If Your Mom Was Extra Hard on You So You Would ‘Have a Good Life,’ Raise Your Hand

Mark* was a pretty good student growing up. He worked hard in school but wasn’t exactly striving to be valedictorian. He wanted to be a normal teen, not someone who constantly bent over backward for schoolwork.

This didn’t exactly sit well with his mother. When Mark didn’t complete his homework or came home with average test scores, his mom grounded him or took away TV privileges. And there was always a threat of being sent to military school. As a result, he felt like he was never good enough—an emotion that’s lingered to this day. “I still feel a sense of never doing quite enough now and then, which was for sure ingrained in me,” he tells SELF.

If you instantly clicked on this article, you can probably relate to Mark—as can a lot of people. Many moms hound their kids to go to top-tier schools, eat “healthy,” make friends with the “right” kind of people, get a high-paying job, and find a successful spouse.

Why the hell do they do this? The truth: It probably has very little to do with their children (i.e. you). Some parents project their own fears onto their kids and even though they think they’re setting them up for a life of success, they wind up being overbearing and even cruel. “It’s kind of bullshit that they’re doing it because they ‘want what’s best for their children,’” Star Rose Bond, LCSW, a therapist based in Asheville, North Carolina, tells SELF. “They’re really trying to ease their own anxieties.”

According to Bond and the other expert we consulted, here’s why your mom was extra hard on you only so you could “have a good life”—an approach that tends to backfire and, well, drives you to read stories like this one.

Why are some moms so damn tough on their kids?

Again, if your mom was particularly harsh, she, most likely, was projecting her own desires, beliefs, fears, and anxieties onto you, Bond says—and discounting the fact that you’re a different person with a unique upbringing. If, for example, your mom didn’t get the chance to go to college because she grew up financially strapped, she might badger you to be at the top of your class so you can get a college scholarship and have the opportunities she never did.

Another projection scenario: Maybe your mother always got on you about what you should eat and how much you should exercise because she was bullied or hated her own body when she was your age. Sarah* recalls her mom teaching her how to “portion control” when she was in middle school and praising her for calorie counting. When Sarah entered high school, her mom constantly made comments about how her clothes fit her body—and even signed Sarah up for Jenny Craig after she gained some weight. “This kind of behavior is based on this idea of ‘I don’t want my kid to feel how I felt,’” Bond says.

Some moms nag their kids because their parents did the same to them, so they think it’s normal to, say, push a child into finance or encourage them to break up with their partner and marry for money instead, Minaa B., LMSW, a New York City-based therapist and author of Owning our Struggles, tells SELF. This behavior can also come down to your family’s culture—it’s common, for example, for people from certain immigrant communities to pressure their kids to get prestigious degrees and succeed professionally. Minaa, who works with a lot of BIPOC clients, says such parents often say things like, “I came to America so you could have a good life, so I expect you to become a lawyer or doctor.”

Yep, a savage mom can turn you into a stress ball.

Needless to say, it’s incredibly stressful to constantly try to live up to someone else’s (potentially sky-high) expectations of you, especially if they don’t align with what you want. Take Mark’s experience—the relentless pressure to excel academically made him feel like he was always falling short. Research suggests that when a parent pesters their kid to succeed, it often backfires; it makes them feel inadequate or leads them to lash out.

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