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."
no subject
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."