Good Daughter Gone Bad: Lovingly Eliminated Their Autonomy
When my mom had a health scare, we did what we do best — fix-it mode with military precision. Crisis resolved. Independence gone. They aged ten years. That's not what you do to people you love.
Am I a Bad Daughter for Pushing Assisted Living?
A few months ago, I made my mom cry over the phone.
She called to tell me my dad fell.
My immediate response: "We need a 24-hour live-in caregiver, or we have to move you two to assisted living—that will prevent any more falls."
Her: "I can still take care of us, and I don't want to be a burden."
Me: "It will be a burden if we don't prevent this from happening again."
She basically hung up on me,
and I felt like shit.
Is It Me, or Did I Make Things Worse by Taking Over?
Two years ago, my mom had a serious health scare. My sisters and I did what we do best: transformed into the fixers.
We found them a place across the street, bought it, renovated it, furnished it—six months, start to finish.
Mom stressed over what to keep after twenty years of late-night gadget shopping, and we turned into TSA for their entire house, deciding what was "approved" for their new life.
The great news:
The medical crisis has been resolved.
The not-so-good news:
They aged ten years.
Physical, mental, social—all of it.
Their world went from "we manage our own chaos" to "we get to decide what to eat and where to shop for food."
Somewhere between the move, the purging, and the "it's better for you," we crisis-managed the independence right out of their lives.
How did we beat the health crisis,
yet create an autonomy crisis for them?
Why Is It Bad to Just Fix It For Them?
I spent decades as the fixer—the one everyone called when something or someone went sideways.
My formula is simple:
identify the risk,
neutralize it,
implement preventative actions,
keep it from ever happening again.
In my logic-driven mind, why would you choose to keep dealing with something over and over again if you can eliminate the problem completely?
My brain only wants permanent fixes!
Great for a corporate crisis.
Not so good for human crisis.
Apparently, humans don't want to be treated like recurring incidents on a risk log.
They want to be heard.
They want to complain.
They want to say, "That scared me."
They want the time to pause and to process.
How Do I Keep Them Safe Without Taking Their Independence?
There's an actual term for this:
the sandwich generation.
Parents on one side, adult kids on the other, and us in the middle, getting squished while we try to keep everything running.
A study in the Journal of Adult Development found that when aging parents start to decline, adult children begin to monitor and control their behavior.
Aging Parents prioritize autonomy,
while we prioritize safety.
Well... shouldn't safety be the priority?
Other researchers call it
"governance transfer in reverse."
Hmm… that sounds about right.
Another researcher put it more bluntly: stepping in and making decisions for an older adult — even when motivated by concern and love — often has a negative emotional and psychological impact.
Crap... that's why they suddenly felt ten years older!
Guess I need to strive to be the cheese in this sandwich generation?
The part that complements what's already there, not the bread holding everything together, not the meat that has to be the main ingredient.
What If I Just Asked Instead?
Last week, my sister called: "Dad's blood pressure is 170."
Old me would've jumped into action—page the cardiologist, remote start the X5, Waze the time to the best (not the nearest) ER.
Instead, I called my dad.
We talked for a minute,
and then I asked him:
"What do YOU want to do about it?
Do YOU want to go to the ER?"
Not, "I've decided you're going now."
By the time we'd finished that conversation, his blood pressure was 125.
Maybe I'm Not the Good Daughter Gone Bad
Maybe my one move—however illogical it may be for me—is to ask:
"What would you like to do about it?"
Maybe they want ideas.
Maybe they want options.
Maybe they just want to say,
"That scared me,"
and to just hear me say,
"Yeah, that is scary,"
without turning it into a construction project.
Your Move?
The next time someone you love calls you about some crisis, notice what you reach for first: YOUR solution to their problem? Or asking questions to help them process their thoughts.
What's one conversation this week where you could have asked, "What would you like to do about it?" even if you are quietly running the "risk management & continuity plan" in your head, just not out loud!
P.S. For the women who need the psychological or behavioral research behind this, I did the homework for you.
P.P.S. For women in the Unscripted Middle — between who they were, who they are today, and who they’ll be — if a friend sent this to you, and you thought, “that’s me,” pull up a chair by subscribing.
P.P.P.S. Wondering how I got here? I got restructured by AI, spent three weeks planning instead of doing anything, watched my face stage a hostile takeover, realized I'd weaponized my hobbies, and got called out for my high expectations, had an epiphany that friendships have expiration dates, realized I was failing at retirement, went with more me as my 2026 New Year's Resolution, and called out why your urgency does not constitute my emergency. Standard stuff.
