Care & Feeding: My Son Won't Forgive Me For My Misguided Advice

[minoanmiss]

Ten years ago, our son announced that he was using his engineering degree to enter a teacher-training program. I’m ashamed to share that my wife and I were horrified by this decision. We’d funded his college education with the expectation that he’d be financially independent, and we had no idea if he could make ends meet as a teacher. We begged him to reconsider. We didn’t want him to end up financially insecure the way my wife and I both were when we were kids. Despite our efforts, our son became a teacher and has blossomed in that field. He won multiple teaching awards and now works in school administration; he intends to stay in education forever. He does not make a ton of money, but he certainly makes enough for a quiet life with his fiancée.

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The problem is that he continues to hold on to ill feelings towards us about the way we treated his decision back in 2011. I will freely admit that my wife and I completely mishandled it. Instead of trusting him to make a good decision and asking questions to better understand his reasoning, we completely dominated every conversation and acted as if he wasn’t old enough to make his own decisions. In turn, he reacted with anger (as college students do) and said we were ruining his life. My wife now fears we’ve done permanent damage to the relationship. We’ve both apologized profusely, and our son does say he’s forgiven us and understands where we were coming from, but there is still distance there. He doesn’t talk to us about his teaching accomplishments and has said it’s because he still feels like we’re judging him. I’m heartbroken at the damage we’ve done—but I also feel like I’m being punished for wanting the best for him and choosing the wrong way to express it. I’m starting to get frustrated that he does not seem to be willing to let us repair the relationship. Do you have any ideas on how we address and apologize for the hurt we’ve caused, and move on as a family?

—Father of the Educator

Dear FotE,

I’m sorry to hear about the distance between you and your son; I’m sorry he still feels judged, and I’m sorry you’re so frustrated. But I’m not convinced that you understand what it is you need to be sorry for, which makes me wonder if your profuse apologies have been along the lines of “I’m sorry that you felt we were ruining your life” rather than “I’m sorry, we were utterly wrong, we did not understand that the decision was yours to make, or that wanting you to be a ‘financial success’ was more important to us at the time than your sense of fulfillment and happiness.” You say that you feel as if you’re “being punished for wanting the best for him.” The best what, exactly?

It seems pretty clear that after ten years he is still hurt and angry. He’s not “holding on to” his feelings: he feels them. If you want to make headway here, you are going to have to understand what his feelings are and why he has them—why he had them then, why he still does. If I had to guess, I’d bet that he feels resentful and judged because he feels—deeply—that you equate success with money. This is a message children pick up from their parents all the time, even when there isn’t the sort of outright crisis of values that occurred in your household: they hear their parents’ derisive remarks about other people’s choices of profession; they see how their parents treat people they don’t consider successful. It seems to me that you’ve done nothing up to this point to make clear to your son that you don’t equate money with success. It seems to me that in fact you still don’t see the problem for what it is—that you have confused “success” with earning power, and that you continue to confuse the two.

Is that really what makes a “successful” life? Earning the most money one can? Why? Your son has honorable, meaningful work he loves and is committed to; it seems he has a partner he loves and is committed to. He has a roof over his head and enough to eat and “certainly enough” for the life he is interested in leading. He doesn’t feel the need for anything else. Except perhaps your approval and genuine pride—and your heartfelt acknowledgment that you were wrong. Make sure when you tell him this, you mean it.

Comments

[shirou]

LW says he is "ashamed" that he and his wife reacted so badly to their son's decision. He says they "completely mishandled it." Why does the columnist assume LW is offering his son only half-apologies instead of admitting to having been wrong? Similarly, LW says his son has "blossomed" as a teacher and makes enough money to support himself, and he laments that his son does not share news of his teaching accomplishments. Why does the columnist believe LW still confuses success with earning power? It irritates me when columnists spend half their response upbraiding a LW who has already admitted wrongdoing and is seeking advice on how to make amends.

I like the point about showing genuine pride.

[purlewe]

I kinda wished the columnist had said that it might never happen. That their son has feelings and he might never share his accomplishments with them bc he is an adult and that is his choice. That LW can genuinely feel sorry, but that as an adult their child has ever right to not ever give more than they want to give in the relationship.

[kiezh]

The whole letter reeks of mealy-mouthed half-apology.

"he continues to hold on to ill feelings"
"as college students do"
"I also feel like I’m being punished for wanting the best for him"
"I’m starting to get frustrated"

As well as the sheer entitlement of "I want a close relationship with my kid, who I behaved terribly to, so he owes me that."

I can't imagine the person who wrote this letter actually having given a heartfelt apology to their son - for the right reasons, with the right expectations (i.e., none). It seems much more likely that they pulled the classic "I *said* I was sorry, it was a long time ago, you're being so immature to hold on to this! But faaaaaaaaamily!"

The columnist gave pretty good advice, I think, though rather than the money thing I would have focused in on "It's HIS life, you treated him like his life belonged to you and you had authority over it, you're still in fact doing that by insisting that he forgive you and forget your past behavior. Back the hell off and look at your entitlement issues. Try to interact with him in a way that isn't about you demanding a specific Child Performance and actually attempt to be a friend."

[conuly]

Yeah.

[minoanmiss]

1) THIS
2) you deserve whatever the columnist got paid
3) I wish I could forward your advice to the LW.

[cereta]

as college students do

1. Fuck. Off.

2. That? That right there? Is a red flag. Because LW is attributing the son's anger to a developmental stage, not to their behavior. LW may acknowledge that they did the damage, but they still see it as "for wanting the best for him and choosing the wrong way to express it," not "our values, sense of our child's worth, and parental behavior was totally fucked up." As long as LW wife continue to see this as just botched communication and not a completely inappropriate attempt to control their son's life, this isn't going to get better.

[melannen]

Hey OP? You say you've apologized, but have ever you told him you're proud of him? For what he's accomplished as a teacher? For having the courage to stand up to you when you were wrong? For following his heart and becoming a wonderful person on his own terms? If you haven't, start there. (If you aren't proud of him for that, start there.)

[conuly]

Maybe you can't repair the relationship, LW. Maybe you're not being punished, maybe he just doesn't want to be that close with you anymore, and that's not fixable.

[lemonsharks]

but there is still distance there

Oh look, actions have consequences :|

[green_grrl]

I have to admit, as soon as LW said “2011” I cut them a teeny bit of slack. The economy had just tanked. I’m sure the parents had been holding on to the relief that at least son was graduating in engineering and would hire into an $80K position, while they could continue on with their plans towards retirement without supporting a return-to-nester. There was A LOT of fear around failure to launch. It was the entire zeitgeist of the time.

However, it sounds like they handled it REALLY badly and son is understandably hurt. The best I can think of is for them to keep an ear out for those accomplishments and write a note or card of sincere congratulations each time saying how proud they are.

[minoanmiss]

The thing is, I kind of doubt this was an isolated incident. LW's son may have made a decision after two decades of listening to his parents deride people who didn't make a lot of money as "losers", and may have spent years knowing he could never tell his parents about any small daily setback or stressor without their saying "we told you so! Teaching is for suckers! Give up now!"

I mean, I could be wrong in all of this, but from what I've seen of people, there tend to be ongoing patterns rather than one big out of character incident.

[green_grrl]

Yeah, could have been over years. Even the description in the letter sounds like several months, at least—enough to leave a scar.

[conuly]

Yup. Estrangement and semi-estrangement rarely has just one trigger, even if that's the only one the estranged party is willing to acknowledge.

[melannen]

That might make sense if he was switching to an arts degree or something? But I was busy failing to launch around that time and teaching was never a degree you worried about job security with - there is never not a teacher shortage. (I mean my parents begged me not to become a teacher because they'd both been teachers who were overworked, underpaid, and stuck in toxic working conditions where they weren't allowed to actually do a good job, and in 2008 Bush had just finished 8 years of making all that worse - they preferred me staying at home being depressed and broke to that fate - but as teachers they were never worried about being *unemployed*.)

[green_grrl]

The reason there’s a teacher shortage is because your parents aren’t the only ones who know teachers are horrifically underpaid. Meanwhile, the cost of housing only continues to rise. LW was probably well aware son might or might not scrape by. (SF, LA? A job was no guarantee of affording housing.)

[melannen]

Yeah, but that's true whether there's been an economic crash or job shortage or not? Right now employment levels are great and teachers are *still* horrifically underpaid. You're basically just agreeing that the parents were right.

(The parents probably were right tbh - I note that the son also got out of teaching and into administration ASAP*. I listened to my parents and am working a related job that is also not paying enough to live on around here, but at least is not overworked is a lot less stressful. It's possible that he's awkward with the parents' apologies because he's realized they were right about the financial aspect, given that, you know, he's no longer teaching. I know a lot of people who love teaching but I know very few who love being a teacher, and pretty much all of them are married to someone with a much higher income.)


*which is still much easier for male teachers than female teachers

[minoanmiss]

They may have been technically right (the best kind of right) about his earning power, but they were still pretty evidently emotionally terrible, and LW at least is still dismissive.

[melannen]

It's always hard to tell with these letters from parents that boil down to "Why don't my adult children like me anymore?" how accurate the parents are being.

This one at least doesn't seem to have missing reasons - they openly admit they were terrible to him and they handled the whole thing really badly and they have a pretty good understanding of why it was all their fault and they have apologized profusely and they understood why he was distant with them for years, and their son seems to have accepted the apology. Which is like 100x better than the parents in most of the letters like this!

The fact that they may or may not have been technically right about teaching as a career doesn't excuse that they handled their son's right to make his own choices really poorly, but they seem to have acknowledged that.

Honestly what strikes me as off in this letter is that there's no explanation of what the actual problem is? He doesn't seem to have cut them off or anything at all like that. Except that LW's wife thinks there is "distance" and they've damaged the relationship forever. Given how these people have a history of trying to be controlling with the kid, I've got to wonder if the problem is less that the son hasn't forgiven them, and is actually "son is trying to have a normal adult relationship with his parents who he's forgiven, Mom is waiting for it to go back to how it was when he was in school and is blaming this ten-year-old fight rather than the fact he's not a kid anymore."