12 Things You Do That Make Your Kids Want To Never Speak With You Again

8. You make them feel like a burden

If you are a parent, you probably on some level dread the moment your kids grow up and sail away into the endless and enticing oceans of adulthood. Deep inside, though, you do hope that they will remember you and come back to visit. You expect to remain in their lives, be informed on their decisions, and kept apprised of the intimate personal details related to their families’ affairs.

Now, imagine that exactly the opposite happens.

Imagine your adult children want nothing to do with you. They move away to a different part of the city, state, or even country and rarely come to visit, if at all. Even phone conversations are infrequent and tense, and you sense the subtle inflections of irritation in their voice on the occasion that these calls do happen. It feels like your children would rather not talk to you but do it out of obligation because you called. The conversation never goes beyond the cordial formalities and high-level, routine updates. You try to learn more details, but the more questions you ask, the more perceptible the irritation on the other end of the phone becomes; it travels hundreds of miles through the telephone networks and pierces you straight in the heart.

Every time you hang up the phone after these weird, unnatural conversations, you feel uneasy. You feel rejected and can’t understand what you did wrong.

Why is s/he being like this? you ask yourself, thinking of everything you have ever done for them, and a wave of resentment arises within you.

And, of course, you will feel painfully righteous in your resentment. You will be permanently stuck in your righteousness and entitlement, making it — yet again — all about yourself.

Even though more likely than not, you were the one who caused this in the first place.

“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel. — Carl W. Buehner”

Here are 12 things you do that make your kids want to never speak with you again.

1. You constantly criticize and judge them

You always seem to be unhappy with your kid. Their clothes look off, appearance is messy, grades aren’t good enough. The music they listen to is silly; the books they read are dumb; their interests are “not serious.” It doesn’t matter what they like — what matters is whether or not you like it.

When they mess up, your negative reaction is always more pronounced and intense than the positive reaction to their success. Got an A at school? Good, that’s to be expected. Didn’t wash the dishes on time? You yell at them for not helping you enough.

You hold them up to a high, unachievable standard that they keep falling short of while you judge them for it. As a result, they never feel like they are good enough. Their self-esteem suffers. And they remember that you were the one who made them feel this way.

2. You compare them to others

“You are such a walking disaster! Look at Peter from your class — he’s such a good student and doesn’t cause his parents a headache as you do.”

“What’s wrong with you Jane, why can’t you work harder like your friend Mary? While you’ve been wasting time writing stuff nobody’s ever going to read, SHE got into Harvard!”

For some reason, there still are people in this world that think negative comparisons are effective. Parents who do this believe that by comparing their children to others who are supposedly “better,” they set a positive example and exert pressure that will motivate their kids to excel.

Except what really happens is one of the two things. Either your child ends up caving in and grow up striving to compete with people around him, believing that only by being “better” than everyone else around him can he truly be whole. Or he ends up rebelling against you by being a failure and messing up on purpose, which may potentially lead to severe underachievement later in life. In both of these cases, though, your child’s self-esteem will be crushed, and he will likely not want to see you again.

3. You communicate they need to be perfect; you don’t want mediocre

You assess everything your child does with a critical eye and on a scale from failure to perfection. Nothing other than perfection is acceptable.

Naturally, any grade other than an A is a disappointment. Any college other than one out of the top 20 US News & World Report’s ranking is not a fit. (Fine, maybe top 50, but come on, we both know it’s a stretch). You will shove your children into various extracurriculars to help them develop their talents (that nobody except for you cares about). When they are old enough to start selecting their professional interests, you will intervene with unsolicited advice with regards to what is considered the most valuable occupation they have to pursue.

All of this, of course, to stroke your own ego. You wear your children like a badge of honor. They are the trophies that you polish and put up for public display, so everyone could see what a successful parent you are. You decorate your life at their expense — and no one likes to be treated as decoration.

4. You constantly remind them that you know better

To make your authority undisputable, you always tell your children you know better. You tell them you want the best for them.

In practice, though, you view them as an extension of you and try to mold them into something they are not to fulfill your own needs. You know it, too. Of course, admitting this fact plainly and openly can be pretty unbecoming, I get it. Because it’s selfish, self-serving, and egocentric. No parent would want to admit they are any of these things — not even to themselves, let alone their friends, families, and just bystanders.

So you rationalize your behavior by saying you are doing it for the child instead. You tell them to trust you — you know better, they’ll thank you later. That’s what you yourself want to believe. That’s what you make them believe.

This hypocrisy gets exposed eventually, and when it does, it’s hard to earn the trust back. Nobody likes to realize they have been someone else’s marionette most of their lives.

5. You don’t listen to what they have to say

You don’t strive to understand what your children are going through. You are never curious about what’s going on in their lives beyond “what’s in school.”

From an early age, you are dismissive of what they feel. You’re not trying to put yourself in their shoes. When they are younger, they usually attempt to share something with you, but you react critically, with judgment, and a lack of emotional engagement. As a result, they feel lonely, isolated, and misunderstood, and learn to resolve their anxieties on their own. They learn they can’t trust you to be understanding and supportive, so they stop sharing.

And then you get surprised why your teenager doesn’t talk to you at all. And your adult child doesn’t answer your calls.

6. You communicate that they can’t be loved for who they are; only for what they do

The result of excessive criticism, high expectations, and pressure is that your children internalize the message that they can’t be loved for who they are.

And how can they think differently when you, your parent, fail to love them unconditionally? When you are only benevolent (to the extent you can be) in exchange for an accomplishment, a track record, a credential? Without it, your children are invisible to you. It’s not them you’re proud of; it’s all these external attributes and achievements they work so hard to collect for you.

Except its not grades and diplomas they’re really earning with their toxic overachievement; it’s your love.

7. You guilt trip and manipulate them

Indeed, there will come a time when your children are old enough that you will find it hard to control them. They will rebel against you and disobey you.

So what are you going to do about it? You will manipulate — by invoking in them the feelings of shame, guilt, and obligation. You will say very toxic things.

You will tell them they are selfish and only think about themselves. You will say they can’t just do whatever they want. You will remind them of all the things you’ve done for them, all the sacrifices you’ve made. You’ll make sure to make them feel indebted.

Guilty people are easy to control, and for a while, it will work. Until the day when your child gets tired of being told she’s inadequate and ungrateful, gets the hell out, and never looks back.

8. You make them feel like a burden

Every time you tell your kids how much you’ve done for them, every time you guilt trip them, it makes them feel like a burden. This is precisely why parental manipulations related to money are so effective (“You seem to forget who earns money in this house! I get out of my way to put the food on your table and the roof over your head!”).

Most young people aren’t really able to start earning income at least until they are in their late teens, and even then, it’s rarely enough for them to become financially independent. So when you tell them about all the money you have invested in them, there is absolutely no way they could repay that, even if they wanted to. Besides, you can’t exactly put a price tag on human life — that you gave them, which you make sure to remind them often. So they feel helpless and crushed under the weight of this debt that can’t be returned.

But that’s exactly what you want, don’t you?

Make them feel indebted, so they do as you say.

Don’t be surprised if your children don’t want to speak with you after this. How excited are you to chat with the collectors preying on you to pay back your delinquent credit card?

9. You communicate that only looks matter

Your obsession with perfection isn’t just for you, do you realize that? You need everything in your life — including your child — to be perfect because that’s the image you want to project to those around you.

Because it’s the image that really matters, not what’s underneath it.

The relationship with your spouse is messed up? You won’t get a divorce because “what are people going to say?” Your kid didn’t get into an Ivy League, but only to an unbranded state school? What a disappointment, how will you explain that to your friends, especially after you made them believe your child is a genius savant?

A notable trait of yours is that you will always be a proud and praising parent in front of others, but in private, you will judge, criticize, and point out the things your child did wrong. You will force your kid to be what you want them to be only so you could use them as proof of your own worth.

Your child sooner or later deciphers it. And will want nothing to do with you after that.

10. You control all aspects of their life

There’s nothing more depressing than a controlling, overbearing parent.

This can be manifested in different ways. Some parents are anxious and overprotective, believing that they are trying to save their children from the harms of the world. Others control not so much out of the urge to protect but more because they are convinced they have a right to shape their offspring in a particular way that satisfies them.

Both are equally damaging and messed up. There are two ways this can play out. The first possibility is that you will raise a docile, helpless, fragile individual that’s scared of the world and blindly follows authority. This outcome is actually the most desirable for anxious parents, as these children often do stick around their parents in adulthood because they aren’t able to go through the healthy process of physical and psychological separation; their parents simply don’t let them.

The second possibility is that you will raise a rebel who will reclaim their freedom by getting out of your house the first chance they get and never coming back.

11. You blame them for your life decisions

This is a big one, and it’s directly related to manipulations and grand announcements of unbearable sacrifices you had to make for your children.

It may be that you had your kid at a young age or as a single parent. Or maybe you feel like you were forced into a job you hated because you had a child you needed to provide for. Or maybe the time and money you would much rather spend on yourself, you had to spend on raising a child.

Whatever it is, you feel you didn’t achieve what you wanted in life and are deeply disappointed — with yourself. The reality is, you just can’t handle the pain of bearing this responsibility, so you conveniently find someone to blame. And that person is none other but your own child.

Your child didn’t make a decision to be born, though. Nor did he force you to do what you hate in life.

No, it’s your life choices. Own them.

12. You teach them that they can’t just do whatever they want in life

You already have an idea of what your child should be, you know better. And you make sure they know you know. You raise them to be aware that they have to be a certain way to fulfill your expectations and fit in society. You force them into conformity.

So they grow up internalizing the message that in order to be successful in life, they can’t do what they want; they have to do what others expect of them. So they end up stuck in their mediocre lives, doing jobs they hate, feeling burned out and miserable, but never being able to identify exactly what’s wrong: they did what was prescribed, what they were told to do.

I get it, you yourself were probably forced into conformity and fulfilling other people’s expectations. So now you’re merely passing the “wisdom” on to the next generation. But just because you didn’t get to do what you wanted in life doesn’t mean your children have to live through that. It’s as simple as that.

Conclusion

Parenting is a tough job. However, contrary to popular belief, the toughest part isn’t about failing to raise a “successful” and functional member of society. Rather, it is about not screwing your offspring up.

Because every guilt trip, criticism, and accusation is a nail in the coffin of your child’s self-esteem. Every time you project your own insecurities and impose unreasonable expectations, you chip away at their wholeness, emotional health, and future well-being.

Every time you engage in any of these behaviors, you push your children away, inch by inch, until they end up drifting so far away that you will never be able to make them want to come back.