Here’s something I haven’t shared before.
I grew up in a small Midwest town with parents who did their best. There was dinner on the table every night, a garden out back, and a mother who made everything from scratch. My dad worked long hours. He provided well. He was steady and reliable and never once let us go without.
But he was emotionally distant. Not in a cruel way — in the way that a lot of dads from that generation were. Conversations at the table stayed surface-level. If I was upset, the unspoken message was to pull it together. If I needed reassurance, I learned to find it somewhere else — usually by being good, being helpful, being the kind of kid who didn’t cause problems.
I carried that pattern with me for a long time. People-pleasing. Perfectionism. A deep need to be “enough” without ever quite knowing what enough looked like.
Then one evening, after the kids were in bed, I decided to watch one of the videos on our YouTube channel called Toxic Parents And The Children They Leave Behind. I almost scrolled past it. The title felt heavy. But I clicked, and I watched the whole thing. Then I watched it again.
It walks through eight parenting patterns — not the dramatic, headline-making kind of harm. The quiet kind. The kind that looks like love, or duty, or “just how things were.” And it names each one carefully, showing how these patterns shape children into adults who carry invisible weight they can’t always explain. I won’t lay out all eight here because the video does that far more powerfully than I could in a paragraph.
But a few of those patterns hit uncomfortably close to home — both from my own childhood and, if I’m being really honest, from moments in my own parenting.
That’s what I want to talk about today. Not to point fingers at our parents. Not to spiral into guilt about what we might be getting wrong. But to look at some of these patterns with open eyes — because what we can see, we can start to change.
1) The parent who provides everything except presence
This is the one that got me. The video describes the emotionally absent parent — the one who keeps the household running, who shows up physically, but who isn’t really there when it comes to the inner world of the child. No co-regulation. No help naming feelings. No sitting with the hard moments.
From the outside, everything looks fine. And that’s what makes it so confusing for the child, because there’s nothing to point to. No obvious wound. Just a quiet emptiness that follows them into adulthood.
I recognized my dad in this immediately. He wasn’t mean. He wasn’t neglectful in any traditional sense. But I grew up emotionally alone in a full house, and I didn’t have the language for that until my thirties.
Watching Matt with our daughter Ellie is what finally made it click for me. She’ll come in from the garden with a basket of leaves she’s sorted by color, chattering a mile a minute about which ones are “the saddest” because they’re brown. And Matt will sit right down on the floor, look at her little collection, and say, “Tell me about this one.” No fixing. No redirecting. Just listening.
The first time I saw her face light up like that — truly light up because someone was paying full attention to her inner world — I felt something crack open in my chest. That was the thing I’d been missing. Not stuff. Not stability. Presence.
2) When “you’re fine” becomes the most damaging phrase in the house
Have you ever caught yourself saying it? Your kid falls, scrapes a knee, and before you’ve even assessed the situation: “You’re fine.”
Your toddler melts down at the grocery store because you won’t buy the crackers with the bear on the box: “You’re okay, it’s not a big deal.”
I’ve said it. More times than I’d like to admit. And for a long time I thought I was building resilience, teaching my kids to shake things off.
But what the video describes as the dismissive parent pattern is exactly this — not cruelty, but a steady minimizing of the child’s emotional reality. “Stop being so sensitive. You’re overreacting.” The child learns that what they feel isn’t valid. That their inner world is too much. And they carry that belief with them — minimizing their own pain before anyone else gets the chance to.
This is something I actively work against now. My default response when Ellie or Milo come to me upset is “tell me more.” Not “you’re fine.” Not “it’s okay.” Just: tell me more. I’m listening.
It doesn’t come naturally. It’s a practice. And some days — the tired days, the overstimulated days — I catch the old words forming before I can stop them. But that’s the work, isn’t it?
3) Love that comes with invisible conditions
The video talks about the conditional love parent — the one who extends warmth and approval when the child performs, achieves, or complies, but withdraws it when things don’t go to plan. The child learns early that love isn’t a given. It’s earned.
As Brené Brown has written in Daring Greatly, “The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesn’t exist.”
That line stopped me the first time I read it. Because perfection was the currency I grew up trading in. Good grades. Good behavior. Being helpful, being quiet, being easy. That was how I earned my place.
I see this pattern everywhere now. In the way some parents light up only when their kid wins the game, not when they helped a teammate who was struggling. In the way praise gets reserved for outcomes rather than effort or character. In the way children learn to perform a version of themselves that keeps the love flowing.
One thing that’s helped me break this with my own kids is celebrating the ordinary. Ellie shared her snack with a friend at the park unprompted? That gets just as much warmth as any gold star. Milo tried to put his own shoes on and got them on the wrong feet? Beautiful. I want my kids to know that simply being who they are is enough — not what they produce, not what they achieve.
4) The child who learned to read every room
There’s a section in the video about the volatile parent that gave me chills. It describes the child who grows up in a home where the emotional weather changes without warning. The rules shift. What was fine yesterday earns punishment today. So the child becomes hypervigilant — constantly scanning, reading micro-expressions, predicting eruptions before they happen.
The video makes the point that this looks like emotional intelligence from the outside. And it is a real skill. But it was built for survival, not connection. And the cost is a nervous system that never fully comes down from high alert.
I know adults like this. I’ve been this adult. Growing up as a people-pleaser in a house where conversations stayed surface-level trained me to read the room before I’d even taken off my coat. That radar was always on. And for a long time, I thought it was a strength.
It wasn’t until I dealt with my own anxiety — after Milo was born, through therapy and a lot of honest reflection — that I understood what that hypervigilance was actually costing me. Constant scanning is exhausting. It leaves no room to just be.
5) Why breaking the cycle starts with being honest about what we inherited
Here’s the thing nobody really tells you about becoming a parent: it puts you back in direct contact with your own childhood. Every bedtime routine, every meltdown, every moment you catch yourself reacting instead of responding — it’s all connected to something older.
As noted by Daniel Siegel in Parenting from the Inside Out, “Making sense of your life is the best gift you can give your child, or yourself.” That idea changed the way I think about parenting entirely. It’s not about memorizing the right scripts or following the perfect gentle-parenting formula. It’s about understanding your own story — where your reactions come from, what you absorbed as a child, and what you want to do differently.
I still catch myself in old patterns. The perfectionism. The urge to smooth things over rather than sit in discomfort. The instinct to say “it’s fine” when it isn’t. I’m a recovering perfectionist, and parenting is the arena where that recovery gets tested daily.
But I practice repair. When I lose patience — and I do — I come back to my kids and I say, “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. Let me try again.” And I watch their little faces soften. Not because I was perfect, but because I was honest.
6) What it actually looks like to do things differently
I want to be careful here because I think there’s a tendency, when we talk about inherited parenting patterns, to swing into guilt. To look at all the ways we were hurt and panic about all the ways we might be repeating it.
But that’s not the point. The point — and the video makes this clear — is that awareness is the starting line. Not perfection. Awareness.
What does that look like in our house? It looks like Matt and me checking in every evening after the kids are asleep. “How was your day — really?” It looks like letting Milo have his big feelings on the kitchen floor without rushing him to “fine.” It looks like creating space for emotional openness at dinner instead of keeping things surface-level. It looks like Ellie knowing she can say “I’m mad at you, Mama” and not lose an ounce of love.
It also looks messy. It looks like frozen muffins for dinner on the hard nights and screens on the days when survival mode is the best I’ve got. As Brené Brown also reminds us, “Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time.”
That’s the part that gives me hope. My kids don’t need a flawless mother. They need one who’s paying attention. One who’s willing to look at her own stuff, even when it’s uncomfortable.
A few final thoughts
If anything in this piece felt familiar — whether from your own childhood or from a moment you recognized in your own parenting — I’d encourage you to watch the video that started this whole reflection for me.
I’m still processing my own childhood patterns. I probably will be for a while. But I’m not doing it with shame anymore. I’m doing it with curiosity, and with the belief that what I can see, I can begin to change.
My dad did his best with what he had. I believe that completely. And I also know that I want something different for Ellie and Milo. I want them to grow up in a home where feelings aren’t inconvenient, where love doesn’t have to be earned, and where someone always has time to sit on the floor and say, “Tell me more.”
That’s not perfection. It’s just presence. And honestly? It’s everything.
