What the family of origin perspective leaves out, and what it creates
BY: JOSHUA COLEMAN, PH.D.
Helping people understand how their families shaped them is important. Most of us know from personal experience that parents and siblings can have a profound influence on who we become, our sense of trust and safety in the world, and even our ability to parent our own children. But there is a downside to viewing adult life primarily through the lens of family-of-origin wounds. Many adult children come to believe that if they didn’t receive everything, they needed growing up—or continue not to receive it as adults—then their parents deserve suspicion, resentment, or even estrangement.
The temptation to rewrite history
This perspective can encourage people to reinterpret their entire life story through the question: “What would my life have been like if I had better parents?” While self-reflection can be valuable, it can also lead people to view many of their disappointments, struggles, conflicts, or unmet goals primarily as the result of parental shortcomings, rather than developing a broader understanding of how lives unfold.
Parents matter—but they aren’t everything
As important as parenting is, research shows that adult development is shaped by many influences, including:
- Genetics
- Neighborhood and community
- Friendships and peer relationships
- Siblings
- Teachers, mentors, and other adults
- Socioeconomic circumstances
- Life events and opportunities
Parents play a significant role, but they are only one part of a much larger developmental picture.
The hidden cost of parent-blaming
One consequence of our culture’s intense focus on parenting is that it often assigns parents more responsibility than they actually possess. It can also encourage adult children to see parental imperfections primarily as reasons for anger rather than occasions for understanding, perspective, or compassion. No parent raises a child perfectly. Every parent falls short in some way.
The question is not whether our parents made mistakes. The question is whether we can hold those mistakes within a larger and more balanced understanding of human development, family relationships, and the realities of being imperfect people raising imperfect children.
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Dr. Joshua Coleman is a San Francisco Bay Area psychologist with 45+ years of experience
Read more from Dr. Coleman in GRAND
