As we age and our parents pass away, we may be stumped with questions about our parents’ lives, the choices they made, and how our existence may have affected them. I know I am. I sometimes wonder why my siblings and I were so disappointing to my parents, and what ancestors further back might have thought of the choices we made in our lives.

My siblings and I were raised to feel that we owed quite a bit to our parents. My father, the first to go to college in his family, gave us the best educational opportunities to prepare us to become “something great.” The pressure was on to get a superior education and become exemplary in our chosen field. In response my sister excelled and become a role model in the areas of nursing, gerontology and long-term care. I had a career as an academic librarian and writer, and my brother John resisted Dad’s pressure as best he could. We all knew in the end John was a great disappointment to Dad, and I wasn’t exactly his star child either. I think he always wondered what happened to us. Why weren’t we as driven and successful as him.

The real question is, did we owe our lives to our parents? Historically I believe the answer is a resounding yes. Many believe the primary job of children is to be successful, make a lot of money and take care of their parents when they get elderly. That wasn’t the expectation in my family, thank goodness. I think my Dad believed that the success of his children reflected on him, and vice versa. He always wondered what happened to me and especially John.

As a psychologist I think I now understand what happened. Children naturally resist being told what to do. They may respond by doing the opposite, or in John’s case, doing exactly what he wanted to do. My siblings and I were plenty intelligent to do whatever we chose to do in life, but our self-esteem was irrevocable damaged by our parents belief that continually blaming and shaming children helps to toughen them up for the “real world.” Big mistake, but the damage was already done by our teenage years. That’s when my brother John told Dad to “fuck off” and left home for good. We rarely saw him after that.

Parents please listen, damaging your child’s self-esteem is a terrible way to prepare them for any world. It can easily destroy their lives. My sister and I were able to find good counseling over the years to remedy the destructiveness of our parents. That was the only way we could recover from such a tough childhood. John never did.