Did They Really Know?

There's a sentence estranged parents hear that lands like a verdict: you knew better, and you just didn't do better.

It sounds airtight. It isn't.

"Knew better" is doing quiet double duty in that sentence. It's borrowing knowledge a person has now - built over years of therapy, reading, watching their own kids do things differently - and projecting it backward onto a version of themselves that didn't have it yet. That's not memory. That's hindsight, and hindsight doesn't announce itself as bias. It feels like certainty.

Here's an example from my own life. I never once saw my parents date. Not a single instance of someone coming to the door, or a parent saying "I'm going out tonight." What I witnessed was two people already married - arrived, fixed, no courtship visible anywhere in my childhood. As an adult, I didn't know how to date. I still find it hard. Every time I'm drawn to someone, the question underneath isn't "do I like spending time with this person" - it's "could this be the one I build a life with." Because that was the only shape of relationship I'd ever seen modeled. Nothing lighter. Nothing exploratory. Nothing with room to simply not work out.

No one would look at that and say I "knew better" about dating and chose not to do it well. I didn't have the input. You can't draw water from a well that was never dug.

Apply that same logic to parenting from obligation instead of desire - a claim making the rounds in parenting content right now, usually framed as a binary: either you parented from duty, or you parented from real care. I'd push back on the binary itself before accepting either label. Real parenting doesn't sort neatly into two bins. A parent can rock a colicky baby at 2 a.m. out of aching love on a Monday and go through identical motions on Thursday out of nothing but grim duty - same child, same week, both true, not sequential. This is a Both/And situation being sold as an Either/Or diagnosis, and Either/Or performs well online precisely because it's clean, not because it's accurate.

So when an adult child says "you knew better," the more useful question a parent can ask isn't "did I know." It's: what would I have needed to have access to, in order to do differently? For a lot of parents raising kids in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the honest answer is: not much. No searchable attachment theory. No mainstream therapy language. No algorithm serving you alternative models of parenting from families that weren't your own. What you had was what was modeled in your house - and if that was obligation and sacrifice, that's the well that got dug. Meanwhile, millennials and Gen Z came of age inside a completely different information environment - a flood of language, models, and permission that simply didn't exist for their parents at the same life stage. This isn't an excuse. It's context, and context changes what "knowing better" could have possibly meant in real time.

I also want to gently retire a word here: abuse. I understand its pull - it names something serious, and minimizing language does its own damage. But I'd offer "harm" instead, because harm doesn't require proving intent to be real. "You harmed me" is a claim about impact. "You abused me," in the clinical sense, is a claim about a deliberate pattern - and collapsing the two is what turns "you knew better" into "you consciously chose to hurt me," a much bigger leap than the evidence usually supports. A chosen harm is, psychologically, easier for an adult child to hold than an unconscious one - it means the world still makes sense, that harm has a villain and a boundary. An unconscious, capacity-limited harm is scarier, because it means harm can happen without one. So impact quietly becomes proxy evidence for intent, because intent is invisible and impact isn't.

Here's what I think actually explains why some people - parents and adult children both - can hold "you loved me and you harmed me" as one sentence, and others cannot get near it without collapsing into all-or-nothing: nervous system regulation. Not intelligence. Not how much someone has read. Regulation.

I can say this from the inside. My nervous system is regulated around my children now, because I've done real healing work there. It is not regulated, to the same degree, around my family of origin because that work isn't finished. Same person. Two capacities. As healing progresses, triggers reduce, and the binary loosens on its own; that's not something you talk a person into, it's something their nervous system becomes able to hold. This is true in both directions. A parent who can't hear "I caused harm" without collapsing into defense isn't necessarily in denial. An adult child who can't hold "and they loved me" next to "and they hurt me" isn't necessarily being unfair. Both may simply not have the regulated capacity yet and that's not a moral failing on either side. It's a location on a healing timeline, and it's workable.