Okay, I want to describe a specific feeling to you, and see if it rings a bell.
You love your mum. You really do. If she called you right now and needed something, you’d drop what you’re doing. Same with your dad, or whichever parent you’re closest to. You’d get on a plane. Rearrange your week. Sit in a hospital waiting room for hours if it came to it.
And yet.
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When you hang up the phone after a long call with them, there’s often this quiet, specific little tension sitting in your chest. A slight tightness. A background hum of something that isn’t quite anger but isn’t quite peace either. It might last five minutes. It might last the rest of the afternoon. And I’d bet good money you don’t have a name for it.
For a long time, I thought this feeling was something I was supposed to fix. If I really loved my parents, surely I shouldn’t feel this vaguely resentful, low-grade thing after every visit, right? So I’d talk myself out of it. Push it down. Tell myself I was being ungrateful. Feel guilty. Then talk myself out of it all over again the next time it came up.
Turns out I was completely, entirely wrong. This feeling isn’t a personal failing. It isn’t a red flag about your relationship with your parents. It isn’t evidence you don’t love them enough. In fact, according to the psychologists who study it, this feeling is the default. It has a name. And it’s showing up in about half of all adult parent-child relationships.
The word psychologists use for this
The word is ambivalence. Now, in everyday language, we tend to use “ambivalent” to mean “unsure” or “kind of indifferent.” In the psychology of family relationships, though, it means something more specific and more useful. It means holding two opposing feelings toward the same person at the same time.
Loving them and resenting them.
Wanting to be close and wanting distance.
Feeling grateful and feeling burdened.
Both feelings are real. Neither cancels the other one out. And they can, apparently, live side by side in the same person for a lifetime.
The concept of intergenerational ambivalence was formally introduced in a 1998 paper by the sociologists Kurt Lüscher and Karl Pillemer, who argued that the model researchers had been using for decades to describe family relationships was too simple. It assumed families were either close and warm or distant and conflicted. Real families, they said, are almost always both. And the “both” isn’t a problem to fix. It’s the actual structure of the relationship.
I actually came across a really interesting video on this – it dives in deeper and uncovers 5 difficult truths adult kids often feel without being able to put into words.
How common is this, really?
Very. In a 2002 study of 189 older mothers, Karl Pillemer and Jill Suitor at Cornell found that only about 22% described their relationships with their adult children as “purely positive.” The rest reported some mix. Later research has consistently shown around half of parents reporting genuine ambivalence toward their adult children. And adult children, when researchers ask them the same kind of question, report similar mixes back.
So if you’re sitting there thinking you must be the exception here, you’re really, really not. What you’re feeling is what the average, everyday parent-child relationship in adulthood actually feels like from inside. The tension isn’t the sign of a broken bond. It’s the sign of a bond that’s real enough to contain contradictions.
A quick note before we go further
I want to be careful here. Everything I’m describing in this piece is the ordinary version of ambivalence, the low-grade, workable kind that shows up in most families. If what you’re carrying toward a parent is heavier than that, if it’s rooted in abuse, neglect, or the kind of ongoing harm that doesn’t get resolved just by naming it, that’s a different situation, and it deserves more than a general piece can offer. Working through that kind of relationship usually needs a therapist who knows this territory.
Nothing below is meant to talk you out of taking your own experience seriously, or to suggest that all resentment toward a parent is fine and normal. Some resentment is a signal. This piece is about the ordinary kind that lives alongside genuine love, not the kind that’s telling you something bigger is wrong.
Why the mix makes complete sense
Think about it this way. Your parents are the people who raised you. Which means they got to shape your world during the years you had no say in it. They made decisions that affected you deeply, sometimes without realising it. They set the tone in the household. They passed down whatever they were carrying, some of it lovely, some of it much less lovely.
And they were, throughout all of it, also just people. Regular, flawed, tired people doing their best with the tools they had at the time.
Now, as an adult, you’re supposed to have a relationship with them where you love them, respect them, appreciate what they did for you, and also be your own separate self with your own opinions about how they did it. That’s a lot to hold in the same person at the same time.
Ambivalence is what naturally results.
What ambivalence actually feels like day to day
Let me get specific here, because I think this is the part that gets lost when researchers talk about ambivalence in abstract terms.
You look forward to seeing your mum. Then, during the visit, you notice she’s making little comments about your career choices, the way she has for twenty years. You feel yourself getting quietly annoyed. You don’t say anything, because you don’t want a fight, and because you know she means well. You leave feeling both glad you saw her and slightly deflated. On the drive home you replay one comment three times in your head. By the time you get home you’ve mostly let it go. Not entirely.
Or you call your dad because you know he’ll be worried if you don’t. You talk for forty minutes, mostly about his neighbours. You feel real fondness for him during the call. And afterwards you feel drained, in a way you can’t quite explain to yourself, and you find yourself wondering when the last time was that he actually asked how you were.
Or you drive over to help one of your parents with something practical. A broken appliance. A form to fill in. A doctor’s appointment. You’re happy to help. You’d never say no. And also, sitting in the car in their driveway afterwards, you feel a small, tight thing in your chest that isn’t quite resentment and isn’t quite love either. It’s the two of them, at once. And it stays with you until you’re back home and doing something else entirely.
It’s not a sign that something’s wrong
The main takeaway from the research, in a 2015 paper by Gilligan, Suitor, Feld and Pillemer in the Journal of Marriage and Family, is that ambivalence isn’t a bug in the parent-adult child relationship system. It’s a feature. Intergenerational relationships, the researchers wrote, involve a “fundamental interplay between positive and negative elements.” Which means: the mix isn’t the problem. The mix is the relationship.
That said, ambivalence isn’t cost-free. The same research also shows that people who experience higher levels of ambivalence often report more stress and lower wellbeing than people whose family relationships are either clearly positive or, in some cases, clearly negative. The mix takes energy to hold. Which is why so many of us feel tired after even the loveliest visit with our parents. It isn’t the visit itself. It’s the emotional work of holding love and resentment in the same body at the same time.
So what do you do with all of this?
Here’s what I’ve found actually helpful.
First, stop trying to resolve it. The resentment you carry toward a parent you also love isn’t a problem you need to solve. It’s a feature of loving someone who was also, at various points in your childhood, the reason things were hard. Both things can be true. Both things are true.
Second, give yourself permission to feel the mix without judgement. You don’t need to work out whether the resentment is “fair.” You don’t need to justify why you also love them anyway. You don’t need to feel guilty. The feeling isn’t a moral failing. It’s what being a member of a family looks like from the inside.
And third, if you can, notice when the mix is telling you something useful. Sometimes the tension is telling you to set a small limit somewhere. Sometimes it’s telling you to have a specific conversation you’ve been avoiding. Sometimes it’s just telling you to take a day or two after a family visit before you make any big decisions. The tension isn’t your enemy. It’s the emotional intelligence of someone who has been paying close attention to a specific relationship for a very long time.
So the next time you hang up the phone with your mum, or leave your dad’s house, or find yourself replaying a comment in the car home, remember this. You aren’t broken. You aren’t ungrateful. You aren’t loving your parents wrong. You’re a normal adult in a normal family, carrying the ordinary weight of loving people who are also the people who raised you.
And on the current research, that isn’t the exception.
That’s just the human condition.