The best traits from your parents

Look for the good, not the bad.

Mar 23, 2023

Of all the people in our lives, our parents are perhaps the easiest scapegoats to blame for our shortcomings. They didn’t raise me right. They were too controlling/lenient/obsessive/negligent. They shouldn’t have made me study medicine. They should have let me keep that pet rabbit. They could have told me they loved me more.

Because parents are responsible for our upbringing, for shaping our identity in our most formative years, we think they are the explanation for our flaws. I’m insecure because my parents never encouraged me. I don’t know what I want in life because my parents never let me choose. I have a hard time trusting others because my parents were never there when I needed them.

It’s always something our parents did or didn’t do. Worse, blaming them makes sense. We were too young to know any better, and so they messed us up for life.

The sin of our parents

I’m no exception to this line of thinking. Often I’ve traced my failures in life back to how I was raised. I didn’t know how to make friends in university because my parents didn’t encourage me to spend time with friends when I was young. I started investing late because they didn’t teach me how to manage money. I had an existential crisis in my mid-20s because they never helped me explore what my identity could be once I was no longer a student.

It’s easy to blame my parents for all the bad things that happened. But it’s not helpful, not to mention unfair.

With the exception of genuine parental abuse, the only sin parents are usually guilty of committing is not knowing any better. I have no firsthand experience, but I’ll wager that parenting is one of the most difficult and demanding tasks one can ever undertake. The stakes are high. And doing one’s best is often not enough.

Every human has beliefs and biases, not all of them constructive. And parents are no exception. Inevitably those beliefs and biases will colour how they raise their child. If they think medicine is the greatest profession on earth, they’re going to want their child to become a doctor. If they believe pet rabbits are evil, they’re not going to buy their child one. If they’re not comfortable expressing emotions, they may end up not saying “I love you” enough.

Every single human on this earth—that includes you and me—is flawed in some way. So are our parents. Blaming them for our ills is easy, but unkind.

Instead of looking for the bad that our parents gave us, why don’t we look for the good? Instead of blaming them for our worst traits, why don’t we thank them for our best?

The best traits from my parents

As soon as I stopped looking for the bad, I started seeing the good. As it turns out, I have my parents to thank for many traits I’m proud to call mine.

Most important of all is the confidence that I can be and do anything, thanks to my parents’ unwavering support and the complete freedom they’ve given me at every critical juncture in my life: choosing to study French rather than the science pathway in high school, moving halfway across the world to the UK to study, quitting my corporate job to pursue freelancing full-time. My parents have never told me what I could or could not do, be or could not be. They’ve always let me choose and stood behind my choices.

I also have them to thank for my readiness to work hard. For decades I watched my dad toil six days a week at his dental clinic and my mom seven days a week at home, neither ever complaining. They never sat me down and told me I should work hard—their hard-working nature simply rubbed off on me. To this day, whenever I’m feeling lazy to take on a project, I think of my parents and say yes. It’s in no small part thanks to them that I’ve been able to sustain my subtitles translation and teaching for so long alongside my main hustle.

Other best traits I’ve inherited from my parents: my dad’s stoicism as he weathers the several storms life has thrown his way, my mom’s consistency in showing her love as she reads all my newsletters (hi mom!) and sends me happy birthday messages every year on the stroke of midnight.

The more good I sought, the more good I found. My parents may not have done everything right, but they made me a better person in oh so many ways.

What do you think?

If you’ve ever indulged in parent-blaming, and I bet you have, I urge you now to instead find something to thank them for:

What are the best traits from your parents?

What good did they give you? How did they make you a better person? Please hit “reply” or leave a comment—I read every response and I’d love to hear from you. Even better, share this with someone whose traits inspire you.