After therapy sessions, it is occurring to me how my parents and maybe most desi parents don't really grow as parents. For example, a person would be a very different to a baby and to a teenager because the needs and vulnerabilities are so different.

But here, I feel that growth for parents stagnants sometime around when a child is 12-13. None of our parents really talk to us about puberty and growing up. None of us are taught or can talk about relationships because of moral reasons. So what do you have?

You have parents who are still parenting their adult children like kids, not apologising to us but asking us to eat, reminding us to wear jackets, locking up cars. They care. But they are coming from a care where the parent is always concerned about keeping the kid safe and alive

which imo really reduces the kind of parental advice and care one needs as an adult. Because adults know enough about the world to no longer be infantilized but we still have parents who expect us to be the same children because they're still the same kind of parents.

This is why so many of our parental relationships are strained or just based on civilities. We're forced to hide a lot from them because parents refuse to grow as parents and acknowledge us as adults. How many of us are still lectured, have curfews, other restrictions?

Parents love us. They really do and they try to love us in the ways they always did because it always worked before but cooking a favourite meal in response to an emotionally disturbed adult versus a kid throwing a tantrum are 2 different things.

Or infantilizing you by speaking to in the same "I am older and know better" tone whenever you DO go to them with adult decisions. These things may have worked when we were kids and we did believe they were older and wiser.

But to have any relationship, parents really need to evolve as parents. They need to first acknowledge that the child they love is a teenager/adult now and has different needs which require a different form of parenting than the infantilizing one they've been used to giving.

I don't really see this happening because tbh, our parents don't want growth. Especially as parents. They're fine loving you in the same way because let's be honest, how many of us actually turn away a meal and say what we actually want from them? How many of us will be rejected?

How many of us cannot even bring these topics up because it will end in your mom and dad becoming taunt-y and snide and actually make things worse? The best thing (which is working for me) is recognizing that my parents never "grew up" as parents.

Its recognition that they love me in their own way even if it's not the love I need. I really wish they would evolve too because I would love to tell them a lot about me since I have not grown up in their eyes since I was 12. But that won't happen ever.

So whenever I'm frustrated now by how my parents are being. Whether it's in response to me establishing boundaries or me making professional decisions, I try to understand their gestures and their perspective which doesn't justify what they do/don't do but explains it a lot.

I also try to remember that my parents were also parented by other people who have probably inflicted their own traumas and troubles on them. So it's important for me to recognise and see how my mother is projecting or how my dad is displacing his own issues.

Parents do become a major psychological and personality foundation for us. In so many ways. Like I'm still learning daily how much of my current behaviours and patterns are formed by them and also learning their own issues and problems through what I know.

I also know this isn't much. Why should we be doing all the work & emotional labour? Why are we expected to be better? But this is how patterns and generational trends are broken. At the end of the day, despite the label of the word, parents are still human and very flawed ones.