6 Phrases Adult Children Want To Hear From Their Parents

Arielle Dualan, another associate marriage and family therapist at The Connective, underscored the importance of parents apologizing to their adult children for pain they may have caused, even if it was unintended.  

“Most adult children understand their parents aren’t perfect and have the best intentions when it comes to parenting,” she said. “Some parents struggle with acknowledging unintentional or intentional hurt they may have inflicted on their adult children at any stage of their life.”

Adding a “How can we work through this?” to the apology can make it even more impactful. 

“Taking ownership not only creates space for emotional repair and connection, it also models humility and relational healing for the adult child, which can transcend into other relationships in their life,” Dualan said. 

Caraballo pointed out that parents from certain cultures may have a harder time apologizing to their kids — communities of color, in particular, he noted. 

“As a therapist, I work with a lot of Black clients specifically, and oftentimes when they express a concern about how they were raised, parents can become defensive or obstinate,” he said. “This can be for a lot of reasons, of course, some of them personal and others cultural. There can be a lot of pressure to ‘save face.’ I think it’s incredibly healing for Black families to try and normalize parents apologizing to their children when appropriate. It’s certainly not the norm, but hopefully it becomes more common in time.”

Dualan, who specializes in working with the adult children of immigrant parents, said she’s noticed her clients’ families struggle in this area. The parents may have been raised in an environment where they needed to focus on fundamental needs, like safety, while their kids may have grown up with those needs met, allowing them to focus on prioritizing things like emotional connection, she explained. 

“For my clients and myself, it might mean having to shift our expectations that our parents may not be the ones to initiate emotional connection,” Dualan said. “And there is grief in never knowing that type of relationship with their parents.  But we as adult children can certainly try our best on our end to create the relationship we’ve always wanted with our parents as well.” 

2. ‘I was in survival mode.’

While this statement is not an excuse for poor parenting or bad behavior, it does recognize that while the parent was trying to manage everything, they did, in fact, drop the ball, Glover Tawwab said. 

“As a young adult, especially one without children, it can be very hard to think of your reality of childhood outside of you being the child,” she said, “versus as this adult who had a job, who had to come home and cook, who still had to have friendships, who had to do all of these things while parenting you.”

Talking about everything they had going on at that time can provide some useful context and understanding.

“If I had more support, if I had more resources, if I had more finances, if I wasn’t going through a divorce, if I wasn’t struggling with X, Y and Z — like really recognizing those things and being able to speak to them can be very healing for the adult child relationship,” Glover Tawwab said. 

Los Angeles marriage and family therapist Gayane Aramyan echoed a similar point: Our parents were likely doing the best they could with the tools they had available at that time. They may not have had the keen awareness of their emotions or the communication skills we expect of parents today. 

“Having tough conversations with your parents and having them acknowledge your experience as a child can be healing in repairing the relationship between adult child and parent,” Aramyan said. 

3. ‘I’m really proud of you.’