It’s perfectly natural for each generation to examine what their parents did, evaluate it, and decide what they want to do differently. That’s how civilization advances. That’s how human progress gets made.
At the same time, we must make room for grace and appreciation of those who came before us. In many ways, the balance between honoring and honestly assessing has gotten a bit skewed in the modern era. Billy Garton, Jr., host of the You Choose podcast, encapsulated it perfectly in a poem he shared called “The Age of Ancestral Amnesia.”
“We are living in a time where it has become fashionable to blame our parents, to dissect them, diagnose them, to explain ourselves through their failures,” he begins.
‘The comfort of vocabulary they never had access to’
Then he explains the dilemma: “We’ve learned how to critique our elders without learning how to honor them. We speak fluently about trauma, but rarely about sacrifice. We analyze their emotional limitations from the comfort of vocabulary they never had access to.”
He shares that many fathers were taught to “endure” instead of “feel.” Mothers were taught to “survive,” not to “process.”
“And survival built the ground we stand on,” he says.
However—and this is important—none of this means we should simply overlook what our parents may have done wrong.
“Reverence doesn’t mean blindness,” Garton continues. “It doesn’t excuse harm. It means remembering context. How they were raised. What they knew or didn’t know. What they were dealing with. Because progress without gratitude becomes arrogance.”
None of us is truly ‘self-made.’
“You are not self-made; you are inheriting—inherited resilience, inherited endurance, inherited imperfect love,” Garton continues. “And one day, you will be the imperfect elder. The question is: Will they only see your flaws, or will they remember what you built? Because a culture that forgets its ancestors does not become enlightened. What remains unhealed becomes the inheritance.”
So many people relate to what Garton is saying here, and shared thoughts in the comments:
“I believe understanding where our ancestors came from is important because what they haven’t healed can impact our nervous system but I believe we can do it through love and compassion so we choose what we pass forward! We can thank our ancestors for what they did AND also say what we no longer passing on.”
“Don’t blame your parents for what they were never taught. The speaker is right: a lot of this knowledge simply wasn’t available to them.
But “they didn’t know” doesn’t mean we have to excuse everything either.
Instead of using “they didn’t know” to justify the behaviour, use it as a reason to educate. We now have access to a wealth of knowledge they may never have had, so perhaps the goal isn’t to condemn them, but to invite them to learn alongside us.”
“Only after you have raised your own children do you have the opportunity to learn the lesson that 99.9% of parents do their best at that time. They don’t get up and plan to do stuff that would send you to therapy.”
“Beautifully said. I didn’t understand this until my 50s. Unfortunately by then, my mother had only a handful of years left on this earth. I regret that I couldn’t see her clearly a long time ago.”
Unrepentant abuse is the exception, of course
Some people took issue with the idea of honoring elders as a rule, which is understandable. Those who have suffered at the hands of abusers and endured genuine trauma from it are not being overly critical when they blame parents for things. Some parents haven’t earned the right to be honored and deserve a harsh critique.
However, that’s not most parents. And intolerance of abuse isn’t the trend Garton challenges here. He’s essentially saying respect, reflection, and reckoning can go hand in hand. We can be grateful for what our elders tried to do with the tools they had at the time, acknowledge that those tools weren’t always adequate, and also create new tools that better fit what lies before us.
We also need to be aware and humble enough to know that some of our own tools will become obsolete, and that might happen sooner than we think. As Garton says, “…one day, you will be the imperfect elder…” That’s a wise thing to remember as we examine and critique our own elders.
You can follow You Choose with Billy Garton, Jr. on Instagram.
