When Your Child Has More Emotional Freedom Than You Did

When you know better, you do better, right? But when the doing better is mingled with bitterness and resentment because you never had the better, tension mounts. 

For those who are Gen X, wanting to give and do better for their kids than their parents did, there’s this contrast that can seem double-minded. 

We want one thing, but feel this frustration simmering below. Not that anyone would ever mention, mind you, but seriously- who cares? But the stat that Gen X has the highest suicide rate of any other generation has nagged me enough to say, “I care.” 

Good parents want better for their kid, no matter how good the parent had it when they were kids. It’s part of the DNA of God ot want increase, expansion, better than the former. So naturally, parents would be reflecting the image of God in how they desire to raise their crew. 

For Gen X parents, we wanted our kids to not be met with harsh discipline and freedom of expression. This is an overgeneralization, of course. 

Hurrah! We did it! Our kids are vocal, blunt, expressive, free… But sometimes… It’s hard to tolerate. Because truthfully, having a vocal, blunt, and massively expressive kid can rub those tender spots on you as a parent. It can stir up bitterness and resentment seeing them be and do something you weren’t allowed to do, and many times, it’s at your emotional expense. 

It is exhausting to have your child bust your chops at midnight because they’ve got a beef with you. Or offer opinions on decisions being made. But it’s not exhausting for the reasons most people think. Late nights and constant contrary questions come with the territory of parenting. It never stops, by the way. I get texts at all hours of the night with questions and concerns. Time zones are funny like that.

It’s exhausting because not only are you getting questions that are well past your bedtime, the questions are challenging, accusatory, and sometimes, spoken from a place of ignorance and a not fully developed frontal lobe.

We understand this.

We welcome this.

Yet, we are still hurting, and our voice is still squashed from when we were told, “Children are to be seen and not heard.”

That line, that one statement, is probably the most damning thing a parent can ever speak over a child, by the way. 

Watching your child express emotions you were forced to suppress and probably got a what for if you attempted to express yourself is painful. 

Gen X adults had childhoods that were not filled with emotional attunement. We spent our childhood learning how not to upset adults, how to stay out of the way, how to regulate ourselves alone, how to carry responsibility early, and how to survive instability without becoming a problem.

And here’s what happened. You, dear Gen X pal, learned to figure things out yourself. You swallowed disappointment, and consequently, you learned real early not to expect too much. And somewhere along the way, emotional restraint became your identity. It became the identity of 65 million people. 

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When Parenting Changed

To this day, I have no idea why or how Gen X decided we would be the generation of cycle breakers. Because typically, kids follow in the footsteps of their parents to some degree. For example- gang mommas took their babies away from the streets of East L.A. in the mid 90s to Palmdale, Ca in an attempt to take them out of that lifestyle. But they didn’t take the mindset out of the kids and themselves. So, Palmdale became as bad, if not worse than L.A.

In any case, for some reason, when we started having kids, we took it upon ourselves to be the change the world so desperately needed. 

Typical Gen X. 

Also, typical Gen X, we figured out how to do this ourselves. We simply became more emotionally available, affirming, involved, protective, and conversational. We instinctively wanted our babes to feel seen, safe, and have the ability to ask questions and express their emotions. 

Since no one taught Gen X how to do this, no one was able to prep us for the fact that giving your child emotional freedom can unintentionally expose the grief of your own emotional deprivation. 

Because sometimes when your child openly expresses frustration, anger, disappointment, or needs, something inside you whispers:

“I was never allowed to do that.”

And if we’re honest, another thought sometimes follows:

“If I had spoken that way, there would have been consequences.” You all know the consequences, the ones that kids would be removed from homes now, consequences… 

That realization can create enormous internal conflict. The freedom our young ones have can still feel destabilizing to the nervous system we built through emotional restraint.

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Why Some Reactions Feel So Intense

Many Gen X parents become confused by the intensity of their own reactions.

A rude tone.

An eye roll.

A dismissive comment.

A teenager speaking with emotional certainty.

And suddenly something inside feels flooded. Your nervous system isn’t reacting to the child; it’s reacting to memory. 

Your body is reacting to years of carrying responsibility silently, to never being comforted, to learning that respect kept the household stable, and to surviving environments where emotional expression felt literally dangerous.

You see, for a lot of Gen X adults, respect was not merely etiquette. It was our protection and survival. The respect we gave reduced conflict, punishment, chaos, humiliation, and/or emotional volatility. So now, when younger generations communicate casually toward authority, emotionally process publicly, or push back openly, the Gen X nervous system may unconsciously interpret that as instability. Hear me well- this has zero to do with the next generation “needing to be more respectful” and everything to do with us learning to deal and heal our wounds that were created decades ago. 

That matters. A whole lot. 

Ladies, this is especially true for those of you who have now spent decades maintaining peace in your home, managing everyone’s emotions, over-functioning, and absorbing stress quietly. My dear, this isn’t being a good Christian wife and mom. This is straight up conditioning and societal programming that is hurting you. 

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The Hidden Envy No One Admits

Some parents feel envy toward their children’s emotional freedom. Because witnessing someone else receive what you were denied can surface grief you never processed.

It can feel unfair.

“I had to survive without this.”

“I carried responsibilities far beyond my age.”

“Nobody softened things for me.”

Those thoughts are cues for us to show that there is, in fact, some healing that is needed.

Gen X adults are still carrying emotional exhaustion from decades of working, caretaking, managing households, supporting aging parents, supporting children, and functioning through burnout. And to be met with an eye roll at the grocery store could cause someone to finally lose their schmidt. 

When a child appears emotionally demanding without understanding sacrifice, the parent likely feels emotionally unseen all over again. And so we just use dark humor to mitigate any overly emotional responses, am I right? 

Here’s the bottom line- this entire generational conversation is not about who is right.

My point in opening this conversation is to bring awareness to the table to something I have watched all of us silently walk through for 30 years. There are a lot of folks who simply need to grieve, who need to learn a slightly healthier identity. And no, telling us all that our identity is now Christ is useless, thank you very much. That only dismisses and diminishes real pain with religious mantras and jargon- ones that many Boomers don’t even know what that means. 

Dear Gen X friend, resilience is a tool, not an identity. Guys, we need to heal. And hey, think of this- Perhaps we will be the first generation in history who heals while actively parenting at the same time. If that isn’t grunge, raw, authentic, very Gen X energy, I don’t know what is.