Most of us, when we became parents, made a quiet promise to ourselves about the kind of parent we wouldn’t be. The promise was usually specific. Not the kind that yelled. Not the kind that worked too much. Not the kind that withheld affection. Not the kind that pushed too hard. Not the kind that made us feel like we had to earn the love.
You held that promise like a vow. You measured your parenting against it, year after year. And in most cases, you kept it. The thing you swore never to do, you mostly didn’t do.
But somewhere in your sixties, watching the adult children you raised, the ones who got the corrected version of your childhood, you may have started to notice something you weren’t expecting. They have problems too. The problems are different from yours. But they are real. And the disquieting part is that your corrections may have produced them.
This is one of the harder things to look at clearly in late midlife. It doesn’t mean you got it wrong. It also doesn’t mean you got it right. It means you did what almost every generation has done, which is to parent in reaction to the previous one, and discover, decades later, that every reaction has its own shape.
What the correction usually looked like
If you were born somewhere between the late 1940s and the late 1960s, you were probably raised by parents whose generation had been shaped by war, scarcity, and a culture that didn’t have much vocabulary for the interior life of a child. The parenting was often practical, often loving, but often quiet. Affection wasn’t always said out loud. Feelings weren’t always asked about. Discipline tended toward the firm.
You felt the gaps. You knew, somewhere by the time you became a parent yourself, what you wanted to do differently.
You said I love you. You asked how they were. You came to the games and the recitals and the parent-teacher meetings. You didn’t smack. You didn’t yell, or at least you tried not to. You bought the parenting books. You read about emotional intelligence. You validated. You showed up.
This was real. The love was real. The effort was real. The improvement, in many specific ways, was real.
What the new wounds look like
The research on what’s happened to the children of the correcting generations is, by now, fairly clear about the new pattern.
A widely cited 2014 study by Holly Schiffrin and colleagues at the University of Mary Washington, Helping or Hovering? The Effects of Helicopter Parenting on College Students’ Well-Being, published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies, found that college students who reported having over-controlling parents also reported significantly higher levels of depression and lower life satisfaction. The mechanism the researchers identified was self-determination. Helicopter parenting tended to violate young adults’ basic psychological needs for autonomy and competence. The well-meaning involvement, in other words, was producing the very kind of fragility the involvement had been designed to prevent.
A 2022 systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology of the helicopter parenting literature came to a similar conclusion. The pattern across studies, the authors found, was consistent. When parents organize their involvement around shielding the child from struggle, the child does not appear to grow up freer of struggle. The child appears to grow up with reduced confidence in their own capacity to handle struggle, and that reduced confidence carries forward into adulthood as anxiety, depression, and a fragile sense of self.
The new pattern isn’t only about helicopter parenting. It also shows up in the more recent research on what’s been called gentle parenting. A 2024 study published in PLOS One examined 100 parents who identified with gentle parenting principles and found that, while the approach was associated with high attention to children’s emotional needs, more than a third of the parents in the sample reported significant burnout and uncertainty about their own parenting. The approach itself is not, on the basis of one study, indicted. But the pattern is recognizable. A corrective parenting style developed in conscious reaction to a previous generation’s perceived harshness produces its own particular costs, often for the parents as well as the children.
Why corrections turn into distortions
The reason the corrections so often produce new problems is, when you look at it directly, fairly simple. Corrections are calibrated to absences. They are designed to fill in what wasn’t there.
Your parents didn’t say I love you, so you said it constantly. Your parents didn’t ask about your feelings, so you asked about everything. Your parents made you feel you had to earn your worth, so you reassured your child of their worth at every turn.
Each of these corrections was real. But each of them also missed something that the previous generation, by accident or by structure, had inadvertently provided.
Children raised by parents who didn’t say I love you often grew up wondering whether they were loved. They also grew up with substantial practice at internal interpretation, at not being fed every emotion from the outside, at developing their own sense of where they stood. Children raised by parents who said I love you constantly didn’t have to wonder. They also didn’t develop the same muscle for sitting with uncertainty about other people.
Children raised by parents who didn’t ask about their feelings often grew up feeling unseen. They also grew up with privacy, with an interior life that wasn’t subject to constant verbal investigation, with the freedom to be confused about themselves without having to perform that confusion for anyone. Children raised by parents who asked about everything were always seen. They also often grew up without an interior life that felt entirely their own.
Children raised by parents who made them earn their worth often grew up exhausted and conditional. They also grew up with frustration tolerance, with experience of disappointment, with practice at not getting what they wanted and being okay anyway. Children whose worth was constantly affirmed didn’t have to perform for love. They also didn’t get the practice with frustration that the previous generation often got too much of, and they sometimes arrive at adulthood with a particular fragility in the face of setbacks.
None of this is a defence of the previous generation’s failures. The failures were real. The wounds they produced were real. The point is the quieter one. Every parenting choice carries trade-offs. Corrections that consciously address one trade-off tend to amplify the opposite one. The pendulum rarely lands in the middle on its first swing.
What the intergenerational research actually shows
It’s worth noting that the research on intergenerational transmission of parenting is not, in fact, simple. A UK longitudinal study following 146 mothers and 146 fathers and their parenting of their own children found a complicated pattern. Affection from the grandmother’s generation predicted positive responsiveness and cognitive stimulation in the next generation’s fathers. But the grandmother’s controlling parenting predicted decreased engagement in the next generation’s mothers, and increased control in the next generation’s fathers.
The headline finding is that parenting patterns do transmit across generations, but not always in the directions the parents intend. Sometimes the corrective produces the opposite of the original. Sometimes the corrective inadvertently reproduces the original pattern in a slightly different form. The conscious decision to be different is one input. It does not appear, in the data, to be the only or even the most powerful input.
This is humbling, but it’s also clarifying. The work of breaking a generational pattern is harder than simply deciding to. The unconscious patterns we absorbed from being parented are still there, often running in the background, even when the conscious choices are pulling in the opposite direction.
What parents in their sixties are now noticing
If you’re in your sixties or your early seventies, your adult children are now in their twenties, thirties, and forties. You are watching them live the lives your corrections were designed to make possible.
Some of them are flourishing. Many of them are not.
Many of them are anxious in ways that don’t track the world you handed them. They have more resources than you had. More information. More acknowledgment of their feelings. More awareness of mental health. And yet they describe themselves as more anxious than you remember being at their age, less confident about adulthood, less sure of themselves in the world.
You may have noticed that your offer of help is sometimes received as intrusion. That the constant emotional check-ins you grew up wanting now feel, to your adult child, like a kind of weight. That the validation you spent decades providing did not produce the bedrock confidence you had assumed it would.
This is uncomfortable to see clearly. It can feel like the rug being pulled out from under thirty years of conscientious effort. It is also, on a closer look, not quite the indictment it can feel like. You did fill in the absences. The absences were real. The children of those absences would have had their own problems too. What you couldn’t have known, at the time, was that filling in absences is not the same as producing balance, and that the new shape of presence you were offering would carry its own costs.
Where this leaves us
There is no clean resolution to this. Every generation parents in reaction to the previous one. Every reaction has costs. The children of every reaction will, in their turn, parent in reaction to the new costs they experienced, and produce children with a still different set of problems.
This isn’t pessimism. It’s a more accurate map of what parenting actually is. It is not the long march toward producing unwounded children. It is a slow, intergenerational rebalancing in which each generation gets some things less wrong than the previous one and some things more wrong, and the question is whether the average over the generations is bending toward something better.
If you are a parent in your sixties looking at your adult children and registering, for the first time, that the corrective was its own kind of distortion, the most useful thing you can do is probably not retreat into self-criticism. It is also probably not retreat into the position that your parents were right after all and you should never have tried to be different.
It is, more simply, to acknowledge to your adult children what you didn’t know at the time. To name the trade-offs you didn’t see. To let them know that you did your best, and that you can see now that your best was a particular kind of best, with its own gaps. And to let them, in their turn, parent their own children with whatever clarity they can carry into the next round.
That conversation, when it happens, is one of the more meaningful exchanges any family can have. It is also, in most families, one of the least common.
