Do you need to parent your parents?

I had a look at a very interesting book the other day, titled: Get out of your own way: Overcoming self-defeating behavior (this is neither an affiliate nor a sponsored link). 

A very important and thought-provoking point made in this book was that you shouldn’t expect or ask from your parents anything that was not given to them by their own parents (i.e. your grandparents). 

However, if you do so, you have to undertake the role of “parenting your own parents” and offer them whatever your grandparents failed or missed to offer them. 

That’s an amazing statement, because it successfully sheds light on many problematic aspects of the parent-child relationship, offering a child the opportunity to literally reestablish this relation with parents on a much more effective, healthier and mutually beneficial basis. 

Although this is not covered in the book, I guess that children of parents who were themselves orphans can also apply this method by thinking of what an imaginative parent of their parents would do in a situation, and act in a similar way. 

As it is stated in the title of the book, we are the biggest obstacles to ourselves, and this is also true when we complain about our parents. It’s us who should approach our parents by becoming “parents to them”, regardless of how strange this might sound.  

This method of enhancing our relationship with our parents can have great results by using simple yet effective words that make our parents realize that we really care about them, and that we can “fix” the omissions of our grandparents to our parents.