I came across a video recently called Toxic Parents And The Children They Leave Behind.
It wasn’t what I was expecting.
It doesn’t talk about abuse in the dramatic sense.
It doesn’t describe the kind of childhood that ends up in a courtroom or a newspaper.
It talks about the ordinary, everyday patterns that most of us would recognise from our own upbringing or our own parenting, and it names them carefully, one by one.
I watched it twice.
The second time, I kept stopping it to sit with something it had said.
What I brought to it
I should be honest about where I’m coming from here.
I spent thirty years in human resources watching people struggle.
Not with the headline problems, those were rare.
With the quieter ones.
The employee who couldn’t take feedback without collapsing.
The manager who needed to control every outcome and couldn’t understand why their team kept leaving.
The person who worked twice as hard as anyone else and still couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t quite enough.
I saw those patterns repeatedly across three decades and I thought I understood them fairly well.
What I understood less, for most of that time, was where they started.
I was good at seeing what people did.
I was slower to connect it back to what had been done to them.
The parent who didn’t look dangerous
My mother was not a cruel woman.
She was hardworking, capable, and present in the practical sense.
Meals appeared, the house ran, things got sorted.
But she was not emotionally available in the way I now understand that phrase to mean.
If something was difficult for me, the expectation was that you moved past it.
You didn’t dwell.
Dwelling was treated, in that house, as a kind of weakness.
I carried that with me a long way into adulthood.
The tendency to say I’m fine before anyone had the chance to ask differently.
The discomfort when someone tried to sit with me in something hard rather than help me fix it.
My wife Linda spent years gently pointing out that I managed my feelings rather than felt them.
She was right, and I didn’t fully understand why until much later.
What I got wrong as a father
I love my sons.
That has never been in question.
But love and skillful parenting are not the same thing and I spent too long assuming they were.
I pushed my older son toward a career path that made sense on paper and wasn’t right for him.
It took years and a painful conversation for me to accept I’d been wrong about that.
I gave advice when neither of my sons had asked for it, so consistently that my younger one finally told me it felt like constant criticism.
That landed hard.
Because I hadn’t experienced it as criticism.
I’d experienced it as care.
That gap, between what I thought I was offering and what they were actually receiving, is exactly what the video is about.
What the video names that most of us don’t
It covers eight patterns.
The narcissistic parent who turns every achievement into something about themselves.
The emotionally absent parent who keeps the lights on but leaves the child growing up alone inside.
The guilt-tripping parent who links love to debt so quietly that the child spends decades unable to distinguish between genuine obligation and emotional manipulation.
The volatile parent whose unpredictability turns a child into an expert reader of other people’s moods, a skill that looks like emotional intelligence and costs a nervous system that never fully comes down from high alert.
I won’t name all eight here because the video does it better than I could.
It’s specific and honest and careful in the way this subject requires.
If any part of what I’ve written so far feels familiar, either from your own childhood or from the parent you’ve been, it’s worth fourteen minutes of your time.
The link is at the bottom of this piece.
The inheritance nobody chooses
What struck me most, watching it, was the consistency of one thread running through all eight patterns.
Almost none of it is intentional.
The guilt-tripping parent is not sitting down and thinking: how do I make my child feel responsible for my emotional state.
The dismissive parent who tells a child stop being so sensitive is usually repeating the exact message they were given, word for word, from their own parents.
The controlling parent who says I know what’s best for you often genuinely believes it, because nobody ever trusted them with their own choices either.
The pain gets passed down not through cruelty but through the limits of what someone was given and what they therefore have to give.
I saw this in my HR work.
I see it in my own family’s history.
And I see it, if I’m being fully honest, in some of the things I carried into fatherhood that I didn’t choose and didn’t recognise until my sons were old enough to name them for me.
What being a grandfather taught me that fatherhood didn’t
With my grandchildren I notice things I didn’t notice the first time around.
I notice when I’m giving advice instead of listening.
I notice when a child comes to me with a feeling and my first instinct is to redirect them toward a solution rather than just stay with them in it.
I notice, and I stop, and I try to do it differently.
Not because I’m a better person than I was.
But because I’ve had more time to understand the cost of getting it wrong.
The grandchild who is a different person when it’s just the two of you, when there’s no competition for attention and no adult agenda in the room.
The one who tells you something they wouldn’t tell their parents if you just stay quiet long enough.
That kind of trust is not an accident.
It comes from a child feeling that their inner life is taken seriously rather than managed.
It took me too long to understand that.
I understand it now.
What awareness is actually for
The video ends with something worth holding onto.
The point of awareness is never shame.
I’ve sat with that line.
Because shame is the thing that stops people from looking honestly at their own patterns.
It’s too painful, so they don’t look.
And so nothing changes.
The awareness that matters is the kind that lets you say: this is what I received, this is what I passed on without meaning to, and this is what I want to do differently with the time I have left.
That kind of honesty is uncomfortable.
But it’s the only kind that actually opens anything up.
I’ve found, late in life, that apologising to my sons for specific things I got wrong has done more for our relationships than anything I did right.
Not because the wrongs cancel out.
But because naming them says: I see it, I know what it cost you, and I take it seriously.
That’s worth something.
It doesn’t erase anything.
But it opens a door that staying defensive keeps permanently shut.
If you can relate, I recommend watching the video I mentioned earlier here: Toxic Parents And The Children They Leave Behind.
