Welcome to the Mother-Daughter Relationship. Show the podcast for mothers and daughters who want to build stronger bonds, deepen their understanding and transform their relationships. I'm your host, Brittany Scott, licensed therapist and mother-daughter relationship coach. After years of working with hundreds of daughters. And mothers. I've developed strategies that help break generational patterns, heal wounds, and create the loving relationships you've always wanted. Each week I'll be sharing insights from real clients, expert interviews and practical tools you can use immediately to improve your mother-daughter dynamic. Whether you're struggling with communication breakdowns, navigating major life transitions, or simply wanna take your already good relationship to the next level. The show is for you. And yes, the transformation I guide my clients through can be yours too. I'll share more about how you can work with me. It's time to experience the relationship you both deserve. Are you ready? Let's dive in. Welcome back to another episode of the Mother-Daughter Relationship show. It's Brittany here. Today we're diving into something I've been thinking about a lot lately, how millennials appear to be the first generation collectively holding their parents accountable for their parenting choices and what that means for us as parents ourselves. Before we get into generational accountability, I want to start by talking about how we understand trauma and parent-child relationships. As a therapist, I firmly believe. It's not my place to label someone's experience as trauma. That determination belongs solely to the client. I get to help you process what you determine is trauma, but it's not my place to tell you if something you experienced is trauma. That's for you to decide. When we talk about Big T versus little T trauma, the distinction often comes down to intent. For example, physical or emotional abuse would typically be considered big T trauma actions that were deliberate and intentional. Emotional neglect might be considered little to trauma, not something a parent necessarily intended, but it was still very harmful. This might be a mother who was emotionally unavailable forcing her daughter to seek emotional support elsewhere. Both can be traumatic, but there's a difference between a mother who deliberately tried to sabotage you, maybe making you late to your dance recital, or never showing any urgency for things that matter to you, versus a mother who was simply unpredictable and inconsistently present. You just didn't know what you were going to get. I've had clients ask if their experiences qualify them for support in healing from a mother wound. My answer is always this. It's not up to me to decide if what you experience is enough to need healing, and I'm putting enough in quotes, if something is still causing you pain today, then it's significant enough to address it because it was enough to leave lasting effects. Again, it's not for me to decide. It's for you to decide that this is still affecting you, it's still bothering you, it's still something that you think about even when you don't want to. And that's where my support comes in. Now let's switch and talk about this phenomenon of millennials being perhaps the first generation to openly hold their parents accountable for behaviors that caused harm. We're not shying away from letting our parents know what they did or didn't do, wasn't enough. We are being very vocal about wanting our parents to understand how we were hurt and we're seeking acknowledgement and apologies. Well, I don't think those apologies or acknowledgements happen enough. The fact that millennials are speaking up, its significant progress. There's been so many generations that just stick to the status quo. Well, that's what my parents did. That's just how things were. That's what I'm gonna do. And that's how things just continue to pass down inside of families. This silence of not talking about anything, just accepting it as you know, it is what it is, or it was what it was. Millennials aren't accepting that, like we've decided that. No, it didn't have to be like that. No, it wasn't good enough for me. No, this actually hurt me, like we're speaking up about what our parents did or didn't do, where they fell short, where they could have gotten better and we're not accepting the statement of, my parents did the best they could with what they had. That statement there makes a lot of people angry, and rightfully so, because some of our parents could have done better. Some of them could have learned new things. Some of them could have decided they weren't just gonna repeat what was done to them. And I'm proud of everyone who will speak up about what was done to them or just what wasn't enough for them, where they needed more of their parents or where they needed different from their parents. So if you fall into that camp, I'm very proud of you. So this leads me to a question I've been pondering. How are millennials going to manage when our own children let us know how we hurt them? Are we prepared and ready to hear the truth of where we fell short or caused harm in raising our children? Will we receive their feedback with the same openness we expect from our parents? Are we gonna be willing to say, you know what? You're right. I'm sorry. Maybe I could have done better. I had no idea that this would lead to any pain. Like, how will we respond to our children? I think which each generation of mothering or parenting, the baton of generational healing or cycle breaking keeps moving forward in most families. If we look back at what our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers experience. We'd likely see incremental improvements with each generation. Sometimes a mother breaks one cycle, but inadvertently creates a new one. But overall, the trajectory tends to move toward improvement in most families. I've said this to a few people, and I've talked to my husband about this, that when, and I always say when, maybe I should say if, but if slash when my daughter comes to me or her dad, or to both of us together and lets us know that she's in therapy for childhood trauma. I'm just gonna ask for the bill. Like of course if she wants to have a conversation about it and she wants us to be a part of this healing for her, then I absolutely want to be. But if she just wants to do it alone with a therapist and just wants like our acknowledgement, I will do that. But I want the bill, I don't want her to cover. Therapy for trauma that I had a hand in creating for her. I don't want her to be an adult trying to cover a therapy bill. I don't know what healthcare is going to look like when she's an adult, but if there is a bill, I am gladly and proudly going to take that away from her. I don't need to know what she talks about with a therapist. I don't need to be a part of it if she doesn't want me a part of it, but I will cover the bill so that way she doesn't have to, and her healing doesn't have to be her financial responsibility. I'll take that on. I wanna add an important note here before I continue when discussing mother wounds and maternal behaviors, I'm not referring to deliberate sexual abuse, severe physical abuse, beyond generational practices of spanking or mothers turning a blind eye to others, harming their children, deliberate abuse, or turning a blind eye knowing that your child is being abused. It is never okay, and it does not fall under this idea of generationally how are we going to affect our children? So if this is your experience with your mother or your parents in general, don't hear your story in this episode. So what will our children say about us as millennial parents? Where are we getting it wrong or falling short? One theory I've heard is that millennials might be the generation of over parenting, where previous generations had latchkey kids who roamed freely until the streetlights came on. Millennials may have overcorrected. We might be hovering too much, not allowing enough independence or natural consequences. This correction might be showing up in some of the complaints we're starting to see from teachers about younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha children's behavior. I'm also wondering if our approach to emotions might come under scrutiny. Are we putting too much emphasis on emotional expression? Maybe not enough. Are we finding the right balance when it comes to emotions? I think how we've handled emotions with our children would definitely be a part of the conversation when they evaluate our parenting. I am interested in what they might say or. How this might turn out, like I think how we allow our children to express their emotions and to feel them and that all emotions are safe, and teaching them how to move through them and how to handle the emotions are going to be good. But I do wonder if there's a point where this is being overdone, but I don't know. It's just a thought in my head. I guess we'll know when our children are adults, are just as they get older we will see what happens. But I am interested in where, where this is going to take us because we have a really big emphasis on emotion, emotional regulation, and just emotional awareness and education. I'm curious, I also wonder you as a listener, what your thoughts might be on how our children, especially Gen Alpha, how our children. We'll view our parenting and where we may be overcorrecting or maybe under correcting, where is there an area where you might believe we're not doing enough? Or where are we doing too much? There's not a mother on this planet who got everything right. She doesn't exist, and if she does, I wanna speak to her and her children because I'd truly be amazed. The difference between good and bad parenting isn't about perfection, it's about accountability. A great mother takes responsibility and apologizes when she falls short. A mother who struggles with this might deflect or make it about herself, oh, I must just be a terrible mother, that I would do that to you. Okay? I'm such a bad mom. Those responses are just deflections or a way to make this about herself and find pity. Or help you pity her because now you're focusing on her and not you. The key is understanding that making mistakes doesn't make you a bad parent. It makes you human. What matters is how you respond to those mistakes with accountability, apologies, and adjusting your behavior moving forward. As we continue to hold our own parents accountable, let us also prepare ourselves to receive feedback from our children with grace and openness. That's how we keep moving the baton of healing forward when I'm working with clients individually. We look at their mother wound and what has happened, what's hurt them? What are the things that they need to heal from, and if they're a parent themselves already or if they desire parenthood, motherhood, I mostly work with women. Then we take into account who they want to be in their motherhood, what kind of mom they wanna be, what they want to do differently from their own mother. What are things they hope that they will change in their motherhood, and we work to be intentional parents. It's so easy to just say, I'm going to do the opposite of what my mom did. But sometimes the opposite isn't always correct. Sometimes doing the exact opposite is a complete overcorrection when there's probably a middle ground of what your mom did versus what would be the opposite. And what you should do lands in the middle, but that's where intentionality comes in. You can't make that decision or know what the middle ground is. If you're not even well versed in why or how your mom made the decision to parent the way that she did, was it because she was hurt and broken? Was it because she was just copying what the generation did before her, or was she also doing the complete opposite of what the generation before her did? There's so many answers inside of her story that help you be the intentional parent you want to be. That you can't ignore what the generation before you did. There has to be an understanding of what happened in the motherhood and like in the women that came before you. What happened when they were children? How were they parented? What were they carrying and what was helping to drive their decisions? Because the bottom line is that our brain development happens when we're children and. To make this easy to understand. I caught that like the factory setting. Your factory settings of your brain were done in childhood. They were done when your mother was making all of her mistakes when she was parenting through trauma when she was. Parenting broken when she was trying to parent and heal herself at the same time. That's where your factory setting was created. And so if you are not being intentional in making changes and adjustments to your motherhood, your brain is gonna fall back to what it knows and what it knows at the factory setting. The factory setting is what your mom did. That is how people look up and say, oh my God, I became my mom. Because your brain can only do what it knows how to do. If you're not being intentional in trying to change that, well, then you're just gonna fall back into old patterns. It's going to take intentionality, it's going to take. Paying attention to the stories of the women before you is gonna take awareness of knowing where you come from in order to change the cycles and in order to make different decisions. Otherwise, we're all destined to just become our mothers. Thank you for listening to today's episode and letting me kind of ramble a few thoughts on this topic. I'd love to hear any feedback if you have any. How are you preparing to receive feedback from your children? What patterns are you consciously trying to break? If you know them, who are you trying to be intentionally as a parent? What does that look or sound like for you? Connect with me on social media. Send me an email, however you wanna reach out. I am curious about your thoughts. I'd love to start a conversation on this. That's all for today's episode of the Mother-Daughter Relationship Show. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. I hope you picked up some valuable insights that you can start using right away in your own relationship to create deeper connection and understanding. If something from today's episode resonated with you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with the mother or daughter in your life who needs to hear this message. And while you're at it, please consider leaving a rating. And review so we can reach more families and transform the way mothers and daughters relate to each other. For those ready to take the next step, you can visit my website to learn more about my private coaching programs and my program designed specifically for mother-daughter pairs. Whether you're dealing with communication challenges, life transitions, or just wanna strengthen an already good relationship, I'm here to help. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you in the next one.