Are You a Cycle Breaker — or Just a Grown-up?
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Making different choices than our parents did: This is normal, right? I don’t hold my parents in contempt for much, but there are ways that I smugly tell myself I’m setting my children up for success in ways that I never was. Every time I buy my kids name-brand clothing, I pat myself on the back: My parents couldn’t have and wouldn’t have. The shame of wearing two-striped track pants is one my children will never know, thanks to my temerity. But that’s just small stuff — the stability that we’ve managed to maintain for our kids is worlds away from how either my husband or I grew up. Sometimes, I need to check myself: This degree of self-satisfaction is so delicious that it trips my own bullshit alarm system.
Lately, there is a lot of talk in the parenting Zeitgeist about being a “cycle breaker” — making different choices than one’s parents did, thereby breaking cycles of harm that had been passed down through many generations. A lot of the cycle-breaking talk has to do with intergenerational trauma: physical and emotional abuse, neglect, abandonment, and emotional volatility. Dr. Becky Kennedy has been one of the prominent voices on the topic of breaking cycles. She talks about how parents can “re-parent” themselves while raising their children by trying to meet their children’s emotional needs in ways that their own needs might have been neglected. The concept of cycles of emotional inheritance has caught on; cycle breakers is a huge ongoing topic on TikTok in particular, with endless lists of “signs you’re a cycle breaker” and therapy role-plays about coming to terms with being a cycle breaker.
But we live in a time bristling with perverse incentives for exaggeration and self-aggrandizement, and there are no boundaries to where and how people will do this. I see it everywhere, and increasingly in conversations about parenting. Recently, a friend sent me an article by a woman who has decided to allow her children to keep their toys in the living room rather than shut away in their bedrooms. This act of bravery, which is apparently referred to (by … some?) as being a “living room family,” is equated with breaking a cycle of harmful child erasure in the home. The author remarks that only recently did she realize how damaged she had been as a child, being told to put her toys back in her room. You don’t say.
Every time we break away from how we were raised, it is an act of bravery? Are we always healing aching wounds when we don’t follow tradition? Or are we simply becoming our own people, exercising a bit of hard-won agency? Isn’t all this just part of the mundane and vaguely humiliating shuffle through adulthood? Sometimes it feels, thanks to the ubiquity of certain pop-psychological concepts, that childhood is swallowing adulthood whole. If everything we do is either a pantomime of things we learned as children or a brave act of refuting our tyrant parents, do we ever really get to be sovereign adults?
The author and technologist Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification — how profit-driven online services inevitably deteriorate in quality over time — also applies to ideas once they’ve picked up a whiff of viral potential. What starts as a useful concept for those who need a term to describe their experiences is inevitably appropriated and misused by people who mostly just want to attract and keep people’s attention on social platforms. Ultimately, enshittified ideas are pressed into the service of selling garbage: MLMs, fake courses, snake-oil wellness programs. Cycle breaking becomes a cash cow. Emotional labor has been enshittified (the sociologist who coined it, Arlie Russell Hochschild, has tried to correct its use), likewise narcissist. Now, cycle breaker, meant to describe an arduous process of extricating oneself from patterns of behavior that threaten you with their dangerous undertow, is being used to describe the decision to no longer say “I don’t care who started it” to your kids, or force them to eat every morsel on their plate. Harm is subjective, sure, and we do live in a post-truth world. And a lot of people setting the tone about parenting on social media these days are exaggerating for clout.
When so many people are inflating the stakes in their own life stories so as to attract attention, it can be tempting to apply that same kind of inflated thinking to ourselves. Recently, my son and I flew to Philadelphia for a family wedding. I am not very close with my extended family, and the reason for this is that my mother, who was from New Jersey, moved to Quebec when she was in her 20s and completely remade her life. She remained close with her mother, but she broke with conventions. For one thing, I don’t think her family ever knew that she and my father never married.
My parents were on the whole “chosen-family” thing before it had a name, but I doubt they would have called themselves cycle breakers. They were just very independent. As a result, I am a foreigner to most of my family, literally (as the family’s only Canadian) and figuratively, because I grew up in a culture of my parents’ invention.
There’s deep satisfaction in being proud of the choices you’ve made. It’s necessary and important to name that feeling. But it’s rarely that simple, and broken cycles are often not a clean break. We want our families to see us and know us in our independence. They often don’t, or can’t, but that doesn’t mean we don’t all still crave a feeling of connectedness.
At the farewell breakfast at the Homewood Suites the morning after the wedding, my son and I mingled for a bit, but we stuck to the periphery. It being a Sunday in October, everyone had their Eagles hoodies on. My son and I were wearing head-to-toe black, like we were on our way to host an episode of Sprockets. I’ve always been out of step with my relatives, not quite having the same habits of dress or shared frames of reference. Sometimes, it can feel kind of lonely. My son and I ate our plates of cut fruit, thanked our hosts, and left.
As I tried to find my way out of the labyrinthine parking lot that surrounded the hotel, I could feel myself instinctively reaching for a narrative, something simple that would make me feel better about how, ultimately, my family and I don’t know each other as well as I wish we did. Maybe my being different from my family makes me somehow more evolved. Maybe, in the cosmic race, I’m actually ahead. Talk about a cycle worth breaking: I remember my mother relying on these kinds of narratives often, before she died. But I don’t believe that story. It’s too cheap for real life. It reduces all of us to bullet points. So instead of grabbing hold of it, I let it go.