Let's Talk About Parenting

Couples rarely come to me because they've fallen out of love. The most common reason they come is to repair what has ruptured between them, the slow accumulation of misunderstanding and defense that builds in any long partnership. But close behind it, almost as often, is something else entirely: their children.

A nine year old who has stopped listening to anything either parent says. A fourteen year old who is dissociating, lying, hiding in a room with the door locked, cutting in places no one noticed for months. A six year old having meltdowns so large the whole household reorganizes around managing them.

Parents who love their children fiercely and still cannot reach them, cannot hold a boundary that sticks, cannot tell whether they are doing too much or not enough, and have stopped trusting their own instincts.

This blog series is an attempt to look at what is happening underneath these struggles. Not the parenting advice that floods every feed and bookshelf, but the deeper architecture: what these parents were given, what they were not, and what they are now, often desperately, trying to offer children whose needs are real and whose distress is not exaggeration.

It begins with four words almost everyone uses and almost no one defines precisely enough to be useful.

Responsibility. Discipline. Consequence. Accountability.

Responsibility is the simplest of the four and the most foundational. It refers to the fact of one's own actions, words, behavior, conscious or not. I said this. I did this. I had this thought. I went to that place. Responsibility also includes something quieter and easy to miss: the capacity to respond to one's own sensory and emotional experience, to notice what I am feeling in my body and choose, from that noticing, what to say or do or refrain from doing. This is not about anyone else. It is entirely about a person's relationship to themselves. Their ability to respond to their own sensations, emotions and thoughts.

Discipline comes from the Latin discipulus, meaning pupil, student, follower of a teacher. Disciplina meant instruction, the transmission of knowledge from someone further along to someone just beginning. A disciple is not someone being punished. A disciple is someone following a model worth becoming, which is how a child first learns to develop the kind of self-relationship responsibility requires. You cannot teach yourself to notice your own internal experience in a vacuum. You learn it by following someone who already knows how.

Consequence comes from consequi, to follow with, to follow closely. A consequence is simply what comes next, the natural continuation of a choice already made. Not punishment delivered from outside, but the next link in a chain the child is learning to perceive.

Accountability traces back to the Latin computare, to calculate, and putare, to reckon. To be accountable was to be able to give an account, to reckon honestly with the effect of what you had done. This is where the circle closes, and it depends entirely on responsibility already being in place. Accountability means taking in another person's experience of having been affected by your choice of self-expression, without explaining, defending, or justifying your choice. It means understanding that your existence has impact on others whether you intend it or not. And crucially, it means returning afterward to your own body, to the response-ability you already have in relationship to yourself, and letting yourself feel whatever arises there, grief, remorse, sorrow, pleasure joy . . . so that awareness of the feeling itself can inform how you choose to respond/act next time.

Responsibility without accountability stays sealed inside the self, accurate but isolated. Accountability without responsibility has nothing to return to, no internal home for the reflection from the other to land in, so it either collapses into performance or never comes into play at all. The relationship between the two, responsibility feeding into accountability, accountability circling back to deepen responsibility, is the actual architecture of what I mean when I say someone has become an adult. Not everyone will agree with my orientation, but let's explore and see how far we get.

Back to the four words . . . none of which originally referred to dominance or control or punishment. Responsibility meant a clear relationship to one's own actions and experience. Discipline meant following a worthy model on the journey to one’s own becoming. Consequence referred to continuity in flow; the natural next thing that would flow from words and actions. Accountability meant reckoning honestly with your impact, with the outcome or result of your words and actions. Four words pointing toward a single developmental movement, which is largely missing in the homes of the clients I sit with every week.

Over a number of decades and through multiple generations our understanding and experience of these capacities narrowed into something harder, less supportive or resilient. Responsibility, the one word that should have kept us closest to the self, often got swallowed into the others, treated as a synonym for blame rather than as the quiet, foundational capacity to know one's own experience. Discipline became restriction imposed by an authority, fear as the operating mechanism. Consequence became punishment, pain and loss delivered from an outside source of judgment. Accountability nearly vanished from the collective vocabulary of parenting altogether, crowded out by its conflation with responsibility-misinterpreted; accountable to the other person and responsible for their pain.

This didn't happen by accident, and it didn't begin with the parents sitting across from me.

A Half Century of Course Correction

I’m a boomer, and many, if not most of my generation grew up inside the more punitive versions of these words. A belt. A wooden spoon. A father's silence that could fill a house for days. Discipline, for many of us, really did mean fear. Consequence really did mean pain. So, when this generation became parents, and when their children became parents in turn, the culture began a long, often well-intentioned swing in the other direction.

Following the boomers, subsequent generations of parents wanted, more than almost anything, to avoid becoming their own fathers and mothers. They remembered the fist, or the cold withdrawal, or the silence that could fill a house for days, and they built their parenting in direct reaction against it. What they often built instead was warmth without follow through. Connection without containment. Research on parenting styles has long distinguished this permissive approach, high warmth, low structure, from an authoritative (not authoritarian) one that holds both warmth and boundaries together. The first generation knew exactly what they didn't want to repeat. Few of them had ever seen the second one modeled. I wonder if good modeling is still needed today

There is a particular version of this that deserves its own naming: the parent as friend. A father who wants, more than almost anything, to be liked by his own children. A mother who relates to her teenage daughter as a peer, a confidante, someone to process her own feelings with. This is not new exactly, but it has a distinctly contemporary flavor, tangled up with a culture wide resistance to aging itself. An entire industry now exists to help adults look young, feel young, stay relevant to youth culture indefinitely. Boomers who once swore they'd never trust anyone over thirty are, decades later, still trying not to look or act like the elders they have technically become.

A child cannot follow a peer the way a child needs to follow a teacher. Discipline, in its true sense, requires someone steadier and further along to follow. When the adult in the room needs to be liked more than they need to be trusted, when they need to be young more than they need to be the elder, there is no one left to follow. There is only another person, slightly larger, also looking for approval.

Children Adapt

Children raised in these generational phases of reactivity did not simply grow up unstructured and carefree. Children are remarkably intelligent, and an intelligent organism does not experience the absence of containment as freedom. Children experiences it as exposure, which is generally not experienced as safe or secure.

So, with survival being the prime directive, some children adapted by becoming, themselves, the structure their household lacked. This is adultification: not simply maturing early, but taking on the actual function of an adult because the situation required steadiness no available adult was supplying. The child who manages the household's logistics. Who reads the parent's emotional weather and adjusts to keep things calm. Who becomes, functionally, the most reliable presence in the home, because reliability had become an unfilled vacancy.

This is not simply a child who became responsible. In structural family systems terms, the adultified child typically ascends past competence into something more particular: they become a confidante, an ally, almost a partner to the parent, rather than a caregiver in the practical sense. The parentified child does the parent's job. The adultified child becomes the parent's peer, the one they turn to for validation, for company, for someone who finally understands them. The parent often mistakes the child's eager participation in this role for insight or maturity, never quite registering that underneath the child's willingness is a quiet fear of what happens if they refuse.

It is worth naming, again, that this is one adaptation among several available to a child whose central task is maintaining the security of attachment. Some children disappear instead. Some please. Some dissociate. Some develop symptoms such as injury or illness that finally bring attention no direct request ever could. Adultification is the strategy of becoming the competent one. It is often the most rewarded of all the available strategies, which is part of why it is the hardest to later recognize as a strategy at all.

The challenge we are addressing in this series is the fact that the adultified child grows up. They are now the parent sitting across from me, somewhere between thirty five and fifty five years old, exhausted, watching their own children refuse to listen, watching their own marriage cycle through the same corrosive disconnection again and again, with no idea that the competence they are bringing to the problems they face now is competence developed for an entirely different environment and different survival needs, decades ago, in a household that needed something very different than what their current family relationships need.

Need itself is confusing and disorienting to the adutified child who has grown up chronologically, but not emotionally. Their own need was repressed and unmet as a matter of course. Survival required suppressing their essential selves.

The adultified child grows up physically. They become an adult in body, in appearance, in every outward marker the world uses to measure maturity. But the identity living inside that grown body is still the child who learned to perform adult competence in place of being seen and met as a child with need. The lovely and capable people in my office are so often children in adult clothing, doing adult jobs, raising children of their own, without ever having emotionally or psychologically grown up.

Developmentally, the reciprocal, relational flow that Responsibility, Discipline, Consequence, and Accountability were always meant to produce never fully embodied for so many of us. These capacities are intellctually understood. They are discussed fluently, sometimes taught to others. But they aren’t integrated and aligned in our behaviors and choices. Ironically, the childhood performance of these traits or capacities was never intended to produce genuine connection. The performance was intended to maintain attachment and belonging. To literally distance the child and their parent from the child’s need by prioiritizing the parent, thus ensuring the child's survival.

The adultified child’s competence exists precisely to keep the original need, the one that gave rise to the strategy in the first place, safely out of consciousness.

So yes, competence. But underneath it, carried quietly and for a very long time, isolation. Separation. A loneliness buried so far beneath the performance that the person performing as an adult may not yet know it's there.

What that competence is actually covering, what it leaves out, and the cost to the children of adultified child/parents is where we go next.