping her work through her own childhood trauma while raising kids.
Finding the bridge between generations
The beautiful thing? Many boomer grandparents are starting to come around.
My parents were skeptical of what they called my “hippie parenting” at first, but they’ve watched my kids learn to name their emotions, self-soothe, and communicate their needs clearly.
They’ve seen that “all this talking” actually leads to fewer meltdowns, not more.
Last month, I overheard my dad tell my daughter, “Tell me more about why you’re frustrated.”
I nearly cried.
He’s learning too, just forty years later than we did.
We’re not rejecting our parents’ values of raising good kids who contribute to society because we’re using new tools to achieve those same goals.
In the end, we want resilient, kind, and capable children just like they did.
We just have access to research about how secure attachment in early childhood creates that resilience, how emotional validation builds that kindness, how age-appropriate choices develop that capability.
Sometimes, I wonder what our kids will do differently when they’re parents.
What resources will they have that we can’t even imagine? Maybe they’ll look back at us spending hours researching sleep training methods and think we were overthinking everything too.
And honestly? That’s okay because that’s progress.
The point is that we’re parenting in a completely different world with completely different resources.
Understanding that might help bridge the gap between generations, or at least help us all give each other a little more grace!
