Do you share difficult family news with your parents?

[Wallywonker72]

Do you share less-than-good news with your parents?

We’ve always been very close with my parents, despite living in a different country. We’ve spent lots of holidays and extended periods of time together, and they absolutely dote on my two boys who are their only grandkids. but I’ve come to realise that while I find it easy when everything is going well, it’s harder when it isn’t.

Those two lovely little boys are now strapping teenagers. The oldest (18) is going through a rough-ish patch. He left school last year and has gone to uni but really isn’t inspired. He talked about leaving uni and joining the army, becoming a mechanic - all perfectly respectable careers but not what we expected for him. ATM he’s mostly learning to drive, and hanging out with his girlfriend and friends (and smoking a bit of dope I suspect). Nothing dreadful, but nothing my parents would be happy to hear either. The younger one is struggling in a key subject at school. It’s very stressful as worse case scenario he’d be forced to change schools (not the UK system). This is causing DH and I some stress but I haven’t really expressed that to my parents, partly because it’s a complicated system that they don’t understand but honestly because they’d be so outraged that anyone could doubt the ability of their wonderful, intelligent, hardworking grandson - and I would find their outrage on his behalf stressful in itself.

My sister and I agree that our parents happiness always felt very conditionnel on our being ‘good’ at school and being ‘mature’ ie well-behaved. It’s just the same thing isn’t it, except that I’m trying to only deliver good news about the boys ? And while they are indeed lovely, they are not the polite / swotty / people pleasing girls that my sister and I were.

DH and I are having a tough time financially atm, and at work. DH tends to share this kind of news quite openly - and I can feel myself getting angry when he does. Again, I find it hard to share our bad news with them.

Reading all these posts on here makes me think, if so many people seem to have a “censored” relationship with their parents, that lacks depth, doesn’t that mean, statistically speaking, that they’re likely to end up being the exact same way with their own kids when they grow up? (Or for people whose kids are grown up already, is your relationship any better with them than it is with your parents?)

It doesn’t mean that at all for us. We are very different people to our parents and we parent in a completely different way. My kids are very open with us and we’re very close. They know we don’t judge them, we don’t tell anyone what they confide in us, we’ve never said ‘we told you so’. We are honest with them but provide genuine support to help them get through things and that comes with no strings.

No parents, but I don't share anything with PILs that I wouldn't be happy to share in a national.newspaper. They have no concept of privacy. It is a shame, as I'd have liked.to have told them more and possibly have their support when I had serious health problems, but didn't want all and sundry knowing.

That’s really good insight and advice. I used to be cross at my husband for stuff like this, so my mum talks over everyone I used to think he was unreasonable as he’d just stop what he was saying until she paused. It’s wild the mental gymnastics one goes through when you’ve had an odd childhood

No because we recognise it and we work bloody hard to give our children a very different childhood. We will cock up all the time but, if an adult child was to give us feedback we’d listen and not get defensive or, if we did get defensive in the moment we’d go back and apologise.

I tell my parents as little as possible. They interfere too much and both love a catastrophe.

But I realise that not all families are like mine.

hard relate with those who can’t tell their parents anything coz they fuss and/or tell other people 👊🏽 my parents will immediately tell the other one with no regard to my privacy then my grandparents when they were alive also members of our religious community and work/other contacts who’d then discuss it with a 3rd party so I’d have near-randoms asking me about my personal issues in my home town and online! a friend of theirs who I know very little even phoned me about a financial problem before as he was in the (physical) area! I was so annoyed mum had given him my number and of course I wasn’t going to take any money off him which was the only thing that could really help anyway 🫠 I had to sit my parent down last year and say “unless I tell you you can share my news; please don’t” she stuck to it for about 10 months to my knowledge whereupon they immediately dashed back to their bedroom to relay a conversation to my other parent so they came down and started discussing said issue with me. 😬 I didn’t even say anything, I give up 🤦🏽‍♀️ sympathy ❤️‍🩹

Identify very much with what you and others have said on here, OP. I am also one of two 'good' daughters! And I tend to present the stuff about the kids they will want to hear to my parents and in-laws.
What I wonder for myself though is how much of it is about not wanting to deal with their reactions (and there are definitely strong elements of that!) and how much of it is finding it difficult sharing anything other than the 'edited highlights' myself due to my own discomfort about it. It's hard to know where it all starts and ends.
I struggle to talk about any difficulties with friends as well - I am very conscious about protecting my kids' (late teens, small town) privacy, but I'm honestly not sure how much is about that and how much is about my own issues.
It's a minefield, isn't it. My own parents had and continue to have a staunch belief in their own essential rightness about things; I sometimes feel like I have too little of it - one of my kids has said I am too non-directional/non-judgemental at times; I'm so determined to listen and be supportive without rushing in to judge/fix things I think I've gone the other way!

If I tell my dad I’ve got a sniffle he calls up my brother and implies I’m on my death bed with pneumonia. Hence I usually say everything’s hunky dory and we’re all in great form.

My sister has had two breakdowns and years of therapy to try and get her out of perfectionist mode, which has been very damaging for her. I know from what she’s told me that a lot of her therapy has been focused on her relationship with my mum, and having to live up to the standards she set or expected.

I remember reading Unconditional Parenting when my boys were small.., it was a mind fuck tbh and really opened my eyes to how conditionnel my parents approval (love) had been growing up. My mum put so much of her self worth into how we behaved, so we had that weight on us always. I have deliberately tried not to do the same with my boys, and only gave her snippets and never talked about academic achievements. I slipped up once and told her DS1 had scored the highest in a class test : she was literally speechless with pride for a minute and ‘well of course he is, look at his parents, how could he do anything else etc etc’ cringe. My sister and i both have PhDs but never a bloody clue what we actually liked - we just chose the options that would get us good grades.

I can completely sympathise.

As a child I only felt I was loved if I was perfect and did extremely well at school. My behaviour also had to be perfect, especially if anyone else was around to witness it. Appearances mattered so much more than my happiness.

I wasn't allowed to choose my own hobbies, my GSCE or A level subjects or the universities I applied for.

My reaction was to try and live up to it all and please them, my brother reacted by going completely off the rails and now has no qualifications and is estranged from them.

As a result I share very little important stuff with them, just inane chat about things like how my veg patch is doing.

I wonder if it was a generational style of parenting? I was a child in the late 1970s and 1980s.

No, I don’t because firstly as they get older they get stressed really easily. Secondly my mum shares everything with her sisters and besties. So they get a slightly censored view of our lives.