When home hurts: Navigating strained relationships with parents

The afternoon sun in Thika pressed hard against the jacaranda trees, but Caroline Laboso sat calmly in the shade. At thirty-two, her face bore no bitterness, only the quiet strength of someone who had survived her own storm.

She grew up in Nakuru, in a house where discipline and love were hopelessly entangled. Her father’s cane left marks on her palms as often as his words left bruises on her heart.

Her mother’s affection was rare, offered only when Laboso met the impossible standard of perfection.

“I always felt like a guest in my own home,” Laboso recalled.

As the only daughter, she bore the brunt of expectation. Good girls stayed silent, good girls obeyed.

But inside her, a quiet rebellion burned. At night, she scribbled poems in old exercise books, hiding them under her mattress.

“Words became her refuge, her way of surviving the noise of arguments that rattled the walls,” Laboso said.

When she left for university, she expected freedom. Instead, her parents’ voices followed her through constant calls and messages, demands wrapped in guilt. Her father urged her to abandon literature for law.

Her mother scrutinised her clothes and even her friends. The pressure built until it erupted into panic attacks that left her gasping for breath in the middle of the night.

“One day, I realised that if I kept living for their approval, I wouldn’t survive,” Laboso said.

Three years ago, she made the difficult decision to write to her parents, explaining that she needed distance.

Her hands trembled as she told them she needed to live. She mailed the letter, switched off her phone, and cried until her throat burned that night.

“The silence that followed was terrifying, but slowly it transformed into peace,” Laboso said.

A few months later, she began therapy, addressing the wounded child within her who had never felt safe. She built a career as a literature teacher and finally published the poems that had once been hidden.

“I never hated my parents,” Laboso emphasised, eyes glistening. “I just had to choose myself.”

Words can build or break a soul, but for John Kamau, they were weapons long before he understood their weight. At 26, he made the agonising choice to sever ties with the people who gave him life, his parents.

From Wendani, he recounted a childhood where every sentence was a scar, every silence a storm.

“If I brought home a 90 after an exam, my parents asked why the neighbour’s son had 95,” Kamau said.

“When I won a small football trophy, they wondered why it wasn’t bigger—nothing was ever enough,” he added.

By his teenage years, he walked like a shadow of himself, always bracing for the next reminder that he was somehow lacking.

His parents perfected the art of ridicule, tossing barbed remarks at family gatherings as if humiliation were discipline.

“I swallowed it, thinking maybe adulthood would earn me respect,” Kamau said.

But adulthood brought more scorn. Every achievement was dismissed. A promotion? “Must be office politics.” His first car? “You probably bought a scrap.”

When he graduated with a Master’s degree, his parents offered only, “You’re lucky they let you through; others worked harder.”

That was the final fracture. He did not argue or plead. That night, he pressed the block button on his phone with the certainty of slamming a door in a burning house.

He never called. He never returned home. Days became weeks, weeks became months. One year later, silence had become his salvation.

“Now I walk taller,” Kamau said. “I don’t hate my parents—I simply refuse to bleed for their applause.”

Family ties can bend, fray, and sometimes feel on the verge of snapping. Yet, despite conflict and disappointment, not every strained relationship is destined for silence or separation.

Across the city, in quiet Kileleshwa streets, 28-year-old Brian Ogutu admitted that his childhood appeared enviable from the outside.

A tall gate, manicured gardens, cars shining in the driveway, neighbours assumed he was blessed with a charmed life. The truth was more complicated.

“I wasn’t abandoned on the streets,” Ogutu said wryly. “I was abandoned in a luxurious mansion.”

His mother had him as a teenager. Though she loved him, she never quite knew how to parent.

She clung fiercely to her youth, chasing relationships, drinking, dressing in the latest fashion. Men drifted in and out of their lives.

“Each one promised stability, each one disappeared as quickly as he arrived,” Ogutu said.

In their absence, he became caretaker. At ten, he wrote shopping lists because his mother would return from the supermarket with bottles of wine instead of food. At thirteen, he cooked dinner.

By sixteen, he leaned on teachers and neighbours for guidance that his mother could not provide.

“What hurt most wasn’t the chaos,” Ogutu said, “it was the loneliness of growing up without a steady hand.”

As an adult, his relationship with his mother had frayed into formality. Birthdays were short texts, conversations boiled down to logistics. When he voiced his hurt, she defended her choices as freedom.

“She thought she was giving me liberty,” Ogutu said.

“But what she gave me was absence.”

He carried resentment for years—through university, through his twenties, into his career. Only when he held his daughter for the first time did the bitterness crack.

Her tiny fingers curled around his thumb, anchoring him in a new kind of love. In that instant, he understood the weight of responsibility his mother had been too young to carry.

“It didn’t excuse her mistakes,” Ogutu said. “But it gave me perspective.” Slowly, he and his mother began to rebuild—not as parent and child, but as two flawed adults learning to forgive.

Speaking from Westlands, 30-year-old Jacinta Kiragu admitted that reconciling with her father had seemed impossible. Her mother’s diagnosis hit like a rogue wave—endometriosis, aggressive and relentless.

At fourteen, she watched the woman who had been her anchor struggle and falter. As if pain could be measured, her father vanished into alcohol, leaving them to navigate the storm alone.

“I never understood why he chose himself over us, why he drank and disappeared instead of staying,” Kiragu said.

By the time her mother died, just shy of Kiragu’s eighteenth birthday, exhaustion had carved deep lines into her soul—not from grief alone, but from carrying the bitterness of an absent father.

Then came the hundredth letter from him. A simple envelope, worn at the edges, arriving like a cautious knock on a locked door.

“For the first time in years, I considered responding,” she said.

Their first conversations were jagged, filled with questions and half-truths. He did not ask for forgiveness, nor apologise for everything.

“I almost gave up on mending our relationship during this phase,” Kiragu said.

Yet over time, their bond grew, not as it might have been, but as it needed to be. She watched him stumble, recover, and learn, glimpsing the man behind the mistakes.

Eventually, she realised: “This was my father’s first time living life, and he had floundered as any young, broken human might.”

Forgiveness did not erase the past, but it lightened her load. By opening her heart, she found a relationship she had not dared hope for, a father, imperfect but present, and a daughter finally free of resentment.

Parent-child relationships are rarely linear. They are a dance, sometimes graceful, often clumsy, demanding skill to stay in rhythm.

Missteps are inevitable, and when they pile up, the floor becomes a battlefield of unspoken words and buried resentment.

According to relationship expert Henry Mungai, navigating this delicate choreography requires more than love.

“The first step is perspective,” Mungai said.

“Parents are not mythical beings who always know best. They are humans, often carrying scars, regrets, and blind spots. Seeing them as flawed rather than perfect can soften the edges of resentment.”

Boundaries are crucial. A healthy relationship is not endless tolerance but clarity of where one ends and the other begins.

“They allow you to engage without losing yourself,” Mungai said.

Then comes communication, not shouting or silence, but brave honesty. Sometimes, the response you hope for will not come.

“However, speaking your truth releases the weight you carried alone throughout childhood,” Mungai said.

“Furthermore, practice patience,” he added. Healing strained bonds is not a single conversation but a series of small, consistent choices.

The dance may never be perfect, but with effort, the music can shift from chaotic noise to something resembling harmony.

Every family story is a tapestry of contradictions—love laced with pain, duty tangled with resentment, silence stitched beside sacrifice. For some, survival means breaking away; for others, it means reaching back with softened hands.

There is no universal formula, only the courage to face what is broken and the wisdom to choose healing where it is possible.

The dance between parents and children will never be flawless, but with honesty, boundaries, and patience, even fractured steps can be reshaped into a rhythm worth holding on to.