Parents deserve room to learn without turning every mistake into a family identity.

Families are efficient at turning incidents into permanent characters. One bad decision becomes the story of who someone is, retold at gatherings, and the person inside it stops being allowed to have changed. Parents get this most, because their errors landed on people who remember them and were young at the time.

If someone in your family has been carrying an old label, look at who they are this year rather than the year the story was set. Notice one way they have changed, and say so out loud where the story usually gets told.