“Anything exciting this week?”
It was the usual chit-chat that dads do after service, going over the weekly summaries of what had or hadn’t happened recently. As we took turns sharing, one of the dads was detailing his strategy for playing board games with his son so as to keep him from becoming despondent. He explained that he went to such great lengths so that one day, his son “wouldn’t need to go to therapy.”
I hear this phrase, or some version of it, all. the. time. (My particular favorite is “I don’t want my kids to have to go to therapy because of my childhood.”)
I understand what moms and dads mean when they say this, namely, they don’t want to emotionally harm or traumatize their children. Count me in. And yet, it is quite odd that many parents today have a truly nauseating aversion to the idea that, someday, twenty years from now, one of their children could be talking to someone about them on BetterHelp.1 The greatest primal fear of parenting has gone from how we can keep our kids physically safe to how we can keep them emotionally safe. Again, count me in. However, because emotional safety is subjective and ephemeral by nature, it places excessive pressure on parents to create a reality for their children that is impossible to achieve.
And I feel this pressure.
If I check my text messages in front of my child, am I a disengaged parent? When I speak firmly to set boundaries, am I causing her emotional trauma? What if I use daycare? Am I choosing career over family? How will my actions today be realized and thought through in several decades? And, the grandaddy of them all, can everything I am doing right now be explained using the DSM-5?
These questions would have sounded like communism to my grandparents, or the type of language used by the Manson Family, not the nuclear family.
My generation has been inundated with therapeutic tools and therapy-speak. Which, to be clear, this is a pro-therapy Substack. And these days it seems like the new fad is discrediting therapy as a helpful enterprise, but that is not the goal of this post.
However, rather quickly, it seems as if every boss is a narcissist, and being bloated can be used as a self-diagnostic for depression. But equally, many of us have benefited tremendously from therapy and, particularly, insight psychology, which seeks to find the why behind your what.2 For example, a person (you, not me) gets overly angry at feedback because during their childhood, mistakes led to very disastrous consequences from parental figures. And this is a very helpful tool when used appropriately.
But all too often we come to the realization that who we are, in a negative sense, and all that has happened to us, in a traumatic sense, tends to stem from one or both peoples—mom and dad.
To be overly simplistic, we millennials and Gen Zers have developed a habit of blaming our parents (and their parents) for our perceived faults while taking credit for our successes. We are anxious because of our upbringing, but we were able to graduate from college and secure jobs thanks to our own resilience.
But now, we’re suffering from the consequences of this behavior.
As parenting has become a verb, parents are spending more time with their children (whether staying at home or not) than previous generations ever did. It is not a stretch to speculate that today, an average working dad spends more active and intentional time with their kids than a stay-at-home mom did in the 1950s. We are all more invested and present in our families. This is a wonderful thing. But why exactly are we so invested? Is it to love and help raise resilient children to the best of our ability, knowing we will fail them and they us? Or is it so that one day, we hope that they won’t blame us, like we blamed our parents?
Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents?
“When I asked one young adult about her chronic feelings of anxiety, she didn’t mention the long hours she worked for Uber in order to make ends meet while she took classes at the local college, her difficulty finding affordable childcare for her toddler as a single mother, or her worry about her ability to finish college and have a career. Instead, she blamed her parents for her feelings of anxiety and insecurity.”3
In the middle of John’s Gospel, Jesus is departing from the Temple and passes a man “blind from birth” (ek genetēs). Given the disability’s hereditary or genetic nature, the disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2). This may seem like a crude question about someone with a physical disability, but some Jews did believe that babies could sin in the womb (Genesis Rabbah 63:6) or sin by proxy of their mother’s actions. For instance, pregnant women who prostrated their bodies to worship idols, by nature of their position, were causing their fetus to worship (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:6).4 The disciples’ question is not intended to be offensive but rather one of theological concern. Why has this man been punished? Who sinned? They assume that a person’s differences or faults must be associated with their parents’ actions. And what the disciples asked Jesus then, we ask our therapist now. Namely, whose fault is it that I am who I am?
A few of my mentors and friends are now empty-nesters, a season of life they assumed would be filled with travel, adventure, and expendable income. But not too few of them have reported to me that this season has been interrupted by heartbreaking news from their adult children. This usually takes the form of a sit-down conversation, in which their children inform them that a particular moment or parenting style has marked them for the worse. Usually, parents are encouraged by their children to seek therapy, and then are given labels for their behaviors by their children, ranging from the diagnosable (ADHD) to the speculative (codependency).
The parents I have talked to are puzzled by these conversations. They’d assumed that if they gave their children a better life than they had, all would be well. But now parents are hearing for the first time how their actions have impacted their children internally. For most older generations, it is truly bewildering. And for many families, these types of conversations or emotional charges have resulted in their child cutting off all communication (a trend that is currently skyrocketing in America). And of course, it is hard to paint with a broad brush. Indeed, sometimes, these types of conversations can produce good fruit.5
However, we should be alarmed by this trend of estrangement. For instance, among some 7,000 estranged parents surveyed in April of this year, a third believed their adult child’s therapist had influenced or recommended the decision to end the relationship. It is becoming a regular pattern that kids attend therapy, blame their parents, and then cut them out. Like the prodigal son, we’ve received our (traumatic) inheritance and want them out.
This is, of course, not to say that our parents are not, to some extent, responsible for our brokenness today. God himself states that sin lingers around for three to four generations (Ex. 34:7). And anyone who’s done a family genogram can attest to the brokenness of our families and how it has directly affected us. But in pursuing the origin of our brokenness, have we mistakenly believed that we are only who we are because of what someone has done wrong?
It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that. . .
In John’s Gospel, sight (along with the other four senses) plays a particular role in belief in the Messiah Jesus. We are told to “behold the Lamb of God” (1:36), and Jesus’s death and resurrection were something to see (19:35; 20:18). Indeed, John’s entire invitation to his audience can be summarized in his repeated phrase, “come and see” (1:39, 46, 4:29, 12:21, cf. 11:34). But the only time Jesus actually heals a blind person in the Fourth Gospel comes in this question about parental sin.
Instead of affirming the parent’s responsibility or casting blame (which Jesus has no interest in), Jesus instead offers that this man has been born blind so that “the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3). This man is who he is, not due to hereditary sin, but he has been crafted and molded by His Creator, and his perceived flaws actually display the works of God.
Parenting in 2026 is, to put it mildly, insane. Parents have access to the latest research and information on every possible product and personality trait. Everything about your child, from facial expressions to audible cues, is Googleable, and somehow, you are already behind. There are books, podcasts, Bible studies, charts, memes, Instagram accounts, and TikTok videos that specialize in the most niche moment of a child’s life. And so many of us will chase every lead and possible solution to give our child the best life we can.
All this as a non-parent can seem laughable, after all, “How hard can it be? People have been doing it for thousands of years!” I remember scoffing at parents who spent money on organic diapers when I was a DINK. “Not me, when that day comes, I’ll be buying my kiddo diapers from Costco, thank you very much.” And you better believe when my sweet baby girl came, I purchased the most organic cotton known to humanity. If a single ounce of fiber on that diaper wasn’t organic (including the velcro), I wouldn’t dare put my daughter at such a risk.
We’re all going to great lengths for our children: asking ourselves questions our parents never asked, purchasing products that didn’t exist five years ago but are now essential, and reading/learning everything we can so that they might thrive. And yet one day our child could very well ask themselves, “Am I broken because of my parents?”
But the task of parenting cannot (or should not) be reduced to not being like our parents or to stressing over who will be to blame in the future. We will make regrettable decisions that harm our children. We will damage them, make them cry, make them angry, make them sad, and make them embarrassed. And regardless of whether we are scholars of Jungian psychology and up to date on the American Pediatric Association’s recommendations on the latest sippy cups, we will continually fail as parents. But in our repeated failures as parents, we do our best to acknowledge our brokenness and ask God to allow His works to manifest in our perceived faults. A prayer that my wife and I pray over our child each night is, “God let your love for her be reflected in us and by us, so that in her receiving our love, she might glorify you.” It is our hope that even in our brokenness, God’s works will be displayed in us to her.
Perhaps one day our children might blame us, point fingers at our idiosyncrasies, and tell us how we damaged them. And they may very well be right. But it is our hope that our children might also look at themselves and see all their imperfections and wounds that we passed down to them, and still view themselves as the image of God and ask how they, too, might display the works of God. We pray that our children will not only focus on the origin of their brokenness, but also be continuously focused on the divine purpose for it.
Punchinello and Parenting
In the early days of my daughter’s life, I read and reread You Are Special to her by Max Lucado. I love this book. It’s a story about Punchinello, a wooden doll, who is constantly pestered by his fellow toy dolls (Wemmicks) about his imperfections. The Wemmicks classify each other by placing positive marks (gold stars) for nice features and negative marks (gray dots) for defects. Punchinello was covered in gray dots left by his peers. But everything changes when Punchinello visits his maker, Eli the woodcarver. Eli assures Punchinello that every perceived imperfection was handcrafted by him on purpose. And he reminds Punchinello that he is very special, but Punchinello remains somewhat skeptical of the claim.
The book concludes with Punchinello ending his meeting with Eli:
“As he leaves, Eli says, ‘Remember, you are special because I made you. And I don’t make mistakes.’ Punchinello didn’t stop, but in his heart, he thought, ‘I think he really means it.’ And when he did, a [gray] dot fell to the ground.”6
A beautiful reminder for kids and adults alike.
The world will continue to try to psychoanalyze and Punnett-square everything wrong with us, but Jesus reminds us that the most fundamental aspect of ourselves is not who our parents are or what we’ve done wrong, but that we have a creator who made us on purpose. That, indeed, we are very special to him. In an age of blaming parents, may we be freed of the stars and dots, and embrace our maker.7
Use my promocode: Substack20.
I am using the definition of insight psychology from this Psychology Today article. “Insights can also come from the ‘top-down’— starting with a ‘why question or linking present to past, and then sensing whether it lands emotionally in the body.”
This is an excellent article from 6 years ago documenting this process. Joshua Coleman, “Estranged: When Feeling Good about Ourselves Matters More Than Filial Duty, Cutting Off Our Parents Comes to Seem Like a Valid Choice,” Aeon, December 17, 2020,
There are also nascent traces of this in the Old Testament (eg., Ps 58:4, Ps 58:3, Ge 25:22).
Believe it or not, emphasis original.
Footnote one is a joke.
I don’t remember who said it/shared this idea, maybe it was a sermon. Maybe Keller? If someone comes and accuses you, “Look how wicked you are… How could God ever love you?” coming back with “You don’t know the half of it. I am a great sinner, but Christ is a great Savior.” (That second part was John Newton) I’m a parent of a 2 year old and 1 year old, so we are a ways out. I want to be open to working through the inevitable hurt I will cause them without blame shifting. I want to be so secure in my forgiveness in Christ that I am eager to repair with them without it degrading my sense of self worth. Because it has always been true. I have always been more sinful than I realize, and more forgiven and loved than I realize.
This is so good. I wish every parent in the world could read this.