I spent years defending myself as a parent before realizing the defense was part of the problem

My daughter said something to me a few years ago that I’ve never fully gotten over. We were having a conversation—the kind adults have with their parents when they’ve been in therapy long enough to start naming things—and she described what it had felt like, growing up, when she tried to tell me something was wrong.

She said: You always had a reason why it wasn’t that bad. You were never defensive; you just always had an explanation. And the explanation made me feel like I’d imagined the whole thing.

I didn’t argue. But inside, I was already forming the argument. Which was, I understood later, exactly what she was describing.

I had spent years defending myself as a parent. Every time something came up—every criticism, every memory that didn’t match mine, every moment where one of my kids expressed something that implicated me—I had a response ready. I wasn’t mean about it. I was reasonable. That was the problem. Here’s what I’ve figured out since.

I always felt the defense was justified

That’s the thing about defensiveness in parenting: it doesn’t feel like defensiveness. It feels like accuracy. It feels like providing context, correcting the record, and making sure your child understands the full picture. You weren’t neglectful, you were exhausted. You weren’t cold, you were overwhelmed. You weren’t dismissive, you just didn’t know what to say. All of these things can be true. And all of them, offered at the wrong moment, can function as a door closing in someone’s face.

I told myself I was being fair. That I was simply offering a fuller picture. What I was actually doing was protecting something, quietly and persistently. I just didn’t know yet what that something was, or why it needed protecting so urgently.

I was protecting an image of myself I couldn’t afford to lose

I wasn’t a bad parent. I knew that. But my children were trying to tell me that knowing I wasn’t bad wasn’t the same as having been okay. Brené Brown, Ph.D., writes that shame and accountability are fundamentally different responses—that when we feel like a bad person rather than someone who did something bad, we defend rather than repair. The deflection isn’t malicious. It comes from genuine pain: the pain of seeing yourself as a good parent and being asked to hold something that challenges that. And I could not hold both things at once.

I taught them, without meaning to, that their feelings needed justifying

When a child tells you something hurt, and you respond with why it happened, what they hear—even if you never say it—is: your feeling is wrong, or at least incomplete, and I’ll tell you why. The feeling needs to survive a review before it’s allowed to exist. I did this constantly, and gently, and with genuine good intentions. I thought I was helping them understand. What I was actually teaching them was that their emotional experience required external validation to be real—and that I was the one who got to provide or withhold that validation.

My youngest told me once, as an adult, that she used to rehearse what she was going to say to me before she said it. Not because she was afraid of me. Because she was preparing for the counterargument. That one took me a while to sit with.

I confused their pain with an accusation

When my kids expressed that something had hurt them, I heard it as: “You were a bad parent. And I defended myself against that charge, instead of receiving what was actually being offered: their experience. Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, writes that this is exactly the confusion at the heart of defensive parenting—treating a child’s emotional expression as a personal attack because you can’t separate “I was hurt” from “you are a bad person.” Those are completely different things. One requires a defense. The other just requires you to stay in the room.

I couldn’t see them clearly while I was defending myself

You can’t see someone clearly while you’re arguing with their account of events. The energy goes toward protecting your version of the story—what your intentions were, what the circumstances were, what you were going through at the time. And while you’re doing all of that, the person in front of you recedes. They become secondary to the narrative you’re working to protect.

I look back at some of those conversations now and realize I was so focused on not being the villain that I never fully absorbed what my kids were actually telling me. I was present the way a lawyer is present—scanning for what to address, building a response, not really listening to what was being said.

I thought admitting I was wrong meant losing myself

When I finally started trying to just listen—without the internal preparation for counterargument—I was surprised by how terrifying it felt. I had conflated acknowledging that I’d gotten things wrong with losing something essential. As if saying yes, that hurt you, and I’m sorry would collapse the whole structure of who I thought I was as a parent. It didn’t. The structure turned out to be sturdier than the defense. Saying I’m sorry I got that wrong didn’t undo anything good I’d done. It just made room for my children to exist more fully in my presence—which, I understood too late, was what they’d been asking for all along.

I needed to hear what they said, not respond to it

There’s a difference between listening and preparing to respond. I thought I was doing the former. I was doing the latter. The difference shows in the eyes, in the quality of attention, in whether you ask a follow-up question or immediately provide context for your behavior. My kids could feel it even when I couldn’t have named it. Kids always can.

What they needed, in those moments when they were trying to tell me something hard, was not for me to explain myself. They needed me to actually receive what they were saying—to let it land, to sit with it, to allow that their experience was real and valid without rushing to amend it with my own. I almost never did that. I thought I did, but I didn’t.

I gave apologies that were really defenses in disguise

I’m sorry you felt that way. I’m sorry it came across like that. I’m sorry, but I was going through a lot at the time. These are not apologies. They are acknowledgments of your child’s perception while simultaneously distancing yourself from responsibility for it. I used all of them. I thought they were generous. They were, at best, a handshake where a hug was needed—and at worst, a way of saying I hear your feelings and I don’t accept any ownership of them.

I understood what I’d been doing before I could stop doing it

The habit was deep. Even after I understood what I’d been doing, I would catch myself mid-sentence forming the explanation. I’d have to stop, notice it, set it down. In some conversations I wasn’t able to. In some I managed it, barely, and then immediately felt the urge to explain why I’d been defensive in the past, which was—I noticed eventually—also a form of defensiveness.

What helped was something simple and uncomfortable: asking what they needed from the conversation before it started. Not what had happened, not what I remembered—just: what do you need from me right now? The answers were usually not what I expected, and never required me to defend anything.

I can’t undo it, but I can show up differently now

I can’t undo the years of explaining myself. I can’t give my children back the conversations where they came to me with something real and honest and got a counterargument instead of a presence. What I can do is show up differently now—in the conversations we still have, in the way I receive the things they still occasionally risk telling me.

My daughter, the one who told me I always had an explanation—we talk differently now. Not perfectly, not without the old reflexes occasionally surfacing on my end. But she takes the risk more often now. She brings things to me that she used to keep to herself. She stays in the room longer. I think she believes, finally, that I’m actually listening. Which means she has to trust not just me but herself—that what she’s saying is worth saying even if it lands somewhere complicated. I’m grateful she still believes that. I understand now what it cost her to keep believing it as long as she did.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.