There’s a phrase people love to use whenever someone speaks honestly about their childhood experience:
“Your parent(s) did the best they could.”
Many parents are raising children while carrying their own wounds, their own trauma, and their own lack of healthy examples. They parent from the only framework they know. In that sense, it may be true that they did the best they could with the tools they had, but somewhere along the way, this phrase stopped being an expression of empathy and started becoming something else. It became a shield against accountability.
The truth is someone can do the best they know how AND still cause significant harm. Intent does not erase impact.
In many families—and even in faith communities—there is an unspoken rule: protect the parent at all costs. The moment an adult child begins to speak honestly about emotional neglect, manipulation, criticism, control, or instability growing up, the conversation quickly shifts. Instead of asking, “What happened to you?” People ask:
“But have you considered how your parents were raised?” “They were doing the best they could.” “You need to forgive and move on.”
On the surface, those responses may sound compassionate. But if we look closely, something important is happening. The focus is no longer on the person who experienced the harm. It becomes about protecting the parent from discomfort, and that dynamic is part of why so many people spend years minimizing their own experiences.
They say things like:
“It wasn’t that bad.” “Other people had it worse.” “My parent(s) did their best.”
But minimizing pain does not heal it. It only delays the work that eventually needs to be done.
A parent may have been overwhelmed. They may have lacked emotional maturity, and genuinely believed they were doing the right thing. All of these statements can be true, but if a child grows up constantly criticized, walking on eggshells, feeling responsible for their parent’s emotional state, or never feeling truly seen or safe, those experiences shape them. Those experiences affect confidence, relationships, boundaries, and identity, and pretending otherwise does not make someone compassionate. It makes them unwilling to confront reality.
One of the biggest differences between healthy parents and unhealthy ones is the willingness to reflect.
Healthy parents—imperfect as they may be—are capable of saying things like: “I wish I had handled that differently.” “I didn’t realize how much that hurt you.” “I’m sorry.”
Those words create space for repair. They communicate humility and emotional maturity.
Narcissistic or emotionally immature parents struggle with this. Instead of looking inward, they may rewrite history, minimize their child’s experiences, shift blame, or portray themselves as the victim. What’s even more confusing is that they may then stand in judgment of the very child whose life was shaped by those dynamics. And the expectation is that the child should simply move on. Forgive. Stay quiet. And never bring it up again while the parent carries on believing ‘their best’ was enough.
In many Christian spaces, forgiveness is emphasized—and rightly so. Forgiveness can free a person from the grip of bitterness and resentment, but forgiveness does not mean pretending harm never occurred. And it certainly does not mean remaining in unhealthy dynamics where accountability is absent.
True reconciliation requires more than forgiveness. It requires truth and repentance. Without those, what many people call reconciliation is actually just continued dysfunction with a spiritual label attached to it, and this is where boundaries come in.
When adult children begin setting boundaries with unhealthy parents, it shocks the entire system. Suddenly the child who spent decades adapting, people-pleasing, and carrying emotional burdens is accused of being “cold,” “ungrateful,” or “disrespectful.”
But boundaries are not dishonor. They are acts of responsibility. They are how people begin protecting their emotional and spiritual well-being after years of carrying burdens that were never theirs to carry.
Yes, some parents truly did the best they could. And emotional maturity requires acknowledging another truth as well: that doing one’s best does not remove the responsibility to reflect, grow, and take accountability when one knows harm has occurred.
When accountability is absent, the responsibility for healing cannot continue to fall entirely on the child. At some point the cycle has to end, and for many people, that turning point begins with a simple but powerful realization: What happened to me mattered.
And refusing to minimize this truth is not bitterness. It is the beginning of healing, clarity, and freedom.
#healingjourney #accountability #growthmindset #EmotionalIntelligence #breakingcycles #boundaries #HardTruth #TruthMatters