I Wish That You Liked Me: On Our Fear of Disappointing Our Parents
By Heartscape Intern, Tan Min Wen
I tried to be good // Am I no good? If I’m turning in your stomach and I’m making you feel sick // Am I making you feel sick? — Ethel Cain, Strangers
In 2020, American singer-songwriter Ethel Cain released her single Strangers, which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for obsessive love. In the song, the singer worries about whether she’s any good even as her lover cannibalises her, giving away her desperate desire to please and to be loved even when she is being brutalised by him. Though she is singing to her lover, some listeners find that the song accurately captures how they feel towards their mothers: desperately wanting to be good enough (“Am I no good?”) and endlessly guilty for burdening her (taking “If I’m turning in your stomach and I’m making you feel sick” to be describing their mothers’ morning sickness when carrying them to term).
The guilt we feel towards our parents, and the (perhaps resulting) fear of not being good enough for them is not an experience unique to Ethel Cain listeners; the sentiment is found everywhere, across art and media. In Favourite Daughter, Lorde sings: All of the medals I won for you // Breaking my back just to be your favourite daughter. In Beautiful Boy (2018), Timothée Chalamet’s character tells his father: “[Y]ou’re just embarrassed because I was… this amazing thing, like your special creation, and you don’t like who I am now.” In 2021, Tumblr user @honeytuesday posted: mothers and daughters existing as wretched mirrors of each other: i am all you could have been and you are all i might be.
A famous scene in Lady Bird (2017) has the protagonist telling her mother, “I wish that you liked me.” Her mother replies, “Of course I love you.”
“But do you like me?”
“I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.”
“What if this is the best version?”
This all begs the question: What drives our almost primal fear of not turning out to be who our parents want us to be?
But Do You Like Me?
At the centre of our desire to live up to our parents’ expectations of us is our innate desire to be adored by them; for them to not just love us, out of obligation, but to like us, to be proud of us, to delight in our personhood.
For a child, parental love is not simply a pleasant addition to life, a good-to-have but something that can be lived without. In the late 1800s to early 1900s, it was observed that infants under institutional care, who had their physical needs adequately met but who experienced profound social and emotional deprivation, had increased mortality rates and showed marked impairments in physical, cognitive, and socioemotional development (Rowold, 2019).
Beyond infant survival and development, consistent, sensitive caregiving is also essential for children to develop secure attachments, which provide an internal foundation for emotional regulation, exploration, and subsequent interpersonal relationships (Bowlby, 1969; Ainsworth et al., 1978). Longitudinal evidence shows that early attachment security is associated with social competence and the quality of peer and romantic relationships later in life, suggesting that being reliably cared for can shape relational functioning well beyond childhood (Fraley, 2002; Sroufe, 2005).
Given the importance of being loved, it is only natural that children, as they are growing up, learn to answer this one important question that will ensure their healthy development and survival: What do I have to do in order to be loved?
Look At the Medals I Won for You
Psychologist Carl Rogers distinguished between two types of parental styles (Rocha Lopes et al., 2015). Unconditional Positive Regard is characterised by the child consistently being valued and receiving parental affection and acceptance, regardless of their behaviour, while Conditional Regard is characterised by the child only receiving approval when they meet certain standards. Unconditional Positive Regard, which Rogers described as the optimal parental style, is associated with significantly healthier psychological outcomes in adulthood as compared to Conditional Regard.
Unfortunately, parents commonly show their children Conditional Regard (Haines & Schutte, 2022), which is associated with what Self-Determination Theory (SDT) calls introjected regulation — the least effective type of internalised behavioural regulation (Assor et al., 2003).
Imagine a child whose parents repeatedly communicate enormous approval when she achieves academically, and withdraw this affection when she fails to do so. In order to earn her parents’ approval and avoid disappointing them, she studies harder and harder, ensuring academic excellence. Eventually, however, even without her parents exerting academic pressure on her, she may start to tell herself: “If I don’t get an A, it means I’m useless.”
This is introjected regulation: internally compelling oneself, often through anxiety, to exhibit the regulated behaviour in order to feel worthy, but without accepting the behaviour’s associated values as one’s own. She studies well into the night because anything less produces guilt and anxiety. She panics when she falls behind. A good grade feels fleetingly euphoric, and a disappointing grade feels disproportionately painful. She grows up into an adult with fluctuating self-esteem, poor coping skills, low self-worth, and resentment towards her parents.
It makes sense, then, why parental expectations can retain such extraordinary psychological power even in adulthood. We can move out of our parents’ homes, become financially independent, and make decisions without asking their permission, and yet still experience intense guilt when making a choice they would disapprove of. Their expectations no longer have to be externally enforced because we have learned to enforce them ourselves.
You’re Just Embarrassed Because You Don’t Like Who I Am Now
No matter how hard we try, it’s extremely difficult to become exactly who our parents want us to be, especially when that fantasy version of us is far departed from the reality of who we actually are.
Self-Discrepancy Theory distinguishes between three domains of the self: the actual self, the ideal self, and the ought self (Higgins, 1987). The actual self represents who we (or others) believe we actually are; the ideal self represents who we (or others) want to be; and the ought self represents who we (or others) believe we are obligated or expected to be. These standards can be considered either from our own perspective, or from the perceived perspective of significant others.
The three domains of the self are particularly relevant to parental expectations. Perhaps I actually want to become an artist, but I believe my parents think I ought to become a doctor; or perhaps I want a different relationship, lifestyle, career, or definition of success from the one imagined for me. The greater the perceived distance between our actual self and these internalised standards, the more psychological discomfort may arise. Discrepancies involving the ideal self are particularly associated with dejection-related emotions such as disappointment and sadness, whereas discrepancies involving the ought self are associated with agitation-related emotions such as fear, threat, and restlessness.
This offers one possible explanation for why failing to become who our parents imagined can feel so frightening. Beyond just deciding between two careers, partners, or ways of living, we may be confronting a discrepancy between who we are and who we have learned we are supposed to be. And when that “ought self” has become entangled with the conditions under which we learned as children to expect parental approval, departing from it can feel like risking love itself.
Am I Turning in Your Stomach?
It becomes even harder to contend with the discrepancy between who you are and who your parents think you ought to be when the psychological boundary between parent and child is unclear.
Enmeshment is defined as the psychological and emotional fusion among family members that results in a diminished sense of self, individuality, and autonomy (Bacon & Conway, 2023). This is different from closeness; a healthy family can be extremely close, seeking one another’s advice, making sacrifices for one another, and feeling responsible for one another, while still recognising each person as psychologically separate. Enmeshment describes a more problematic form of closeness in which boundaries diffuse and individuality becomes difficult to maintain, leading to low self-differentiation.
In children and adolescents, enmeshment can lead to greater relational aggression by teaching children to over-value extrafamilial relationships (Thompson et al., 2024). The desire for autonomy during adolescence may also result in the engaging of problematic or delinquent behaviour. Enmeshed children and adolescents also exhibit greater anxious and depressive symptoms, possibly due to lower self-esteem and self-worth. These maladaptive coping responses to enmeshment can be internalised by children and later accessed in adulthood when faced with stressors.
For someone with low self-differentiation, the psychological and emotional fusion with their parents can make parent-child disagreements feel like a betrayal.
I Am All You Could Have Been
The weight of our parents’ expectations is perhaps made heavier by our culture. In Singapore, the individual exists within a cultural context in which interdependence, family obligation, and filial responsibility can carry considerable social significance. Being aware of the sacrifices your parents have made to ensure your success and access to resources can create a feeling of indebtedness, of owing it to them to live up to their expectations. The concept of filial piety further cements this obligation, and a culture of interdependence emphasises the importance of putting aside your desires to serve the greater good and maintain happiness and peace within your family.
Where Do We Go Now?
Perhaps, then, our fear of disappointing our parents feels so primal because it is rarely just about disappointment. Somewhere along the way, I want my parents to be proud of me can become I need my parents to be proud of me to feel good about myself. Their expectations become our own; the distance between who we are and who we believe we ought to be becomes a source of guilt and anxiety; and, when our identities are deeply intertwined with theirs, choosing ourselves can begin to feel like betraying them. In a culture where love, gratitude, sacrifice, and filial obligation can be so closely entangled, the question becomes even harder: How do we become our own person without feeling as though we have failed the people who made us one?
Maybe the answer is not to stop caring what our parents think. After all, wanting the people we love to be proud of us is deeply human. Nor does becoming our own person require us to reject our families, dismiss their sacrifices, or abandon the values they have given us. Rather, growing up may involve learning to distinguish between the parts of ourselves we have genuinely chosen and those we constructed to remain lovable: between I want this and I should want this; between gratitude and indebtedness; between being loved and being approved of.
Our parents will inevitably have imagined versions of us before we had the chance to imagine ourselves. Perhaps they pictured the career we would pursue, the person we would marry, the life we would build, or simply a version of us happier, safer, and more successful than they were able to be. There can be immense love contained within those hopes. But there can also be fear. And ultimately, we cannot spend our lives becoming someone else's imagined version of us, even when that imagination belongs to someone we love.
Lady Bird asks her mother, “What if this is the best version?” Maybe that is the question we eventually have to ask ourselves, too. Not whether we have become the best version of ourselves according to our parents, but whether we can learn to love the person who exists when we stop trying to be.
Maybe growing up is realising that disappointing our parents and loving them are not mutually exclusive. And that maybe being a good child was never supposed to require becoming someone else.
References
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