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I raised my two boys with a ferocity I didn’t fully understand until recently. Not angry ferocity — loving ferocity. The kind that checks the locks twice, that needs to know where they are, that finds it difficult to let them make choices I can see might hurt them. My sons are adults now, both married, both with children of their own. They are kind about it. But they have told me, gently and more than once, that they would like a little more room.
I have been sitting with that.
I grew up in a religious household where my father’s authority was absolute and God was frequently invoked to justify it. My mother accepted whatever my father decided. When I was fifteen, I was seriously abused by a member of my own family. When I told my parents, they told me God must have wanted it to happen.
I have spent decades trying to make sense of that response. I am not sure I ever fully will. What I do know is that every adult who should have protected me either failed to or decided not to. And when my own boys were born, something in me made a decision: not them. Not on my watch.
That is where my protectiveness came from. I understand it now in a way I didn’t for most of my adult life. Understanding it has not made it easy to change. But it has made it possible to try.
Understanding Your Protectiveness
Your protectiveness is not a character flaw.
It is a nervous system that learned, very early and very completely, that the world is not always safe and that adults cannot always be trusted to keep you safe within it. When your children were young, that instinct served them well. You were the protection you never had. That matters, and it is worth saying clearly: you did something important.
There is a difference between protecting your children and managing your own fear.
This was the hardest thing for me to see. When my boys were small, the two were often the same thing. As they grew, they started to separate. Their actual risks decreased as their capabilities grew. My anxiety did not decrease at the same rate. I was sometimes protecting them from my fear rather than from genuine danger. Noticing that distinction — not judging it, just noticing it — was where the shift began for me.
Adult children are not children.
This sounds obvious, but it did not feel obvious to me for a long time. My sons are capable, thoughtful men. They are good husbands and good fathers. They do not need me to anticipate the dangers of their lives any more than I would want someone doing that for mine. Letting them be adults — genuinely, not just in theory — is a form of respect. It is also, I have found, a way of telling them I believe in them. That belief matters to them more than my worry does.
Working Through It
When faith has been used to harm you, trusting anything can be difficult.
I still have a complicated relationship with the faith I grew up with. What was done to me, and what was said to me afterwards in the name of God, left marks that are still there. One of the things I have had to untangle is the difference between the faith itself and the way particular people used it. I have also had to recognise that my difficulty trusting authority — any authority, including my sons’ own good judgement — has roots in a household where authority was consistently misused. My sons are not my father. Their judgement is their own, and it is generally sound.
Ask your children what they actually need from you.
I did this, eventually, with some trepidation. The answers were smaller than I feared. They did not want me to disappear. They wanted me to ask before offering advice rather than giving it automatically. They wanted me to trust them to come to me when they needed me, rather than me anticipating every need before they’d had a chance to feel it. These were things I could actually do.
What Actually Helps
Get support for yourself.
I only recently started working on the childhood experiences that shaped all of this. I wish I had done it sooner — not because my sons suffered irreparably, but because I did. I carried things alone for a very long time that I didn’t need to carry alone. There are therapists who specialise in working with survivors, and there are peer communities of people who understand what it is to parent from a place of unresolved pain. Both help.
The goal is not to stop caring.
It is to let the caring take a shape your children can actually receive. A parent’s love that lands as surveillance, however well-intentioned, can feel like distrust. The same love, offered with a little more space in it, lands as exactly what it is.
I am sixty-two. I am still learning this. My sons are patient with me in the way I was patient with them when they were small and getting things wrong. That is not lost on me. It is, in fact, one of the things I am most grateful for.
If you are a survivor raising children, or a survivor whose children are now grown, and you recognise something of yourself here — you are not alone, and you are not beyond changing. Neither am I.
Virginia P is a survivor and contributing author at Survive Child Abuse.
