My older son sent me an article a few months back. It was about the long-term effects of certain discipline strategies — the kind that were standard practice when I was raising him in the late eighties and nineties. He didn’t add a message. Just the link. I read it at my desk in the spare room, and I felt something tighten in my chest before I’d even finished the second paragraph. My first thought — the honest one, the one that arrived before any rational processing — was: But you turned out fine.
I didn’t type it. I sat with it instead. And over the next few days, I started thinking about why that phrase is so reflexive for people my age. Why it comes out like a reflex, like pulling your hand from a hot stove. And I think I understand it now, at least a bit better than I did sitting there staring at my phone.
It’s Not Stubbornness — It’s Self-Preservation
Behavioral scientists have been studying this pattern for years now, and what they’ve found is more compassionate than most people expect. When parents — or grandparents, in my case — react defensively to new parenting research, it’s not because they’re incurious or careless. It’s because the research threatens something deeply personal: the story they’ve built around their own childhood.
Research on cognitive dissonance by Eddie Harmon-Jones and Cindy Harmon-Jones shows that when people encounter information that conflicts with a core belief, the discomfort isn’t just intellectual — it’s emotional, sometimes even physical. That tightness in my chest when I read my son’s article? That was dissonance. My brain was doing rapid calculations: If this research is correct, then what my parents did was harmful. If what my parents did was harmful, then my childhood contained harm I never named. And if my childhood contained harm I never named, what does that say about the people I love most?
That’s a lot of dominoes to fall from one forwarded link.
My father — God rest him — was a good man by every measure I had. He worked hard, he showed up, he did what he thought was right. He also did things that, if I’m honest with myself, wouldn’t pass muster under today’s understanding of child development. But here’s the thing: naming that doesn’t diminish him. It took me years and a very patient therapist to understand that holding two truths at once — he did his best and some of it still hurt — isn’t a betrayal. It’s maturity. But it doesn’t feel like maturity at first. It feels like treason.
The Narrative That Made It Survivable
When you grow up in a time and place where certain things were just how it was done, you develop a story about your childhood. You have to. Children are remarkably adaptive — they build meaning out of whatever materials they’re given. If the discipline was harsh, you tell yourself it built character. If emotional expression was discouraged, you decide that toughness is a virtue. If your parents were unavailable, you learn that independence is strength.
These aren’t delusions. They’re survival narratives. And they worked. They got you through.
A 2018 study in the journal Attachment & Human Development examined how adults construct “coherent narratives” around difficult childhood experiences, and found that these narratives serve a genuine psychological function — they allow people to maintain attachment bonds with caregivers even when those caregivers were imperfect. The researchers noted that challenging these narratives without sensitivity can trigger grief responses that people weren’t prepared for.
That’s the piece most articles about this topic miss. When someone says “we turned out fine,” they’re not making a clinical assessment of their mental health outcomes. They’re protecting a story. And inside that story is a child who needed to believe their parents were doing something right, because the alternative — that the people responsible for your safety were causing damage — was too frightening to hold at seven or twelve or sixteen.
I think about this when I watch my grandchildren. My youngest grandson — he’s three — trusts me completely. When I pick him up at the park, he goes limp in my arms. Total surrender. That kind of trust is sacred, and it doesn’t have an off switch. A child who trusts their parent that completely will build whatever story they need to in order to keep that trust intact. Even decades later.
What My HR Years Taught Me About Defensiveness
I spent thirty years in human resources, and one of the things I noticed early on was that the most defensive people in any meeting weren’t the ones who didn’t care. They were the ones who cared the most. The employee who explodes when you question their methods is almost always the one who’s been pouring themselves into the work. The defensiveness isn’t about the feedback — it’s about what the feedback implies about their effort, their identity, their worth.
Parents are no different. When you tell someone that a practice they used — or that was used on them — has been shown by research to carry risks, you’re not just presenting data. You’re implicitly saying: The thing you survived, and maybe even took pride in surviving, was a wound you didn’t deserve. And for a lot of people, that reframe is devastating. Not because they can’t handle complexity, but because they’ve spent forty or fifty years building a life on a foundation they now have to re-examine.
Research by Gregory Walton and Timothy Wilson on “wise interventions” suggests that the most effective way to help people update their beliefs isn’t through confrontation but through narrative revision — gently helping people see that they can keep the love and the loyalty while also acknowledging that some things could have been different. You don’t have to tear down the whole house. You just open a window.
Questioning the Method Means Questioning the Parent
This is the part that I think my son didn’t fully grasp when he sent me that article, though I suspect he’s starting to. He wasn’t just asking me to consider a piece of research. He was, without meaning to, asking me to reconsider my own father. To reconsider the choices Linda and I made when our boys were small. To sit with the possibility that love and harm aren’t mutually exclusive — that good parents can do things that leave marks.
I’ve written before about the complicated territory of apologizing to adult children, and this is connected. Because the apology can’t happen until you’ve done the harder work underneath: admitting to yourself that the narrative you carried — I turned out fine, my kids turned out fine, we all turned out fine — might be incomplete. Not wrong, necessarily. But incomplete.
My mother is eighty-two. I visit her most Sundays. She still sets the table properly, still offers tea before you’ve got your coat off. And sometimes, when something comes up in conversation about how things were when I was young — a reference to my father’s temper, or the long silences that followed certain kinds of trouble — she’ll say something like, “Well, that’s just how it was done then.” And I can see it in her eyes. She’s not being dismissive. She’s holding together a story that lets her love her late husband and live with her choices. I’m not going to take that from her. But I can hold a fuller version of the story in my own hands, and I can make different choices with my grandchildren because of it.
The Way Forward Isn’t Debate — It’s Compassion
If you’re a younger parent reading this, and you’ve hit this wall with your own parents or in-laws — the eye rolls when you mention gentle parenting, the “we didn’t have all this psychology nonsense” comments — I’d ask you to consider what’s underneath. Not because they’re right. Not because research doesn’t matter. But because the person in front of you is doing something profoundly human: protecting the child they once were, and the parent they still love.
A 2019 review in American Psychologist found that intergenerational conversations about parenting practices were most productive when they centered on shared values — keeping children safe, helping them thrive — rather than on specific techniques. When grandparents felt their love and effort were acknowledged, they were significantly more open to hearing new information. When they felt judged, they shut down. Which, if you think about it, is exactly how most humans work in most situations.
I think about the ways creativity helps families communicate what words alone can’t carry, and I wonder if part of the answer lives there — in the doing of things together, rather than the debating of theories. When I’m at the park with my grandson, building something in the sand or watching the birds, I’m not thinking about parenting philosophies. I’m just present. And in that presence, I’m naturally gentler, more patient, more attuned than I ever was when I was thirty-five and running on four hours of sleep and a lifetime of unexamined habits.
My son never asked me what I thought about the article. I never brought it up. But the next time I had the little ones over, I noticed myself pausing in a moment where I might have reacted sharply. I knelt down instead. I asked a question instead of giving an instruction. It was a small thing. But small things, done consistently, are the only things that have ever really changed anything in my life.
“We turned out fine” isn’t a conclusion. It’s a door that hasn’t been opened yet. And the person standing in front of it isn’t your enemy — they’re someone who’s afraid of what they’ll feel when they finally look inside. The kindest thing you can do isn’t to force the door. It’s to sit beside them and let them know that whatever they find in there, they won’t have to carry it alone.
