My younger son is in his thirties now.
He’s capable, steady, good at his job, and by most measures someone who turned out well.
But he told me something a few years ago that I’ve been sitting with ever since.
He said that when he was a teenager and something was genuinely wrong, his first instinct was never to come to me.
Not because he didn’t trust me.
Because he didn’t want to worry me.
He’d learned, without either of us intending it, that his job was to be okay.
That my comfort depended on his.
That if he showed me something difficult, I would work so hard to fix it that the original feeling would get buried somewhere under all my effort to make it go away.
I asked him how long that had been going on.
He thought about it and said: most of high school, probably.
I’d had no idea.
What I thought I was doing
I genuinely believed I was being a good father.
That’s the part I find hardest to reconcile.
I wasn’t absent.
I wasn’t harsh.
I wasn’t the kind of parent who made my children feel small or unworthy or unseen.
I was warm, I was present, and I cared enormously about how they were feeling on any given day.
That caring, it turned out, was part of the problem.
Because there’s a version of parental love that is really, underneath it, parental anxiety wearing a caring face.
And the child learns to read the difference long before they can name it.
When a child shows you pain and you immediately move to make it stop, you’re not teaching them that pain is manageable.
You’re teaching them that pain is something to be hidden from the people who love you.
That showing it causes distress.
That the kindest thing they can do for you is to handle it somewhere else.
Where I learned it
I’ve thought about where this came from in me.
My own parents were not particularly emotionally expressive.
My mother’s version of comfort was practical.
Something to eat, something to do, a problem solved.
Feelings were acknowledged briefly and then the conversation moved on.
And so I swung in the other direction.
I was going to be the father who was available, who listened, who made sure his children knew they could come to him with anything.
What I didn’t understand was that being available for feelings and being able to sit with feelings are different things.
I was available.
But I couldn’t sit still in discomfort.
Mine or theirs.
The moment one of my boys showed me something difficult, something in me needed to resolve it.
Needed to make it better.
Not for them, if I’m honest.
For me.
What I was actually teaching them
Our team recently released a video called 5 Parenting Styles (And The Two Every Parent Should Avoid). It wasn’t an easy watch for me, but it did open my eyes to my own parenting style.
It lays out the five recognised parenting styles clearly, what each one looks like in practice, and what it tends to produce in the adults those children become.
Two of the styles it flags as the most harmful are the ones you’d expect: the cold, controlling household where love has to be earned, and the absent one where the child is essentially left to raise themselves.
But the style that stopped me was the one that looked the most like me.
The permissive parent.
High warmth.
Almost no discomfort allowed.
The video describes it simply: every time things got hard, the parent smoothed it over instead of letting the child work through it.
That was me.
Not because I was weak or careless.
Because I loved them and couldn’t bear to watch them struggle when I had the ability to make it easier.
The video is worth watching in full, and I’ll link it below, because it puts a framework around something that most parents are doing without any framework at all.
But what it confirmed for me is this.
Warmth without boundaries is not the same thing as love.
It’s love missing one of its most important functions.
The children it produces
My sons are not damaged men.
I want to be clear about that.
But I can see, in both of them, the residue of a childhood where discomfort was treated as something to be solved rather than survived.
My younger son, the one who hid things from me through most of high school, still finds it difficult to sit with uncertainty without doing something about it.
He fixes.
He manages.
He is extremely good in a crisis and slightly uncomfortable when there isn’t one.
I recognise that.
I built it.
My older son tends in the other direction.
When something is hard he pulls away, goes quiet, handles it alone.
He came to me once, in his late twenties, and said he’d never really learned how to ask for help.
That landed somewhere specific.
Because I’d been so available, so eager to help, that he’d never had to develop the language for asking.
The help was always just there, before the asking.
What I try to do differently now
With my grandchildren I am learning to sit on my hands.
That’s the best way I can describe it.
When one of them is frustrated or upset or struggling with something, the old instinct is still there.
To fix it.
To smooth it over.
To make the afternoon pleasant again.
But I’ve learned, slowly, that the most useful thing I can do in those moments is stay in the room and keep my mouth shut.
To let them feel the thing.
To resist the urge to resolve it before they’ve had the chance to find out whether they can resolve it themselves.
The ones who figure out that they can carry that forward.
The ones who are always rescued from it carry something forward too.
It’s just a different thing.
The question worth asking
I’m not writing this to be hard on myself.
I’m writing it because I think this particular pattern is one of the least talked-about ways that good, loving, well-intentioned parents get something quietly wrong.
The cold parent.
The absent parent.
The harsh parent.
Those are the ones that show up in conversations about difficult childhoods.
But the parent who loved too anxiously, who made happiness a project and comfort a measure of success, who taught their children to hide the hard things out of kindness toward that parent’s feelings?
That one is harder to see.
It looks like love.
It is love.
It’s just love that forgot to leave room for the parts of childhood that are supposed to be uncomfortable.
The video I mentioned, 5 Parenting Styles And The Two Every Parent Should Avoid, is a useful place to start if you want to understand the framework.
It’s clear and honest and it covers all five styles in about seven minutes.
Watch it and then sit with the question it ends on.
Did the adults in your life make you feel like you mattered?
And the one it doesn’t quite ask, but that I’d add:
Did they let you feel things in front of them?
Or did they love you so much that you learned to feel them somewhere else?
Watch the video here: 5 Parenting Styles And The Two Every Parent Should Avoid
