10 One-Sentence Perspectives to Stop Fighting Your Parents

They’re secretly learning from you.

Relationships with parents are not always smooth. Many times we lose our connection with them and fight for the sake of winning an argument. That’s not what functional relationships are built upon. Relationships need space for empathy and consideration of your own and other’s needs.

Most parents love their children, they just get tangled up along the way sometimes. Children do too. In the end, it’s not a parent’s or children’s problem, it is a communication problem. Verbally and emotionally.

I put down some conclusions I made from my late-adolescence and early 20’s. For me, this was the time I got to explore deeper the relationships with my parents. It’s been some bumpy years.

1. They are continuously figuring out how to be a parent.

As you are continuously figuring out how to be a decent human being. Parents learn it day by day, moment by moment along with their children. They don’t have a set of instructions. It’s only natural that mistakes occur.

Most of them are on a bridge between two very different societies. Disruptive changes in the last decades impacted their life significantly. They keep adjusting their model of reality.

2. They will get defensive if you will try hard to change them.

It’s very hard for them to acknowledge that sometimes they fail as a parent. Tell them it’s okay. There’s no need for perfection. Relationships aren’t about perfection. In fact, some problems are hardly solvable, not because someone is fully wrong, but more because of personality differences. The solution may be just the acknowledgment of the fact, nothing more.

Our parents aren’t always right, but we are not either. Instead of endlessly trying to change someone, change your attitude towards them and aim together to meet where you can be both flexible. So cliché yet so true.

3. They probably never received the love you want to receive from them.

It’s very difficult to offer what you’ve never experienced. I realized this by communicating more with my grandparents after I talked to a psychologist. They grew up in the 1960s in Eastern Europe. It wasn’t the best of times for that part of the world, and all their parents cared for was to put food on the table and make sure their children don’t stupidly die. They didn’t have much time to contemplate moral needs. Physical scarcity was too big to put it aside, and combined with very few tools available to consider different perspectives on their current situation, there wasn’t much space for the connection between them to evolve.

This is just an example that hopefully makes it easier to be aware that parents’ resources are their life experiences. Instead of trying to force out the affection from the people you love — give them that kind of affection, expose them to new emotional experiences. Otherwise, blind love-begging will only make you miserable and people around you confused.

4. Sometimes they have good intentions but bad ideas.

A Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) presupposition right here. NLP provides one of the gentlest human approaches so it’s a perfect tool to use for children-parents relationships. It’s just a model though, so take it with a grain of salt.

It says that every behaviour or idea has a positive intention. But because an idea has a positive intention in no way implies that it is the best way of fulfilling it. The positive intention behind a thief robbing a bank may be to feed his family.

Now back to parents. Point it out. Identify together or at least by yourself what the good intention is behind their actions. Let them know that you appreciate their intention but some implementation ideas aren’t working for you. They want you to prosper and succeed but perhaps their ways of taking care of you aren’t appropriate for your specific context, personality, and aspirations.

5. Sometimes children and their parents have totally different necessities at the same time.

If none of you is aware of his/her necessities to be fulfilled and you’re not working for a compromise, then you’ll fight until someone ‘’wins’’ by emotionally crushing the other. In reality, no one wins. There’s no winning or losing between family members because it’s a zero-sum game. The family represents a positive-sum game, with no winners and losers.

A great tool to use is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s simple yet so powerful for paying attention to your’s and other people’s needs at any given moment in your interaction with them. Being aware of which level we are on when interacting with each other, helps to calibrate the conversation in order to be aligned needs-wise. The result is connection and support between people.

6. They aren’t the omnipotent beings you once considered them to be.

They’re not Gods. They’re not some super-chosen creatures shaped specifically for you. They are human beings with limitations and vulnerabilities, fears, and insecurities. They’re first humans, then parents. One important aspect that emerges once you see them as humans first, is that you’re not perceiving judgments from them as defining you. You start to see it just as it is, critique or a suggestion from an imperfect being with experiences.

7. Their respect is earned through respect given to them and vice-versa.

Mutual respect is one of the most solid pillars in any relationship. It means trust. Respect is about letting each other be a complete person, with his or her strengths and weakness. It is not about control. It’s not about parental ideologies. Rigid ideologies have no place at a family table. It is never about putdowns.

Respect isn’t about agreeing with decisions, rather it is accepting that mistakes are made and they don’t define the people who make them. What defines us is our willingness to learn from them.

The well-being of each individual in a family is directly proportional to the well-being of the family as a unit. But it becomes a unit only when each member is equally respected.

8. If they are harmful, simply love them because they gifted you this life, nothing more and nothing less.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
— Carl Gustav Jung

Psychologically, for some people, a perceived wasted life is a trigger to act careless about their lives and those around them.

Distance yourself from this kind of environment as soon as you can. It will be beneficial for both sides. You will better understand where harmful reactions came from — and forgive them eventually — when you look at it from the outside. With that being said, there’s one primordial premise I always try to keep in mind. Before you think your parents are harmful to you watch out if you are not disastrous towards yourself.

9. Your parents are not the only parents you have.

Don’t expect to learn everything from your human parents. You have nature, culture, and other people you meet during your life. These are important agents of learning. Together these are also our parents’ parents. Pay attention to experiences and the lessons other people learned. Some have succeed where you can’t and have a full backpack of gems to share. Staying open to learning, from any source, is the best bet. Learning is omnipresent if you allow it to be.

At some point in life, the answers you’re looking for are no more in your parents’ house, that’s when maturity knocks at the door. It’s critical to break the baby chain and communicate through responsibilities.

10. They are secretly learning from you.

Parents rarely admit they’re learning from their children. I think it’s such an underrated subject for discussions between family members. It brings a sense of responsibility for your own actions because you know they have an impact on others’ life. This is powerful to me.

Ask your parents what’s the most important thing they’ve learned from you. I asked, and I was surprised by the humbleness streaming from them. You will be astonished by how much colorful your conversations can get.

Takeaway

A respectful discussion, even a mindful disagreement of opinion is really fine. What’s not anymore constructive is aggressively arguing. Fighting in such a context is a loss of self-control, an emotional overload. Learning improved communication skills is the key to making space for understanding and respect to emerge. Ultimately, family members love each other.

Love is free of obligation and responsibility. It’s self-sufficient. Responsibilities are all eventually embraced by you and what is left to share with parents is love and empathy which is enough for such relationships to be at their best. The goal is arriving to be a self-parent.

The greatest gift parents and children can bestow upon each other is to be a happy, fulfilled whole person.