Congratulations. Your Child Is Always Right. Everyone Else Is the Problem.

One of the most difficult but also rewarding parts of my job is teaching parents how to stop “hurting” their children. I realize that’s quite a provocative statement, but after more than three decades in education and years of working with adolescents and families, I have become increasingly concerned about a particular kind of parenting. One that masquerades as compassion, celebrates itself as emotional support, and often leaves teenagers remarkably ill-equipped to take responsibility for their own lives.

I’m talking about parental enabling. Parents who, in their atempt to validate and protect their children, inadvertently, and sometimes quite consciously, reinforce distorted narratives and systematically undermine personal accountability. The result is a teenager who has become exceptionally good at identifying everyone else’s shortcomings while remaining remarkably unfamiliar with their own. The tragedy is that much of this happens in the name of love. Somewhere along the way, we began confusing emotional validation with factual agreement!

A teenager comes home feeling rejected, misunderstood, or unfairly criticized. Perhaps a teacher embarrassed her, a principal singled him out, or a friend deliberately excluded her. The parent hears the distress and immediately accepts the explanation accompanying it. However, feeling mistreated and having been mistreated are not necessarily the same thing. A teenager can genuinely experience rejection without someone having intended to reject them. They can feel unfairly criticized while overlooking behavior that needed correction. Their emotional experience deserves to be understood, but their interpretation may be incomplete, exaggerated, or simply incorrect.

The problem begins when parents take a subjective experience and transform it into an unquestionable fact. Suddenly, the teacher is insensitive, the school is unreasonable, and the friend is cruel. The verdict has been reached before anyone has considered the evidence. This isn’t emotional validation. We can acknowledge our children’s pain without endorsing every conclusion they draw from it. One of the most important lessons we can teach them is that feelings deserve attention, but conclusions require examination.

I have encountered far too many parents who seem to believe that supporting their children requires defending them against anyone who challenges them. It becomes the parent and teenager against the world. Every disagreement becomes another example of someone failing their child. G-d forbid someone suggests that the teenager might bear some responsibility. When did parental loyalty begin requiring unconditional agreement? There is nothing disloyal about saying, lovingly and respectfully, “I understand why you’re upset, but is it possible you’re not seeing the entire picture?” In fact, that may be precisely what your child needs to hear. Parents are not supposed to function as their children’s defense attorneys, constructing arguments that establish their innocence regardless of the circumstances. Their responsibility is to help their children develop judgment, perspective, and the intellectual honesty to recognize when they have made a mistake. If the only way your child knows you’re on their side is when you agree with them, you’ve confused loyalty with surrender.

There is another particularly troubling dynamic that I encounter in my work, and it has less to do with teenage behavior than with parental anxiety. A teenager may feel wronged and tells a parent. The parent becomes emotionally activated, anxious, angry, or intensely protective. Phone calls are made. Messages are sent. Explanations are demanded. Before anyone has established what happened, the parent is already defending the child. The teenager interprets this reaction as confirmation that their perspective was correct. Meanwhile, the parent feels reassured because they’ve acted. Both parent and child walk away feeling vindicated. The problem is that neither of them has necessarily moved any closer to the truth or resolution. From a family systems perspective, this is particularly revealing. Sometimes the parent’s intervention is less about meeting the teenager’s needs and more about relieving the parent’s own emotional discomfort. It can be extraordinarily difficult for a parent to acknowledge that their child was inappropriate, contributed to a conflict, or behaved in a way that warrants criticism. For some, admitting this feels uncomfortably close to admitting that they’ve failed as parents. So, in turn, they look elsewhere for the problem.

It’s easier to believe the teacher is unreasonable than to consider that your child is behaving unreasonably. It’s easier to criticize the school than to acknowledge a pattern of behavior that needs attention. While the parent may feel better having identified someone to blame, the teenager has learned something deeply unfortunate: when faced with criticism, look for someone else to hold responsible. Unfortunately, Sometimes the greatest obstacle to a teenager’s accountability is a parent’s inability to tolerate it.

There is, however, another uncomfortable dimension to this problem, and it involves those of us entrusted with educating, guiding, and supporting families. We have created an environment in which educators, administrators, therapists, coaches, and religious leaders are often expected to tell parents what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. This is particularly troubling in the nonprofit world, where institutional politics, financial considerations, and concerns about professional repercussions can make genuine honesty feel like a liability. After all, telling parents something they are not prepared to acknowledge can generate resistance, complaints, and consequences that many professionals would prefer to avoid. But since when did protecting our professional comfort become more important than protecting a child’s development? A competent educator or clinician must have the integrity, sensitivity, and professional courage to initiate difficult conversations, even when parents have not explicitly invited them. Being forthright does not mean being insensitive, nor does professional expertise make someone infallible. It means having the conviction to communicate difficult truths thoughtfully, respectfully, and without surrendering to the fear of an unfavorable reaction. Because when professionals become more concerned with keeping parents happy than helping them confront what needs to change, we become part of the very enabling culture we should be challenging and leave the child paying the price.

One of the most concerning patterns I see among adolescents is their extraordinary ability to explain every interpersonal difficulty through the shortcomings of other people. The teacher doesn’t understand them. Their friends are insensitive. The school has unrealistic expectations. The adults in their lives are judgmental. The circumstances change but the explanation doesn’t. What is rarely examined is the one person present in every one of these interactions.

Now, I am certainly not suggesting that teenagers are always responsible for their difficulties. Schools make mistakes. Teachers exercise poor judgment. Friendships can be genuinely unhealthy. Parents must be prepared to advocate when their children are mistreated. However, mature relationships require us to recognize that being hurt and having contributed to a problem are not mutually exclusive. A teenager may have been treated unfairly and still have responded inappropriately. A teacher may have handled something poorly while raising a legitimate concern, or a friend may have been insensitive without being entirely responsible for the breakdown of a relationship.

The inability to recognize our own contribution to conflict is one of the greatest obstacles to developing healthy relationships. And when parents consistently reinforce the idea that responsibility lies elsewhere, they deprive their children of the opportunity to recognize patterns in their own behavior. Guess what, eventually, these teenagers become adults. They are going to enter marriages, workplaces, friendships, and communities carrying an understanding of relationships in which accountability is primarily something other people owe them. That is a very lonely place to be. What troubles me most about parental enabling isn’t that teenagers occasionally get away with inappropriate behavior. That’s the least significant part of the problem. It’s what happens to their capacity for meaningful self-examination. They become skilled at explaining rather than acknowledging and they learn to justify instead of reflecting. Of course there is always a reason. They were tired. Someone misunderstood them. The expectation wasn’t communicated properly. The other person started it. Their intentions were good.

Perhaps all those explanations contain some truth. But an explanation is not an exemption from accountability. Personal responsibility requires the ability to recognize that our intentions do not erase the impact of our behavior, that our feelings do not automatically justify our reactions, and that other people’s shortcomings do not absolve us of our own. These are essential components of emotional and relational maturity.

Yet some parents have become so concerned about preserving their children’s emotional comfort, or maintaining a relationship free of conflict, that they are increasingly reluctant to challenge them. They worry that disagreement will damage trust or correction will feel invalidating. That insisting on accountability will make their child feel unsupported. The problem is that the message it sends is not a healthy one, in fact it sets back development rather than promoting it. If the people who love you most cannot tell you when you’re wrong, how are you supposed to learn to recognize it yourself? I don’t question the love that most enabling parents have for their children. Many are deeply devoted, genuinely compassionate, and remarkably invested in their children’s well-being. However, love is not measured by how consistently we defend someone. It is measured by our willingness to tell them something they would rather not hear. A parent should be able to say, “I love you. I understand that you’re hurting. And I think you may have handled this badly.” Those are not contradictory statements.

Accountability should also not be confused with shame. A teenager who makes a mistake is not a bad person. A teenager who is corrected is not being rejected. And a teenager who is asked to take responsibility is not being denied emotional support. It is just the opposite. We should want our children to become adults who can acknowledge mistakes without feeling destroyed by them, accept criticism without immediately becoming defensive, and recognize that healthy relationships require more than identifying what everyone else needs to do differently.

This begins with parents who are willing to model those very qualities. The difference between a supportive parent and an enabling parent is not how much they love their child. It’s whether that love helps their child develop a more honest relationship with reality. Accountability is not the opposite of love. It is one of the most important lessons that love teaches. Your child does not need you to prove they’re always right. They need you to love them enough to help them recognize when they’re wrong.