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[quote=Anonymous]My experiences as a daughter and as a mom is that you get what you give. My parents were not great parents and I have a lot of issues with them, but I do try to be polite and respectful towards them if only to model that behavior for my own child and to make our visits more pleasant. I am stingy with visits though, because they can be real pills and stress me out a lot, and I have to give myself breaks between visits or the resentment will build up and I will really struggle to stay polite.

As a parent, I am trying to do better than my parents. I don't hit my kids, for starters. I think that's really awful behavior and I think the fact that my parents hit us has been really terrible for our mental health and for our relationship with them. I know they'd justify it by saying it was more normalized back then, but I know plenty of Boomers who didn't hit their kids. At the end of the day it's a choice.

I also talk to my kids respectfully, am interested in their lives, and apologize to them when I screw up. These are things my parents didn't do when I was a kid. They were very authoritarian and spoke to me with a lot of condescension or frequently sarcasm -- like I was dumb and they were smart and they resented having to explain things to me. They didn't seem interested in my life, my thoughts, my dreams for myself. And they never apologized. Not even when they were clearly in the wrong, like if they lost their temper over something that turned out to be a misunderstanding, even when it became clear they misunderstood, they wouldn't apologize, they'd just scold us for not clarifying things for them sooner.

I think the reason I have a really positive relationship with my kids but not a great one with my parents is a lot of this behavior. It's just hard to have a mutually respectful and warm relationship with people who used to hit you in anger, criticize you all the time, talk down to you, dismiss you, and were never accountable to you for any of their own behavior.

I do still try to be polite though. And I maintain a relationship with them. But I know often they feel I don't welcome them enough, or visit enough, or even that I am not respectful enough of their station in life. I do my best.

Perhaps some of this will be helpful for you, OP.[/quote]

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