Our parents carry their own set of values and many of them struggled hard to pass them down to us. For some of us these values are either seemingly old fashioned or don’t fit in with our own value system. Reconciling a parent’s values with our own can be a constant source of angst between a parent and an adult child. No matter what their intentions, the inability of a parent’s values to simply be their own moral compass can be irritating at best and infuriating at worst. Families have practically waged war over a value system that doesn’t gel.
Parents often aren’t aware of the reasons behind your differing values. Explaining them might help, but agreeing to simply disagree is usually the only way to bury the proverbial value hatchet between you. When you values are in direct conflict with theirs, there is little room for negotiation. Whether you have only one parent to contend with or you feel you have to challenge the entire family’s values in order to defend your own, the chronic tension can ruin holiday and other festive events. Offering a truce between you and the parent with the alternate values, an unspoken understanding of your differing opinions, is often the only respite from the tension available. It means that you often have to adopt a new value about not needing to be right and being able to give your parent the right to their own opinion no matter how strongly you disagree with it.
