Blindsided by boundaries: What children really mean when they bring out the B word
On the gap between love given and love received
Quick reminder that next Tuesday (June 23rd at 7pm BST/11am PDT/2pm EST) I will be discussing The Correspondent by Virginia Evans with Monica Cardenas, PhD. Exploring themes of grief and family estrangement. Anyone can listen live. Register here. Paid subscribers will receive a recording.
I think many readers will find this week’s post very useful as it explores one of the most misunderstood aspects of estrangement - boundaries and how parents love can be misunderstood. I will also be discussing our guest writer’s - Rita Hoy - Motherance - estrangement experience and the tools she uses to help estranged people in her coaching, during a livestream on 23rd July at 7pm BST/11am PDT/2pm EST. Anyone can listen live. Register here. Paid subscribers will receive a recording.
Some estrangements are absolutely necessary; where there has been abuse, where parents - through their own troubles - were unable to provide basic welfare and care, where third parties enter the fray and make parent-child relations impossible.
This article in no way seeks to diminish this experience; absolve parents of their responsibilities or blame children. Instead, it aims to shed light on the more common and painful grey area of estrangement: relationships in which a parent’s love was real, their intentions largely good; but were somehow not received in this way.
My mother is 86. She gets up at the crack of dawn, always has. She has two loaves of bread kneaded, a load of laundry in the machine and the dishwasher emptied, all before 7:30am.
There’s a trapped nerve in two places on her left side neck and shoulder. She’s in permanent pain, has been for years.
But she pushes through anyway, as she always does.
Her standards are high; her output is impressive. The pace she sets herself, even at 86, is the same pace I grew up watching. The same ‘mode of living’ I absorbed.
As I watch her move around the kitchen now, I feel something I’ve felt my whole life but was never able to name.
A wish. I wish she would stop. I wish she would sit and knit and chat. Have a lazy morning with the Gene Kelly musicals she loves so much and say, “to hell with the bread”.
Because all of that doing was always at the expense of something. Her peace. Her rest. Her calm.
More than anything, I wish she had set limits around how much pressure she would allow into her life; limits around how much cortisol she would allow into her nervous system; intentional rules around when she would stop being productive and allow herself some carefree fun.
I wish she’d had boundaries.
Here’s what I’ve only recently understood about that wish.
I wished it as much for me as I did for her.
My mother’s relentlessness - her inability to stop, to be enough without doing, to separate her sense of worth from her output - was a clear transmission about how she saw herself.
A person whose value, whose ‘lovability’ depended on how much they could do and how well they could do it.
It translated - without her knowing it, without any conscious intention - into an unspoken pressure on me. Because like the bread, mothering for her was another output, and her self-worth became silently but inextricably linked to how I turned out.
She never said this, she wasn’t even consciously aware of it, but I felt it. A persistent sense that being fully, messily, sometimes inconveniently myself would lead her to make it mean something about her.
Her lack of self-worth, her placement of self-value in external measures, had become, in the transmission between us, a pressure on me to be proof of her worth.
It spilled into expectation. Into need. Into an underground constant pressure that said - without words, without intention - I need you to be a certain way so that I can feel okay.
The gap between love given and love received.
I know now that there is a gap between how parental love is delivered and how it is experienced. And it has nothing to do with how much parents actually love their children.
This is what I’ve come to understand through my own experience as a daughter who moved to the other side of the world to get some distance from this dynamic (I called it a ‘controlled estrangement’); and through my experience as a mother who almost lost her own adult child to the
same pattern.
The gap exists because children don’t primarily experience their parents through actions. They experience them through frequency. Through
vibe. And this is dependent entirely on the parent’s inner world, their silent sense of self.
Before they have language. Before they can articulate what they feel with words - children are reading the emotional field their parents carry. The nervous system underneath the love. The quality of presence beneath
the provision.
And here is the thing that is hardest to hear and most important to understand:
The love parents give probably carries an invisible weight - one most parents are unaware they are carrying, but it is fully felt by their children.
I now recognise it as the weight of not knowing your own worth outside of your role, outside of the expectations of family, culture and society. It translates into a need for them to be a certain way. To be a good kid. As evidence that you’re a good parent and therefore a worthy person.
Children can’t describe this because they don’t know exactly what they are feeling. It is too deep and nuanced, yet wholly human.
They just know that something in the relationship - beneath all the love and the effort - feels like pressure.
I know this because I unknowingly repeated the same pattern myself - despite being educated, widely travelled, emotionally articulate, and convinced I was parenting differently from my own mother. I did the same thing to my own daughter.
She felt it when I flipped out and launched into a lecture about respect and accountability when she dropped out of college; she felt it in my comments about her outfit choices at family gatherings; she felt in my repeated suggestion she did more exercise - it’d do her good.
Until one evening, after another devastating argument, I found myself sitting in my kitchen with a truth I could no longer avoid.
I realised that despite all my effort - the bedtime stories, the endless support, the affection, the devotion, the fixing, advising, the years spent trying to “get it right” - my daughter felt a similar emotional weight from me as the one I had felt around my own mother.
Which meant the problem wasn’t living in the visible, ‘doing’ part of parenting; it was living underneath it, in the invisible emotional field beneath all my loving.
Beneath my care was a constant fear about whether I was a good enough mother. Beneath my support was an attachment to her turning out well - not only because I wanted a beautiful life for her, but because somewhere deep down, her outcomes had become entangled with my own sense of value.
My worth still depended, in ways I couldn’t see then, on what I produced in the world. And my children were part of that production.
What’s important is this:
I had absolutely no conscious awareness that I was transmitting any of it.
I wasn’t trying to pressure her. I wasn’t intentionally making her responsible for my emotional stability.
I loved her, I gave every part of me to the job. As it turns out, that was the problem.
What passes through families is often unconscious. A woman who has never fully learned that she is inherently worthy will often - with the purest intentions - raise children inside the emotional atmosphere of that unresolved wound.
That’s what had happened to me. And before me, to my mother. And before her, to hers.
Without meaning to, I was still orienting my parenting around helping my children become successful, resilient, capable, admired.
What I had not yet understood was that true thriving doesn’t come from becoming who the world rewards. You don’t need an Ivy League sticker on the back windshield or a compliant child to be a perfectly whole human. You are one regardless, purely because you exist.
Thriving comes from becoming fully anchored in yourself.
From knowing your worth is intrinsic. From trusting your own inner authority over external expectations. From living in relationship with yourself through unconditional self-love. That is a beautiful life.
Children feel the difference instinctively. Not intellectually but somatically, in their body.
Their nervous systems can detect the difference between:
“You are loved exactly as you are, even in your mess, confusion and imperfection” and “I believe in your potential.”
Those two forms of love can sound almost identical in words. But underneath, they carry completely different emotional frequencies.
What children really mean when they bring out the B-word
The language we currently use around estrangement and family breakdown is creating enormous confusion and pain.
Your child may have told you that you were controlling.
That you gaslit them, that your relationship was toxic, that they need distance for their mental health.
And you - remembering the sleepless nights, the sacrifices, the relentless showing up - feel blindsided. Because the labels don’t match your reality.
But underneath the imprecise language, there is usually something emotionally real trying to get through.
Looking back it was staring me in the face every time my daughter screamed “Why do you care so much?” A question that would both baffle and enrage me.
Children are often reaching for the closest words available to describe an experience they can feel deeply, but don’t yet fully understand.
Millennials and Gen Z have inherited far greater permission than previous generations to speak openly about emotional pain. Where many older generations learned to suppress discomfort and carry on, younger generations have been encouraged to name what hurts and question what feels emotionally unsafe.
In many ways, this is an important evolution.
But we are trying to describe highly complex relational and nervous-system dynamics using blunt words.
So, children reach for the nearest available term.
Boundaries. Toxic. Controlling. Gaslighting. Trauma.
The feeling underneath may be true. But the word itself is often incomplete.
And this matters deeply.
Because if parents become consumed with defending themselves against the label, they miss the deeper invitation underneath it.
The real question is not:
“Did I knowingly overstep their boundaries?”
It’s:
“What was my child experiencing in my presence that made them reach for that word?”
Asking this question opens the possibility for an environment where reconnection - and a newer, richer-than-ever relationship - can grow.
Bio:
Rita Hoy is mom-of-four, Early Childhood Professional, Human Design-Informed Life Coach and creator of Motherance - a philosophy and support program for mothers in conflict or estranged from their child.
What are your views on the concept of boundaries? Did Rita’s experience resonate with how you’ve experienced family?
If you would like to take part in this series then message me.
I’m also thinking about my readers who struggle with father’s day, either because you have a difficult relationship with your father or because you are an estranged father. I hope these articles may help:
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Perfectly written. As an estranged daughter I would love for both my parents to have this awareness. Love it