Parents are never as bad as kids think they are. — Matt Witten

Parents are never as bad as kids think they are.

Author: Matt Witten

Insight: There's a particular sting to childhood disappointment that stays with us—the moment a parent fails you in some way, and you're convinced they're fundamentally flawed, maybe even cruel. Years later, you find out they were terrified, broke, or dealing with something they never told you about. Suddenly the villain in your memory becomes a person, and it's oddly unsettling. The insight here isn't that parents are blameless. Some genuinely hurt their kids, and that pain deserves acknowledgment. Rather, it's about the gap between a child's total dependence on their parent and that parent's actual humanity. When you're small, parents loom impossibly large—their moods feel like weather, their decisions feel like laws of physics. It's almost impossible to see them as struggling people doing their best with incomplete information and their own wounds. What makes this quote relevant now is how much we swing between extremes. We either idealize our parents or blame them entirely. The harder, more forgiving view is accepting that they were probably doing something right while also making real mistakes—not excusing everything, but recognizing that being a parent, like being a person, is messier and more human than a kid can possibly understand.