They Were Young Once Too

-Karthik Gurumurthy

We’re all a little guilty of this: rolling our eyes at our parents for being “old-fashioned,” for not understanding technology, for giving advice that feels outdated, or for making decisions we’d never make ourselves. It’s easy to judge them from where we’re standing now, with everything we know, everything that’s changed, everything that’s easier today than it was for them.

But here’s something worth sitting with for a second: your mom was once twenty-three too. Imagine her, younger than you might be right now, holding you as a newborn with absolutely no idea what she was doing. No parenting books that actually made sense. No Google to search “is this normal” at 2 a.m. No group chat of other moms to vent to. Just instinct, exhaustion, and a whole lot of figuring it out as she went.

Same with your dad. Whatever rules he enforced, whatever lectures felt unfair, whatever expectations seemed too rigid, he was working from the only playbook he had: how he was raised, what scared him, what he didn’t want to mess up. He wasn’t perfect. He was just human, doing a genuinely hard job with no training manual.

It’s so easy to see our parents only as “Mom” and “Dad,” like they arrived in the world already in that role, already knowing what they were doing. But they didn’t. They were young once. They were scared once. They made mistakes, plenty of them, not because they didn’t care, but because nobody really teaches you how to raise a person. You just kind of learn by doing it, in real time, while that little person is watching everything.

So the next time a parent’s advice feels outdated, or their reaction feels overly cautious, or their old habits make you sigh, try picturing them at your age. Unsure. Winging it. Trying their best with what they had.

That doesn’t mean every mistake gets a free pass. But it does mean a little more patience, and a little less judgment, might be exactly what that relationship needs.