The Parent Who Says "I Turned Out Fine!"
Why parents defend the discipline that hurt them, and what it takes to stop passing it down to your own children.
The sentence we reach for
A mother once sat across from me and told me about her husband. Their son had done something to upset him, and her husband slapped him. When she brought it up to him later, he didn’t get defensive. He just shrugged and said his own father did the same to him, and he turned out fine.
She told me he says that a lot. He’s quick to anger, struggles to name what he’s feeling, and is pretty much always in a bad mood. Underneath all of it, she said, is a man who is clearly uncomfortable talking about his own childhood, even while insisting it did him no harm.
The eggshells I walked on
I grew up with a mother who went quiet when she was angry. A loud quiet. Cupboard doors were slammed. Dishes were set down forcefully. Loud sighs that let us know exactly how she felt without her ever saying a word. We learned to read the air in our house the way you’d read the weather. We knew when to make ourselves small, when to stay out of the kitchen, when to just wait it out.
I never once thought of that as something I’d carry forward into my own home with my children. One day, years into raising my own kids, at a time when I was carrying more responsibility than I could comfortably hold, I felt a tightness and a tension rise in me. I didn’t shout or say anything unkind. I just went quiet and let the cupboard doors do the talking for me.
My kids noticed. So did my husband.
That night, after praying Isha salah, I broke down during my dua’. I recognized what I’d just done and knew exactly where I learned it. I didn’t want to hand my kids the same walking on eggshells childhood I’d had. And sitting there on the prayer rug, I knew that if I didn’t find a healthier way to carry what I was feeling, that’s exactly what I was going to do.
What that sentence is really protecting
Turned out fine is rarely said as a conclusion to a lot of deep soul-searching. It’s a reflex, a door pulled shut before anyone can look too closely at what’s behind it. If the discipline you received actually harmed you, if it left you quick to anger, or quick to go cold, or quicker to shut down than to speak up, then admitting that means admitting something painful about your own childhood, and about the people who raised you, no matter how well-intentioned they were. Defending it is so much easier than grieving it.
I think that’s what was happening in that father. He wasn’t defending a parenting method. He was defending the version of his own childhood where nothing was wrong, where his dad did what fathers do, where there’s nothing left to feel. The moment he lets that story crack; he has to process what was actually done to him. That’s a much harder thing to face than a shrug and a sentence he’s said a hundred times before.
I’m not a proponent of opening every old wound and examining it. The past is in the past, and there’s nothing you can do to change it. But you can learn from it. And when your past is affecting how you treat your children, then I say you have a responsibility to them to find a way to come to terms with what’s been done to you, accept that it hurt you and caused emotional damage, and try hard to find a better way going forward.
What turned out fine actually means
Turned out fine rarely holds up once you ask it a real question. Fine compared to what? Fine according to who? A person can hold down a job, raise a family, and love their children fiercely, and still carry a wound that surfaces exactly when they’re most tired, most overwhelmed, most stretched too thin. That reaction isn’t fine. That’s a person surviving something and calling it normal because nobody ever offered them another word for it.
I don’t say that to shame anyone who’s said they turned out fine, including the version of myself who could easily have said it about the loud quiet in my own childhood home. I say it because until we’re willing to look honestly at what shaped us, we keep handling the same patterns down to our own children.
Where the change has to start
Allah swt tells us in the Qur’an:
“Indeed, Allah would never change a people’s state until they change their own state.”
(Surah Ar-Ra’d 13:11)
The verse speaks first to a whole people, but the principle carries just as well into a single choice, in one quiet moment. Change starts somewhere, and it usually starts small and unwitnessed, in the space right after salah when you can’t pretend anymore. It doesn’t ask you to have already fixed everything. It asks you to be honest about what still needs fixing.
The striving is the point
Allah swt also tells us:
“And that each person will only have what they endeavoured towards.”
(Surah An-Najm, 53:39)
Not what they inherited. Not what was done to them as a child. What they themselves reached for. I think that’s actually good news, even though it doesn’t feel like it in the moment you catch yourself repeating the exact thing you promised yourself you’d never do. It means the story isn’t finished. It means the striving itself counts, even when you fall short of it more times than you’d like to admit.
That, to me, is what Ihsaan looks like in the ordinary, unglamorous days of parenting. Not perfection. Just the choice to keep showing up, to keep noticing, to keep trying again the next day, and the day after that.
I don’t know if that father will ever get to the place I got to that night. I hope he does, for his own sake as much as his son’s. But I know this much. Turned out fine is usually the sentence we reach for right before we’re honest enough to say I’m still carrying this, and I don’t want my kids to carry it too.
You’re doing better than you think.
With du’a,
Gulnaz, Halal Parenting
There’s no new This Week At Home guide landing this Friday. This is a lighter week by design, built to give you room to think this through before we go further together on Wednesday’s podcast. Last week’s guides were heavier than normal and already carried a lot, including conversation starters for each age group to help you talk to your SPOUSE as well as talking to your kids. So please take this week to go back and use whatever fits your situation best. Insh’Allah I’ll be back next week with new scripts and guides for this month’s theme, The Divided Home.