To the situation in the OP, I don’t know. I think the kids… as described… are being assholes. But maybe assholishness is a quality to be desired in that family.
However, saying “your parenting decision X sucked” in a genuine discussion (aka, not baiting)… that’s fair game.
I see one main flawed assumption in your OP. You assume both sides can’t be assholes. It’s perfectly possible that the parents are assholes for how they acted in the first place and not acknowledging or apologizing and that the children to be assholes because they are bringing it up with the intent of triggering their parents.
I can understand commiserating with your siblings, using humor. But that works because you’ve all tacitly agreed that doing so is helpful for you. But what is described by the OP is a conversation specifically “in front of the parents,” and so not just the siblings. And it specifically says they “knowingly trigger” them, so it’s not like it just happened to come up
So the children are deliberately trying to hurt the parents. Not in an attempt to resolve the situation or some other actual purpose. But because it produces “butthurt” reactions. That’s just trolling. And trolling is being an asshole.
I do also note that the issue was “bad homeschooling,” rather than, say, abuse. So I’m not sure the “coping mechanism” idea applies. I guess “bad homeschooling” could include abuse, but I would not assume that unless that was explicitly stated.
There’s not usually a need to cope with having had a bad teacher or bad lessons. There’s a need to learn that what is wrong or what you should know but don’t, and a need to learn the truth. But there is usually no trauma associated with this that needs to be coped with.
Thus what happened in the Reddit post might not be applicable to the OP’s life. I am saying the adult children from the Reddit post sound like assholes (based on the OP’s description). On the other hand, everything monstro says about her own personal experience seems completely reasonable.
What I have done when any family member revert to old instincts and forget their place (har har remember when…) I try to sweetly bring context to the subject, that points out their errors in judgment regarding my experience in the matter. Succinctly, deviously , and pointedly. IT’s a shark pool of emotions and the old power plays sometimes surface.
But I would never want to approach my folks about old scars, I’ve forgiven/forgotten most of the not so great times, we’re as close as we need to be.
This is such an excellent reply imo. If I could I would award the post a !redditplatinum 
It’s interesting to imagine because it never really happened in real life. Which isn’t to say our parents never screwed up, because they did, especially my Dad, but that I can’t think of a single time my brother or I ever brought up any of the old hurts in front of either of them as adults without one of them bring it up first. Well, Mom would occasionally want to rehash things but Dad never did.
I’m sorry, monstro, but I can’t offer any advice because what you describe is just so alien to my experience. I suspect it’s probably healthier to not keep everything all bottled up like my brother and I did, though. One of those unpleasant artifacts that come with him and me having been raised by parents who both had serious mental illnesses (and in Dad’s case a short temper too), I guess…
Okay, I’m back.
As I said, my parents apologized for the errors they made in their own ways, but it left me with a question that will never be answered now that they’re gone. Did they treat me so well in my later years, especially my Mom who would tell me she loved me the most, because they really loved me or were trying to make amends for what happened in the past.
The confession of my Mom caused an anger inside me that lasted until the day she died and probably continues on. I’ll never know if the confrontation with my Dad and the confession from my Mom was for the better or worse. But I do know it changed our relationships forever.
I’m rather surprised by many of these replies, especially after monstro clarified the kind of abuse she was talking about. I dunno, maybe it’s my line of work (also knee-deep in child abuse, hey!) but I can relate to using humor to cope with horror. Especially if you’re not getting an apology, and worse, your parents are still gaslighting you, I’m going to have your back if this is your coping mechanism.
If this were a good coping mechanism, you wouldn’t have to keep bringing up the same stories, right? My parents were great, but then my father did something I don’t want to get into that pretty much wiped out the previous years of being a good father for years. I eventually learned to live with it, but didn’t heal, and it was always just under the surface. Every few years, something would trigger me to bring it up again, hoping for an apology, and if the apology wasn’t going to happen, I wanted to make him feel as badly as I did. Especially years later, when he rewrote history and pretended the situation never happened. My view was - why should he get to seemingly forget what he did when I’m still carrying it, all these years later? I really (childishly) wanted him to love me enough to want to give me closure, but it’s healthier (although harder) to accept that he just didn’t have it in him, and there was nothing I could do about it and continually picking at that scab, hoping for a different outcome wasn’t helping, so it was time to find another way. I guess bringing it up over and over again was assholish, but at present, I don’t have it in me to feel bad about, which is not an answer to the question, really.
So far, you’ve hardly gone past repeating the cliche. And a very one-sided one at that. Treating this topic properly would probably take a whole essay (I actually have an article written up for the very purpose of debunking the notion that parents should be easily forgiven because “they do the best they can and make mistakes along the way”; I just haven’t gotten around to revising it and finding a place to post it). I do agree with you that there are situations, perhaps many, where parents will make a decision about their children in good faith, believing it to be the best one (or after not being sure what to do), whereas in the long run, a different course of action might have been better. I’m sure that if I had kids, there would be things that I would do in good faith that I might, in hindsight, have done otherwise if I could do it again. Everyone makes mistakes and no one here is saying that a parent is expected to be “perfect”. I don’t think that one should scrutinize every single action that a parent did or that one should have no empathy or understanding for their side of the story, but there are genuine grievances that one might have toward one’s parents, and the latter should not be able to avoid responsibility for any actions merely because it’s supposedly hard to raise kids. You say that there are “some things that are obviously wrong” like “abuse”, but do you realize that abusers also justify themselves with arguments like “I did the best I could”? Also, there are a lot of selfish, unfair and unjustified things that an average parent, as opposed to one who might easily be seen by society as a blatant abuser, might commit. One problem with this idea of expecting people to have understanding for their parents’ actions and be slow to criticize them is that it assumes benevolence on the parents’ part. Anyone can say “I did the best I could!” I read it as code for “I will not have my parenting of you scrutinized. How dare you think I wronged you in any way?” Yes, most parents probably don’t set out to ruin their children’s lives, but that doesn’t mean that the average parent is necessarily 100% benevolent. I firmly believe that a parent can be both loving and caring and selfish (perhaps on a subconscious level) at the same time. As I already said, society indoctrinates people to treat parents with deferential respect, and many people grow up thinking that, now that they have children, it’s now their turn to be deferred to. I can give numerous examples of things parents have made their kids do, or treatment they have subjected them to, that were not in the child’s best interest but simply served to please the parent. I suggest that anyone who persists in imagining parents as these generally benevolent, well-meaning people who only make decisions in their child’s best interests and rarely make anything other than honest mistakes spend some time reading the “narcissistic parents” reddit subthread.
If I were a parent, I would not want to be shown this level of understanding; I would also want to be subject to reasonable scrutiny for my actions toward my children. They are the weaker, dependent ones; I shouldn’t be the one to be just handed a get out of jail free card.
So if your kids come to you and call you out on something, you should be willing to listen to their grievance. If you think your decision was justfied or understandable under the circumstances, your response should not be the bald cop-out “I did the best I could”. IMO you should as a minimum offer an explanation, i.e. “I did what I did because of XYZ.” And you shouldn’t assume you couldn’t have done something better than you did; that is arrogant.
No, I’m sorry. Just no. This is exactly the sense of parental entitlement that I am criticizing above. You don’t have a blanket right to “fuck up” and to be (even metaphorically) an “asshole”. You will make some mistakes, but you need to have a starting point where you will see your child as worthy of your respect, and make a genuine effort to right by them. There are honest mistakes and then there are “mistakes” arising from your selfishness, sloth or negligence, or from your abusive or malicious nature. If you commit any of the latter, then you are an asshole and your children have the right to be an asshole back to you. You are not a higher being than your children.
I can’t resist commenting on the above example. I categorically believe that doing this is cruel and unjustified, even if the girl ended up enjoying the martial arts program. In this post I am not criticizing the above mother herself but the practice in general (that, is, I don’t think that forcing your child into an arbitrarily-selected extracurricular activity and making them stick with it against their will is a justified “well-meaning mistake”). Even though this case may ultimately have looked like a “success story”, she first had to suffer being forced through it. I don’t think that the period of time when she hated doing it should count for nothing. Whatever “good life skills” the mom thought it instilled, no one has become a failure in life simply because they didn’t do X extracurricular activity as a child. It’s simply cruel.
Secondly, stories like the above fail to take into account cases where the result wasn’t such a success. For example, my mother made me learn the piano for two years. I had no wish to do this and resented it all the way. I did eventually enjoy playing some pieces but had no desire to persevere in it on the whole and it was not a rewarding experience. I only practiced for the half hour I was required to do per day before doing my homework. As soon as I could stop, I did and eventually lost all my piano playing skills.
Is this something I resent? I don’t dwell on this one thing in particular, but I do feel that by being forced to play the piano, rights that I think I should have had were violated. I wish I could have simply refused to have my free time regulated and encroached on in this way. This, in and of itself, is not something I would specifically call out my mother on (there is a plethora of much more serious treatment that I would hold her responsible for), but yes, I do resent it ultimately. (When it comes to the piano episode, more than my mother herself I resent the power she was given to make me learn the piano).
It may well be true that while some people may resent having been forced to participate in a parent-chosen extracurricular activity, others may say, “I’m glad my parents forced me to stick with X activity”. But I always say that rights should exist for those who want and need them. You could use this kind of logic to justify making a child do anything that you can construe as being somehow good for them on some level. Instead, I think people who were* not* made to stick with an activity should *not *blame their parents for not making them do it but should take responsibility for their choice and, if they want and have the ability, try to take same activity up as adults. I also think that one reason why some people can say “I wish my parents had made me…” is because they have internalized the prevalent social meme of having uncritical respect for parental authority, which makes it easier for them to say such things once they are no longer under that authority.
You might be right, but I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise. Some people need therapy or psychotropic medication for the rest of their lives to cope; the fact that they’re never “done” doesn’t mean it isn’t working. Also, we’re not talking about whether it’s unhealthy for the victim, but about whether it’s fair to the perpetrator. It could be both, or neither. Finally, I’m not sure the OP was talking about bringing up the same stories, or different stories that all relate to a theme. Does that make a difference?
Nope. Nope. Nope.
You can say this because you didn’t grow up in an abusive home.
This is true in normal homes where normal humans raise kids and makes normal mistakes. It’s not true in cases of abuse or emotional neglect. I have two siblings who essentially went crazy from the abuse, an older brother who reacted by sexually abusing children in his late teens, a sister who is emotionally distant from everyone except her children, and I’ve had my struggles.
It turns out that in the case of abuse or severe emotional neglect that critical emotional development doesn’t occur. The brain actually develops differently, something which has been verified by PET scans of the brain. These people can get stuck with emotionally immature responses, sometimes for life.
It’s possible to change, and fortunately the field of trauma therapy is making tremendous strides.
However. for people who didn’t go through it, you simply can’t relate. Don’t feel bad, without training, therapists don’t get it either.
I have no idea how fucked up the family was in question. I’m fortunate that my father died long ago so I don’t have to deal with him anymore. He would have done the same thing in denying that anything was wrong.
The stories that my siblings tend to bring up (among ourselves, regardless if our parents are within earshot) tend to be the same ones. They are the more humorous of the messed-up episodes of our childhoods, but not necessarily the most messed-up ones. Like, there’s one story we NEVER bring up because it’s just not funny (and besides, I don’t have a memory of it despite everyone insisting I was in the room when it happened).
I mean, I’m not going to perpetrate like I (or my siblings) are highly self-actualized people with no baggage. But I really don’t think we are as emotionally burdened as some posters seem to think. We just enjoy gallows humor (we are similar to our parents in that respect) and don’t really care too much in our old age about stroking our parents’ egos every minute we are with them.
Our parents didn’t raise us to be sensitive people. They certainly aren’t sensitive people–they make fun of everyone and everything. My parents invented snark. And they will probably snark till their dying day. So I guess that’s why I’m not understanding some of the pearl-clutching that has been expressed in this thread.
I did know that the OP was talking about the same stories, because it was in the first post. And yes, I do know what the original question asked, (and I acknowledged that I wasn’t really answering it). Anyway, if you are going to therapy and you remain at step zero of the healing process for years, I would also wonder if you shouldn’t consider seeking out a different therapist or a different type of therapy, or even asking about a different medication, although medication is in a different category.
It’s too late for me to edit, but this does tip the scales slightly away from justified assholishness. I don’t really get how respecting your parents’ feelings and saving your jokes for later would qualify as stroking their ego, but this is a family dynamic I’m completely unfamiliar with.
This thread and the OP’s insistence that his parents apologize for what they did (a reason or justification for their actions seems to be of no consequence), reminds of My Lobotomy
by Charles Fleming and Howard Dully. When I first read the synopsis of the book, a young boy is unjustifiably given a lobotomy by a doctor who did operation of 2,500 others, I thought, “The doctor and his parents are compete a-holes!”. But by the end of the book I realized that the real a-hole was the author, who was a bad kid (don’t remember all the things he did) that given the timeframe, 1960 when he had the lobotomy, it was considered a valid treatment for an obviously disturbed, possibly dangerous child.
Not saying the OP is an a-hole, but there’s always two sides to every story and sometimes the truth be better left unsaid.
BTW, thankfully I don’t have kids, because despite what the general and the law says, I firmly believe that sometimes a kid needs a good wack to remind them that there are real life consequences to being an a-hole. Better to get a whack from me than someone taking a bat to his/her head!
You have misread my posts. I am not insisting or expecting anything from my parents.
And I’m a woman, btw.
There are things I know my parents regret in how they parented me. And there are different things I wish they’d done differently. But I agree with Voyager, having kids of my own has given me a new perspective - because I have regrets about how I parented them, and they wish we’d done some things differently. As a parent, you do the best you can at the time with the knowledge and resources you have available - and frequently, you come up short. Sometimes you know it at the time - sometimes only hindsight will shed light.
I think its rude to look at someone who made a million decisions about how to raise you - most of them pretty good - and made a million sacrifices to do so - and to continually pick at the mistakes - even the big ones.
However, if most of the decisions were pretty bad and the sacrifices weren’t made or the intentions were bad … Although it would be better to just walk away than to continue to pick at it.
Would you stop reminding them of their failures if they did? In the OP, you say that if they want you to stop, they should apologize, and that’s why I think some people understood that to be your goal. Now it sounds like you feel that they should live with the consequences of not raising you to care about their feelings.
It is more that I feel if they want their kids to avoid certain topics, it is their responsibility to bring closure to those topics. I believe the best way to bring closure to an incident is to acknowledge that an incident happened and to apologize for how it turned out. The worse way to bring closure is to deny it ever happened.
We don’t bring up “old shit” that our parents have apologized for (at least not in their presence), because that would be cruel. Nor do we bring up “old shit” that would be fall into the category of “good intention but poor execution”.
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