I want to write about my mother, and about a particular conversation I had with her last summer that I have not been able to fully put down since.
We were in the garden of my parents’ house in London. It was an ordinary afternoon. I had asked her something innocuous about her childhood, in the casual way an adult son sometimes asks his mother about her own past. She had given me her usual answer, which was a small, dismissive wave and the words, “Oh, I was a tough little kid. I just got on with things.”
I had heard this sentence, in some form, my whole life. It was the standard self-description my mother used when the topic of her early years came up. She was tough. She got on with things. The toughness was the headline. The toughness was, in family lore, one of the central facts about who she had been as a child.
I had always taken this description at face value. I had assumed, in the way children do, that “tough” was a real thing she had been. A character trait. A sturdy, admirable, slightly mythic quality that had carried her through whatever the 1950s and 60s had thrown at her.
What I started to wonder, last summer, was whether “tough” had ever been a description of my mother at all. I started to wonder whether “tough” had been, instead, a piece of language used by the adults around her to describe a child who had figured out, very young, how to survive the absence of an adult who was curious about her interior life.
The two descriptions sound similar. They are not similar. The difference between them is, I now believe, one of the most consequential pieces of late-life recognition available to anyone who grew up in that generation, and to anyone whose parent did.
What “tough” actually meant
I want to think carefully about what the word meant in the homes my mother and her peers grew up in.
It did not, generally, mean what we now mean by resilient or emotionally robust. It did not mean a child who had been given the tools to manage difficulty and was using them well. It meant, in the specific dialect of the 1950s and 60s, something more particular. It meant a child who did not require attention. A child who did not produce visible distress. A child who, when something was wrong, did not, in any way the adults could see, indicate that something was wrong.
The reasons this kind of child was praised had nothing to do with the child’s wellbeing. The praise was about the adults. A tough child made the adults’ lives easier. A tough child did not require difficult conversations. A tough child did not need, in the words my grandmother might have used, “fussing over.” The adults of that era were, in many cases, not equipped to fuss over a child even if they had wanted to. They had not been fussed over themselves. They did not have the language. They had, instead, the language of toughness, which was a way of redescribing a child’s silence as a virtue rather than a survival strategy.
What the praise actually rewarded was the child’s successful adaptation to an emotional environment that did not have room for them. The child had figured out, by some age between four and eight, that asking for what they needed produced either nothing or, in some households, a worse version of nothing. The child had stopped asking. The not-asking was, in turn, called toughness. The toughness was applauded. The applause locked the not-asking into place.
By the time the child was twelve, the not-asking was so thoroughly internalized that it no longer registered as a strategy. It registered as a personality. The child grew up, in many cases, into an adult who genuinely believed they had been a tough kid. The adult would describe themselves this way for the rest of their lives. The description was, in some real way, the final piece of the system. The system had succeeded. It had produced an adult who would defend the system that produced them by describing the cost of that system as a virtue.
The recognition that arrives late
I want to describe what I think happens, sometimes, in the lives of people who were called tough children, when they reach their late sixties or seventies.
What happens, in the cases I have observed, is a slow recognition. The recognition is rarely dramatic. It does not arrive as a single insight. It arrives, instead, as a series of small moments in which the person notices, almost in passing, that the toughness they were praised for as a child was not, in fact, a quality they had developed. It was a description applied to a child who had, very young, given up on being asked.
The recognition, when it arrives, can be devastating. It is devastating because it requires the person to reconsider one of the central narratives of their own life. They were not, it turns out, a sturdy little kid who weathered things well. They were a small child who learned, through repeated experience, that their interior life was not a thing the adults around them were going to engage with, and who responded to that learning by quietly retiring the parts of themselves that wanted to be engaged with. The toughness was the retirement. The retirement was applauded. The applause was, in some real way, a form of harm.
This is, I want to be clear, not the same as saying the adults of that generation were villains. They mostly were not. They were operating with the equipment they had been given. The equipment did not include emotional curiosity about children. It included, instead, a vocabulary of moral approval that rewarded the kind of child who did not require curiosity to be deployed. The vocabulary was the available tool. The tool was used. The tool produced, in many millions of children, the silent self-management that the same adults later praised.
The praise was the trap. The trap closed before the child could see it. By the time the child was an adult, the trap had become identity. By the time the adult was old, the trap had become legacy.
Why the praise arrives again, in old age
I want to write about something that has been bothering me, in recent years, about how my generation talks to my parents’ generation.
My generation has, in the last decade or so, developed a particular cultural reverence for the toughness of the older generation. We praise our parents for being tough. We tell each other stories about how tough they were. We compare our own perceived softness, unfavorably, to the resilience of the people who raised us. The praise is sincere. It is also, I now believe, almost identical to the praise that was used on those same people when they were children.
This is the part I find hardest to write. When my mother says she was a tough little kid and I respond with admiration—when I tell her, warmly, that her generation was made of sterner stuff than mine—I am not, as I had assumed, honoring her. I am, in some real way, doing exactly what was done to her at six. I am praising the silence. I am rewarding the not-asking. I am, with the best possible intentions, reinforcing the very system that taught her, eight decades ago, that her interior life was not worth being curious about.
The praise, in old age, does what the praise in childhood did. It tells my mother that her best self is the self that does not require anything. It tells her that the version of her that was admired by the adults around her in 1955 is the version of her that is still admired by the people around her in 2026. The continuity is the trap. The trap remains closed because the people most able to open it—her own children—keep, with warm intentions, locking it again.
This is, I think, one of the most painful pieces of late-life recognition available to a person of my mother’s age. To realize that the toughness was not a triumph. To realize, further, that the people who love you most are still, in their own well-meaning way, asking you to perform it. To realize that the praise you have been receiving for sixty years has been the same praise, the whole time, and that the praise is not, in any of its iterations, the curiosity you were never given.
What I have started to do differently
I want to describe what I have, slowly, started trying to do with my mother, because the trying is the only practical thing I can offer.
I have started, in small ways, refusing to praise the toughness. When she says, in passing, that she was a tough kid, I no longer respond with admiration. I respond, instead, with curiosity. I ask her what it was actually like. I ask her what she remembers feeling. I ask her, in the gentlest version of the question I can manage, what she would have wanted from the adults around her if she had been allowed to want anything.
The questions land, almost every time, in a kind of small confusion. She is not used to being asked them. She does not, in many cases, have ready answers. The answers, when they come, are partial and often surprising. They are not the answers of a tough kid. They are the answers of a small child who had, eight decades ago, internalized a system she has never, in her life, been invited to question.
I am not, with these questions, expecting to undo the system. The system is too deep. My mother is, at her age, not going to wake up one day having arrived at a different self. What I am hoping to do, in some small way, is to make the system slightly less continuous. To introduce, into the long stream of praise for the not-asking, a few small pockets of asking. To offer, in the years she has left, what was not offered to her in the years she had no power to ask for it.
The offering is, mostly, just the questions. The questions are not therapy. The questions are not analysis. The questions are simply the small ongoing demonstration that her interior life is, to one person at least, an interesting thing. The demonstration is what was missing in her childhood. The demonstration cannot, at this point, repair what was missing. But it can, sometimes, in a small private way, let her notice the missing thing, possibly for the first time.
What I’d say to anyone reading this
If you have a parent of that generation, and you have been praising their toughness, I would suggest, gently, that the praise may not be what you think it is.
The praise is, in some real way, a continuation of the cultural protocol that produced the parent’s silence in the first place. Each piece of admiration for their resilience is, however unintentionally, another small confirmation that the version of them you admire is the version that does not require curiosity. The curiosity is what was missing. The curiosity is, in many cases, still missing. The curiosity is the thing your praise is, structurally, not providing.
What you can offer, instead of the praise, is the curiosity itself. You can ask your parent what their childhood was actually like. Not in the looking-for-a-good-story way, but in the wanting-to-know way. You can ask them what they remember feeling. You can ask them what they would have wanted, if anyone had ever asked them what they wanted. The questions will, in many cases, be unfamiliar. The unfamiliarity is the data. The data is telling you what was not asked, for sixty or seventy years, by anyone in the parent’s life.
You are, finally, in a position to ask. The asking will not undo the silence. The asking might, however, in a few small private moments, let your parent notice that the silence was not, in fact, who they were. The silence was what was applied to them. Underneath, somewhere, was the child who had things to say. That child, even at seventy, may still have a few of them left.
It is worth asking, before there is no longer anyone to answer.
