Our attitude
Parents might just be the most difficult people to forgive.
We can usually forgive children when they mess up. That’s what children do.
Most of us forgive the simple, everyday offenses that others commit against us. We couldn’t have meaningful relationships if we didn’t.
Some go even further and forgive the bigger hurts inflicted by coworkers, friends, siblings, and spouses.
But parents? Parents can be so hard to forgive.
How many adult children are still walking around with unhealed resentment toward their moms and dads long after the damage has been done? Long after they’ve reached an age where they should be mature enough to work through their pain and let it go.
Growing up
We have an intense longing for perfect parents. Part of this seems to be inborn, but we also quickly learn to expect our parents to always understand us and always meet all of our needs.
Right from the start they feed us when we’re hungry, comfort us when we’re upset, and change our diapers when they’re messy. The natural conclusion: These people take such good care of me, they must be perfect.
As time goes by, we become disillusioned. We’re understandably hurt and disappointed when they fail us. Which they always do.
And yet they expect us to obey them, as most of us do most of the time prior to adolescence. A perfect foundation for internal conflict. Which we later blame on them.
The Ten Commandments don’t tell moms and dads to raise their children well, but they do say to honor our parents. Parents have a natural tendency to want to raise their children well. We all have a natural tendency to remember their failures.
The blame game
In the twentieth century, “blame the parents for everything” psychology became common and powerful. I remember reading an article in the 1970s. (I’m pretty sure it was in Reader’s Digest.) It concerned a condition that hadn’t been talked about much up until then: autism. The behaviors associated with the condition had been blamed on poor parenting. But new research showed that they actually had a biological basis.
Around the same time, in my first job working with special needs children, I was told that kids with Down syndrome are naturally sweet and easy-going and loving. Therefore, if they misbehave consistently, it’s because their parents have been lax in their discipline.
Just recently, though, I was informed that the condition itself is associated with a tendency toward stubbornness. They do have a sweet, loving temperament that responds well to kindness. But they often present real behavioral challenges that can’t be due to their environment alone.
I look back in horror to a time when parents (especially moms) were blamed way beyond what they deserved for their children’s troubles. How did they live with the guilt being heaped on them?
Psychologists seem to have backed away from the insistence that every single issue stems from poor parenting, but it’s still easy to blame our own moms and dads for our troubles.
Freya India, a young author in the United Kingdom, describes a new twist on the blame game. Because most of them are not mental health care professionals, parents are now looked down on as incapable of being “helpful” to their children. Members of Gen Z (those born from about 1997 to 2012) are being encouraged to back away from their parents, who are obviously incompetent and usually harmful, and let therapists take on the roles—and the emotional connection—that used to belong to Mom and Dad.
Instead of being counseled to understand their parents, take responsibility for building better relationships with them, and forgive them for the mistakes they’re bound to make by simply being human, these young people are now advised to transfer the relationship to their therapists.
Forgiving
I hope I’ve forgiven my parents for their very real sins against me and my siblings. (Just to be clear—my childhood was mostly good, mostly happy. Overall, I think my parents did a good job. They definitely had their faults, though.)
As a Christian, I have all the tools I need to forgive my parents.
(I’m not going to discuss here why we should forgive, but a good book that deals in-depth with cancel culture’s blindness to the precious value of forgiveness is Timothy Keller’s Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I?. The following thoughts aren’t taken directly from that book, which I read after I’d written the original draft of this article, but of course some of them will overlap, since we’re both writing from a Christian perspective.)
I can forgive those who harm me because God forgave me. The enormity of my sins against Him far outweighs any debt anyone could ever owe me.
Every time I flaunt His commands, I’m replacing the sublime God with a measly little idol, blaspheming the name of the loving creator of the universe, defiling His image before the watching world, and giving the devil a foothold in my heart and mind. If a holy God can forgive me for all that, surely I can forgive those who sin against me.
I can see my parents as God sees them—as my fellow fallen human beings. They’re not any more perfect than I am. They need grace as much as I do. Of course they made mistakes. We all do.
When I was a support group leader at my church many years ago, I was taught that one way to forgive Mom or Dad is to grieve that which we long for but never had and never will have. We needed something from them that we didn’t receive.* They weren’t perfect.
I like that idea. It confirms that real harm has been done, but it leads us to recognize our own mistake in expecting perfection from imperfect people. And it provides a process for working through the issue. We can never heal from any emotional pain as long as we maintain a victim mentality instead of doing whatever we’re capable of doing to repair the damage to our souls.
As a Christian, I have a deeper appreciation for the value of suffering. God can use it to draw us closer to Him and to bless others, if we turn to Him in our need and grow in His likeness as we heal.
I heard a story many years ago from a young woman. (I think it was on a Christian radio station.) She had been raised by “perfect” parents. In her perception, they did everything right.
Then she left home, and she was totally lost. She had no idea how to cope with a world that didn’t love her unconditionally and meet her every need, as her parents had.
Children become better people when their parents do their job well. Paradoxically, though, they also become better people when their moms and dads mess up. We learn and grow because we’re forced to deal with parents who do the wrong thing sometimes. (Of course, this doesn’t excuse any form of intentional mistreatment.)
God as our Father
And then God goes and reveals Himself to us as our Heavenly Father. How does that affect our relationship with Him?
For those who’ve been abused or abandoned by their dads, thinking of God as a Father can lead to rebellion against Him and make it incredibly difficult to trust Him.
All of our dads disappointed us in one way or another. It can be easy to carry over that disappointment and lack of trust to a Father God, often without realizing what we’re doing.
At times, we might blame Him for hurting us. We can struggle with finding a way to forgive Him.
Some people—even Christians—will need months or years to work through the harm done by their earthly fathers. As a body of believers, we need to recognize that and do what we can to contribute to their healing.
At the same time, we all long to have a perfect father. To know his unconditional love. To be able to return to him when we’ve rebelled, knowing that he’ll welcome us back again. To know that he understands our sorrow and anger and fears and failures. And still loves us.
We all have that powerful desire. Only God can fulfill it.
*The handout from that group credits “Robert Bly, in the video ‘A Gathering of Men,’” for this insight.
