02/09/2026
Parents.
“Your parents helped write the opening chapters of your life. At some point, YOU became responsible for the rest.”
Al Grant.
“Bloody kids.”
How many times have YOU heard that? The badly behaved child. The disrespectful teenager. The youngster who has gone off the rails. The adult son or daughter who rarely calls, hardly visits and apparently has no appreciation for everything their parents did for them.
Then there is the argument from the other direction: “There’s no such thing as a bad child, only bad parenting.”
So which is it? Are children responsible for the people they become, or are parents responsible for creating them?
Perhaps the truth sits somewhere in the considerably more complicated space between the two. Parents unquestionably influence their children. The environment we grow up in can shape our understanding of relationships, money, work, discipline, confidence, responsibility, affection, conflict and ambition. It can influence what we eventually regard as normal, acceptable and expected.
But children don't remain children forever. School influences us. Friends influence us.
Relationships influence us. Success changes us and failure certainly changes us. For those of us who served, the military probably had an enormous influence on the person we eventually became.
Somewhere along that journey, responsibility begins transferring. Eventually, we become responsible for ourselves.
So before we blame the bloody kids or blame the bloody parents, perhaps there is a more fundamental question worth asking: What does being a parent actually mean to YOU?
Most parents would probably tell YOU they want to be the best parent they can.
Perhaps YOU have even included something similar among the standards you've set for yourself. I want to be a good parent. Excellent. But what does that actually mean?
Is there measurable substance behind that statement, or is it simply a theoretical description of the person YOU would like to believe YOU are? There is a considerable difference between declaring something as one of your standards and consistently behaving in a way that supports it.
Perhaps you're calm and understanding. Your children can approach YOU when they've made a mistake without immediately preparing for incoming artillery. YOU take an interest in the things that matter to them, even when those things mean absolutely nothing to YOU. YOU can listen to an opinion YOU disagree with and admit when you've got something wrong.
Or perhaps the reality looks rather different. Maybe you're permanently angry. The kids always seem to be in the way. Everything they do irritates YOU. A spilled drink becomes a major operational failure and a misplaced shoe somehow escalates into World War Three. You're constantly telling them to disappear upstairs, stop asking questions or leave YOU alone because you've had a hard day.
Maybe they occasionally hear YOU say, “Why the hell did we ever have kids?”
Perhaps YOU meant it as a joke. Perhaps YOU were tired, frustrated or simply having a bad day. The child listening doesn't necessarily understand the difference.
This is where we need to separate two things that are often assumed to mean the same thing. Loving your children and being good at parenting them are not automatically interchangeable.
A parent can genuinely believe they would die for their children while being unwilling to control their temper around them. They can work sixty hours a week to provide financially while rarely giving them twenty uninterrupted minutes. They can defend their children fiercely against anybody outside the family while creating an atmosphere inside the home where everybody walks on eggshells.
None of that necessarily means they don't love their children. It may simply mean there is a gap between the parent they believe themselves to be and the experience their children are actually having.
Which brings us to a considerably more uncomfortable question: What do your children say about YOU when you're not around?
Not what they say when you're standing in front of them. What do they say when they're with their friends? When somebody starts talking about their parents, what gets said about YOU?
Perhaps they speak about YOU with enormous affection and respect. Maybe you're the parent their friends wish they had. Perhaps they complain about some of your quirks, laugh about the things YOU do and occasionally describe YOU as a complete pain in the arse, but underneath all of that they know something absolutely: if life goes seriously wrong, Mum or Dad is somebody they can trust.
Brilliant.
But perhaps the conversation sounds very different. Perhaps Dad is always angry.
Mum never listens. There's no point asking him because he'll lose his s**t. I can't tell her anything. I just stay out of his way.
You'll probably never hear those conversations. That's precisely why the question matters.
This isn't about whether your children always like YOU. Parenting isn't a popularity contest. Sometimes doing the responsible thing will make YOU temporarily unpopular. A sixteen-year-old telling their friends that Dad is an ar****le because he wouldn't let them stagger home p**sed at three in the morning doesn't necessarily represent a catastrophic failure in parenting.
The more useful question is deeper: What would your children say it feels like to have YOU as their parent?
YOU may never know exactly what they say when you're not around, but YOU probably know enough about your own behaviour to have a reasonable idea. If you're genuinely uncomfortable imagining the answer, perhaps the place to begin isn't with the children. Perhaps it's with some accountability for the parent you've become.
There is something else I would encourage every parent to do moving forward: listen to your children with curiosity.
Not because they're always right. They're not. Neither are YOU.
One of the strange things about becoming an adult, and particularly becoming a parent, is that somewhere along the way we can begin assuming that age automatically places us on the teaching side of every conversation. It doesn't.
Nobody becomes exempt from learning simply because somebody started calling them Mum or Dad.
Your experience matters. You've lived longer, made mistakes, solved problems, survived difficult periods and hopefully accumulated some wisdom along the way.
There are things YOU understand that your children simply cannot understand yet because they haven't lived long enough to experience them.
But experience can also accumulate baggage. We develop assumptions, habits, fears, prejudices and fixed ideas about how things are supposed to work. We inherit opinions from other people and sometimes carry them for decades without ever stopping to examine whether we actually agree with them.
A young child hasn't accumulated all of that yet. Their perspective isn't necessarily better; it is simply less influenced. Occasionally that means they can look at something adults have accepted without question for twenty years and ask the most irritatingly simple question imaginable: “Why?”
Sometimes you'll know the answer. Sometimes YOU won't. And sometimes the most truthful answer YOU can give your child is, “I don't actually know.”
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, perhaps one of the strongest answers a parent can give is: “I don't know. But I'm going to find out for YOU. Ask me again this evening.”
Then make sure YOU bloody well find out.
Something considerably more important than answering a question has just happened. You've made a small promise to your child. You've shown them that not knowing something isn't something to be embarrassed about and that learning doesn't stop when YOU become an adult. YOU haven't invented an answer simply because your ego requires Mum or Dad to know everything.
Most importantly, YOU said YOU would do something. Now YOU follow through and do it.
Perhaps YOU give them the answer over dinner. Perhaps the two of YOU look it up together. Perhaps the answer leads to another conversation. Perhaps your child turns out to have been right and YOU were completely wrong. None of those outcomes weakens your position as a parent. They strengthen the relationship.
Your child begins to understand that Mum or Dad doesn't pretend to know everything, is interested enough to find out and, importantly, keeps their word. Some of the things children say will be ridiculous, some will make YOU laugh, and some of their magnificent ideas will require an immediate and fairly decisive no. But every now and again they may say something that makes YOU stop and think, Bloody hell. I hadn't looked at it like that.
Good. Perhaps that's exactly what was supposed to happen.
Parenting shouldn't be a one-way transfer of knowledge from the older human being to the younger one. YOU have considerably more experience and you're responsible for guiding your children, but if you're paying attention, they may occasionally teach YOU something as well.
There is another reason those apparently insignificant conversations matter. Today the question might be why the sky is blue. Tomorrow it might be why somebody at school doesn't like them. Years later it could be about s*x, drugs, money, relationships, failure, fear, mental health or a mistake they're absolutely terrified to tell anybody about.
YOU don't suddenly create trust on the day the difficult question arrives. You've been building it for years.
If you've spent those years demonstrating that their questions matter, that YOU will listen before immediately judging them, that it's perfectly acceptable not to know everything and that when YOU give your word YOU keep it, perhaps when the really difficult question arrives, you'll still be the person they choose to ask.
The insignificant questions are where we practise for the significant ones.
Before people actually have children, of course, parenting can look remarkably straightforward. YOU watch somebody else's child having a complete meltdown in a supermarket and quietly think yours will never behave like that. YOU hear another parent shouting and decide you'll never speak to your children that way. YOU see somebody constantly working and promise yourself that you'll always make time for yours.
Then YOU actually become a parent and reality arrives with YOU. There is work to deal with, bills to pay, considerably less sleep than YOU anticipated, relationships become more complicated and money can get tight. The house becomes noisy, and the child who apparently wasn't going to have supermarket meltdowns is now lying on aisle seven screaming because YOU bought the wrong fu***ng yoghurt.
Theory has just met reality.
Perhaps YOU genuinely intended to be a calm parent but gradually became an angry one. Perhaps YOU intended to be present but work slowly consumed the available time. Perhaps YOU promised yourself YOU would never behave like your own father, then one afternoon heard his exact words coming out of your mouth.
That doesn't automatically make YOU a bad parent, but it should make YOU pay attention. The parent YOU intended to become and the parent life actually turned YOU into aren't necessarily the same person.
If being a good parent genuinely matters to YOU, occasionally measure the reality against the claim. Not against some impossible version of perfect parenting, because there isn't one. Measure it against your own standard. If you've drifted away from it, acknowledge it and reposition.
Then there is another question we don't ask very often: Did YOU actually plan to become a parent?
For some people, absolutely. They discussed having children, thought about when, considered finances, housing, careers and the kind of family they wanted to build. For others, life happened.
Even as adults, we make the wrong choices. Perhaps before all the enormous questions surrounding parenthood, there was once a considerably more immediate decision to make: Shall we use contraception or not?
It sounds almost ridiculously simplistic when placed alongside the enormous responsibility of raising another human being, but sometimes a decision lasting a few minutes creates a responsibility lasting the rest of somebody's life.
An unplanned pregnancy doesn't automatically produce a bad parent. Plenty of extraordinary parents never planned the pregnancy that created their child, adapted to the situation and embraced the responsibility completely. Likewise, carefully planning a pregnancy doesn't guarantee competent parenting.
The more important question is what happens afterwards. A pregnancy may be unplanned, but parenthood shouldn't remain unplanned for the next eighteen years.
Once another human being exists, the conversation changes. Whatever happened before, responsibility has now arrived.
If the decision to have children was deliberate, another uncomfortable question appears: How much thought went into who YOU were planning to have them with?
Think about some of the other decisions we make. We'll spend weeks comparing cars, investigate mortgages and interest rates, and read dozens of reviews before spending a thousand pounds on a television. Some people will spend eighteen months planning a wedding down to the fu***ng colour of the napkins.
Yet how much thought do we put into choosing the person with whom we're going to create another human being?
Of course love matters, but perhaps “Do I love this person?” shouldn't be the only question. Is this the man I believe could be a great father to my child? Is this the woman I believe could be a great mother to my child? Do we share enough fundamental values around responsibility, discipline, money, education and family to raise another human being together?
Perhaps there is an even harder question: Would I trust this person to raise our child if one day I wasn't here?
That's a rather different test from whether somebody gives YOU butterflies on a Friday night.
Nobody can predict the future. People change, relationships change and marriages end. Good people sometimes become terrible partners, while people who were complete disasters in their twenties can grow into extraordinary parents. There are no guarantees.
But did we even ask the questions?
Sometimes the sequence of life seems almost completely reversed. Have the child, work out the finances later, work out whether the relationship actually functions later and find some stability later. Perhaps have another child while we're still trying to figure out the first lot. Before long, somebody entering a new relationship isn't merely meeting a partner; they're inheriting half a fireteam with a section apparently under construction.
There can be complicated reasons why these cycles occur. Poverty matters.
Education matters. Access to contraception matters. Religion, family expectations, social norms and opportunity can all influence behaviour. But none of those things should automatically remove personal responsibility from the conversation. Adults still make choices. Sometimes those choices are considered, disciplined and responsible. Sometimes they're bloody stupid.
That leads to a question that perhaps should have appeared much earlier in many people's lives: Why did YOU want children?
For many people the answer will be straightforward. They genuinely wanted to build a family, raise children and experience parenthood. But sometimes children arrive carrying expectations they never asked to carry.
Perhaps everybody else was having them. Perhaps the grandparents wanted grandchildren. Perhaps somebody believed a baby would save a failing relationship.
Perhaps they wanted somebody who would always love them. Perhaps having children was simply regarded as the next stage of life because that's what everybody around them appeared to do.
Maybe nobody ever stopped long enough to ask: Do I actually want to be a parent?
That isn't a selfish question. Perhaps it's one of the most responsible questions somebody can ask before becoming one. Creating another human being is considerably easier than accepting responsibility for helping them navigate the next eighteen years and beyond. A child shouldn't have to spend their childhood paying for an adult decision that nobody really thought through.
Which brings us back to where we started.
When a child starts behaving badly, society can be remarkably quick to allocate responsibility. Some people immediately blame the child while others immediately blame the parents. Perhaps both positions are too simplistic.
A parent can provide an extraordinary upbringing and still watch their adult child make terrible decisions. Equally, somebody can grow up inside a chaotic, damaging environment and become an exceptional adult. Parents have enormous influence, but they don't have exclusive authorship.
Eventually there comes a point where childhood explanation has to meet adult accountability.
“That's how I was brought up.”
Fair enough. That may explain something. But does it still excuse it when you're forty-five?
Maybe your parents were terrible with money. That could help explain why YOU entered adulthood knowing absolutely nothing about finances, but it doesn't mean YOU have to remain financially incompetent forever. Maybe anger was normal inside your house. Perhaps nobody expressed affection. Maybe alcohol dominated family life, problems were never discussed, ambition was ridiculed or your parents genuinely did things that damaged YOU and followed YOU into adulthood.
Those things matter. We don't need to pretend they didn't happen.
But eventually YOU become responsible for deciding whether those patterns continue through YOU. There comes a point when “That's how I was brought up” stops being only an explanation and risks becoming an excuse.
And this is where the mirror turns around.
Everything we've just asked about being a parent can also be asked about the people who raised us. Did they plan to have YOU? Were they ready? Did they have any real idea what they were doing? Did they consciously think about the kind of parents they wanted to become, or did they simply find themselves with a child and work the rest out as they went along?
Perhaps they were extraordinary parents. Perhaps they were average parents who got plenty wrong but genuinely tried their best. Perhaps they were terrible. Most probably existed somewhere in the enormous grey area between sainthood and complete disaster, getting some things brilliantly right and other things spectacularly wrong.
Adulthood eventually gives us an opportunity to recognise something that is almost impossible to understand when we're young: our parents were human beings before they were our parents.
They had fears, insecurities, ambitions, relationships, financial problems, disappointments and mistakes of their own. They had dreams before we existed.
They probably had plans that never happened and roads they never travelled. Some were carrying damage from their own childhoods and perhaps repeating behaviours they had once promised themselves they would never repeat.
None of that excuses genuinely harmful behaviour. Understanding isn't the same as absolution. But perhaps adulthood gives us the opportunity to look beyond the title of Mum or Dad and finally see the person behind it.
Have YOU ever really got to know your parents as people?
What did your mother want from life before YOU arrived? What did your father dream about when he was eighteen? What frightened them? What did they sacrifice? What do they regret? What would they do differently if they could start again? What were their own parents like?
We can know somebody for fifty years and still know remarkably little about them.
For veterans, this shouldn't be difficult to understand. Your own children might know YOU as Dad or Mum. Perhaps they know that YOU served and have heard a few stories or seen some old photographs. But they didn't know the eighteen-year-old who first walked through the gates. They weren't there for the friendships, stupidity, fear, adventures, deployments, losses, mistakes and thousands of experiences that helped shape the person eventually sitting opposite them at the dinner table.
There is an entire human being behind the label parent.
Your parents have a story too. Perhaps it's worth hearing while the storyteller is still available.
Families also have an extraordinary ability to preserve historical roles. YOU can leave home, join the military, travel the world, lead people, become responsible for millions of pounds' worth of equipment, raise your own children, build a business and spend decades making serious decisions.
Then YOU walk through Mum's front door and hear, “Shoes off.”
Thirty years of personal development disappears in about four seconds.
There is humour in that, but there's something interesting underneath it. Some adults become children again around their parents. Mum makes one disapproving comment and suddenly they're fourteen. Dad questions a career decision and a forty-five-year-old adult finds themselves explaining why they're allowed to run their own life.
The reverse happens too. Some parents never update their view of their children.
Their fifty-year-old son is still the boy, while their forty-five-year-old daughter apparently still requires instructions on how she should live.
You're still their child, but you're no longer a child.
At some point, one of the healthiest transitions a family can make is from parent and dependent child towards two adults who happen to be parent and child. Love doesn't disappear and respect doesn't disappear, but permission is no longer required.
Perhaps the curiosity we discussed earlier shouldn't disappear either. Your parents may still know things YOU don't, and YOU may now know things they don't. Neither generation has a monopoly on wisdom. The relationship can become considerably more interesting when everybody stops trying to prove who knows best and remains curious enough to discover what the other person knows.
Of course, reaching adulthood doesn't mean your parents will suddenly agree with everything YOU do. They may dislike your partner, think your career choice is ridiculous, hate where YOU live or believe YOU should move home, earn more, spend less, have children, stop having children, buy a house, sell the house, get a proper job, cut your hair or generally reorganise your entire life according to their preferred operating procedure.
YOU can listen. In fact, sometimes YOU probably should. They might even be right.
But adulthood means the final decision belongs to YOU. Respecting your parents doesn't require surrendering ownership of your life.
Yet as parents get older, an interesting reversal can begin. Adult children can start doing exactly the same thing to them. We decide they shouldn't be driving, need to move, can't manage something themselves or would be better off if we simply took over.
Sometimes intervention is absolutely necessary, but getting older doesn't automatically make somebody incapable of making their own choices.
So perhaps the question becomes: When does helping become controlling?
If Dad takes fifteen minutes to do something YOU could finish in two, perhaps let him take fifteen minutes. If Mum needs help navigating something online but is perfectly capable of making the underlying decision herself, help her navigate it.
There is a difference between supporting somebody and taking over. The parent who once had to learn to let YOU make your own decisions may eventually need YOU to extend the same dignity back to them.
Then there are the old arguments.
Some families carry them for decades. Maybe Dad was a hard bastard when YOU were fifteen. Maybe Mum was controlling. Perhaps they didn't support a decision that mattered enormously to YOU. Maybe something happened that genuinely damaged the relationship.
We don't need to rewrite history, and something doesn't become acceptable simply because thirty years have passed. But there is still a question worth considering: Are YOU relating to the person standing in front of YOU today, or to the version of them you've been carrying around in your head for thirty years?
People change. Parents included.
Sometimes they don't change enough and sometimes they don't change at all. But if somebody genuinely has changed, perhaps part of our own growth involves being capable of recognising it. And perhaps our parents owe us exactly the same courtesy. If you're fifty, they shouldn't still be judging YOU entirely by the stupid things YOU did when YOU were seventeen.
God knows most of us wouldn't survive that particular assessment.
Of course, not everybody had good parents, and this is where we need to avoid sentimental bulls**t.
They're still your Mum. He's still your Dad. You've only got one family. You'll regret it when they're gone.
People can say those things very casually when they know absolutely nothing about the relationship they're commenting on.
Some people grew up with violence. Some experienced abuse, addiction, manipulation, humiliation, neglect or abandonment. Some parents continued controlling, damaging or exploiting their children long after childhood ended.
Biology creates a relationship. It doesn't automatically create a healthy one.
Reconciliation can be enormously valuable where it is possible, healthy and genuinely wanted, but reconciliation isn't compulsory. Forgiveness isn't something another person gets to demand from YOU. Boundaries can be healthy, distance can sometimes be necessary, and occasionally the healthiest relationship somebody can have with a parent is no relationship at all.
Being related to somebody doesn't give them unlimited access to your life.
Equally, if a relationship has been damaged but both people genuinely want to repair it, pride shouldn't automatically prevent that either. Perhaps somebody has to make the first move. Perhaps somebody has to say, “I got that wrong,” without immediately following it with, “Yeah, but YOU...”
Accountability doesn't stop being useful simply because the mistake happened twenty years ago.
Military Service can add another dimension to all of this. Many veterans left home young and went from living under their parents' roof to existing inside an entirely different system, surrounded by people their parents had never met and experiencing things they couldn't possibly observe.
Your parents saw the person who left. After that, they often saw snapshots: a weekend home, Christmas leave, a phone call, a photograph or perhaps a few weeks between deployments or postings. Meanwhile, YOU were changing, and so were they.
Years later, everybody can assume they still know each other perfectly because they're family.
Perhaps they don't.
Then Service ends, but the distance doesn't necessarily disappear. Veterans move for work, build families, pursue careers and settle elsewhere. Some move overseas. Life fills the diary and “I'll ring Mum at the weekend” becomes next week, then next month.
Nobody has fallen out. Nothing dramatic happened. Life simply became busy.
But the clock kept running anyway.
This is the part nobody formally announces. Your parents start getting old. Not necessarily elderly overnight, just older.
At first it's almost invisible. Then one day YOU notice Dad struggling with something he once would have thrown over his shoulder without thinking. Mum asks YOU for help with something she previously would have sorted herself. Technology becomes more frustrating, driving becomes harder, health starts filling the calendar with appointments and friends begin disappearing.
Perhaps one parent dies and suddenly the person who spent most of their adult life as half of a partnership is learning how to live alone.
Somewhere during all of that, the relationship begins changing again. The people who once looked after YOU may gradually begin needing help from YOU. At first it might be nothing more than a lift, a phone call, sorting something online, fixing something around the house or helping with paperwork. For some families, eventually it becomes considerably more.
There is something quietly significant about the man who taught YOU to ride a bike eventually needing YOU to steady him.
But helping doesn't mean stripping somebody of dignity. They are still adults. They still have opinions and preferences. They may continue making decisions YOU think are completely ridiculous.
Welcome to their world.
They probably spent twenty years watching YOU do exactly the same thing.
Perhaps part of the changing relationship is learning how to support somebody without making them feel that ownership of their life has been taken away from them.
Foundation #52 looked at time through our children. Children grow up while we're busy.
Parents move in the opposite direction.
They grow older while we're busy.
That's the uncomfortable symmetry between the two.
Perhaps there are conversations you've always assumed you'll have one day.
Questions you've been meaning to ask, stories you've never heard properly, things YOU want to say, old disagreements YOU might eventually sort out, trips you've talked about taking or visits YOU keep meaning to make.
The trouble with one day is that eventually the calendar runs out of them.
That isn't an argument for immediately repairing every broken parental relationship. It doesn't mean abandoning sensible boundaries simply because somebody is getting older, and it certainly doesn't mean pretending the past didn't happen.
It simply means recognising something we already know but are remarkably good at ignoring.
Time is finite.
If one of your parents disappeared tomorrow, what would YOU wish you'd asked, said, understood or done while they were still here?
Maybe the answer is nothing. Fair enough. Perhaps everything that needed saying has already been said and the relationship is exactly where it needs to be.
But if something immediately appeared in your mind when YOU read that question, perhaps don't automatically leave it until one day. Make the call, ask the question, hear the story, take the photograph or have the coffee. Perhaps just sit down and discover something about the person you've spent your entire life calling Mum or Dad.
We started with bloody kids. Then we examined the parents. Eventually, we arrived back at ourselves.
Your parents influenced YOU. They may have given YOU an extraordinary start or a difficult one. They may have loved YOU brilliantly, badly, imperfectly or perhaps hardly at all. Those experiences matter.
But eventually the question changes from “What did my parents do to shape me?” to “What am I going to do with the person I have become?”
If you're a parent yourself, the cycle is already repeating. At first, your parents knew things YOU didn't. Then YOU started discovering things for yourself. Eventually, YOU discovered things they didn't know. If YOU have children, the cycle begins again.
Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes any generation can make is believing wisdom only travels in one direction. Sometimes your parents have something worth listening to. Sometimes YOU do. And sometimes the eight-year-old sitting at the dinner table asks one simple question that leaves every adult scratching their head.
Stay curious enough to hear it.
So perhaps Foundation #53 leaves us with a few questions worth carrying forward. What does being a parent actually mean to YOU? What would your children say it feels like to have YOU as their parent? Are YOU still willing to learn from them, or have YOU decided that being the adult means YOU must always have the answer? How much of who YOU are today genuinely belongs to your parents, and how much are YOU still conveniently giving them credit or blame for?
And finally, are YOU still relating to your parents through the roles YOU all occupied years ago, or have YOU allowed the relationship to grow up with YOU?
Your parents helped write the opening chapters.
At some point, YOU picked up the pen.
What happens next belongs to YOU.
NEXT: FOUNDATION #54 - COMMUNITY.
Military Service gave many of us something civilian life doesn't automatically replace:
a ready-made community. There were people around us, shared experiences, common language and a sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves.
After Service, that sense of community can become considerably less obvious.
Perhaps the answer isn't simply waiting to find another tribe that feels exactly like the old one. Perhaps community is also about where we choose to participate, what we contribute and what we help build around us.
That's where we're going next.
If these Foundations are making YOU stop, think, question or reconsider something in your own life, continue your repositioning at strugglingveteran (dot com)
Al Grant.
Struggling Veteran.
Helping Veterans Help Themselves.
