13 Things You Can Legitimately Blame Your Parents For

J.K. Rowling said, “There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction,” and I couldn’t agree more.

We are all our own people with our own fears, desires and mistakes. Our parents can't control us anymore than we can control the wind. However, we are raised and molded around the ideals of the people who raised us, and that does have some effect.

No child comes into this world with a blank slate. From the minute you are born, your parents' past, their regrets and their baggage become part of your life. Everything in your parents' lives -- their fears, paranoia, political biases -- is thrust upon you, willingly or not.

As much as your problems are your own, many of your habits and views are based around those of the older generation.

They are formed from an early age and ingrained in you like a reoccurring soundtrack. Your parents are your spiritual guides throughout a good portion of your life and can leave some serious scars that take years of individual attention and reflection to heal.

Of course, this is not to shame parents in any way. Parents are the guiding light we all need and should respect to the highest degree.

They are people who gave up their desires, dreams and independence to bring us into this world, putting our needs before their own. They tried their best to shelter us from the bad and introduce us to the good.

You will never be a perfect parent -- none of us will. The best we can hope for is that we raise our children in the direction of morality and compassion.

We can hope to steer them toward the good parts of life and only pray they don’t get caught up in the bad. We must respect that they will find their own path and assume we gave them the necessary tools and wisdom to flourish without us by their side.

However, there’s no way our own baggage, our own bias, won’t rub off on them. In that regard, here are the things we can always blame our parents for:

Your Disillusion In Marriage

Unless your parents had a perfect matrimony, and are still as in love as the day they met, there’s a large chance you look at marriage with a pretty scathed view. As a product of divorce, we’ve been led to believe that marriage is fleeting and divorce is inevitable.

Your Overwhelming Importance Placed On Education

Many of us are leaving college and grad school, thousands of dollars in debt, and still unable to get jobs due to being "overeducated." We’ve also been programmed to place less importance on outside experiences and professions that can’t be defined by a degree.

Your Biased Political Views

Whether intentional or not, your parents imparted their political views on you. Their rants, their news station, their dinner conversations -- it was all molding you to have the biases and political opinions you have today.

Your Unwavering Trust In Authority

We’ve been brought up to believe that anyone with a badge or a government-issued card must be right and must be good. They are the people with our best interest at heart -- when in reality, they are no more trustworthy than your fellow citizen.

Your Fear To Stray From The Norm

Our parents have led us to believe that a nine-to-five is good and anything different, unique or artistic is unacceptable and lazy. Inventiveness is not supported and traditional norms are always correct.

Your Faith In Religion

By now, most of us know that religion is not the moral guiding light we were led to believe it was. At the root of almost every scandal, war and controversy is always religion. The sooner we stop giving it so much power, the sooner we are free.

Your Prejudices

You are not born prejudiced. You are not born disgusted by gays or believing that interracial marriage is wrong. Those views are something that spread like viruses between one sick person to the next.

Your Aversion To Having Children

How can we ever want to have kids knowing how messed up we are? Do we really want to bring kids into this world?

Your Bad Eating Habits

You can't control your kid's preference of pizza over vegetables, but you can control how they eat. Parents who let their kids drink soda and eat Lunchables and consider it adequate are only teaching them bad eating habits that will stay with them through life.

Your Lack Of Independence

Over-controlling or over-protective parents have good intentions, but many times, us children are left unable to cope without them. They sheltered us too much and left us with a fear of the world and an aversion to being left alone that only inhibits us from truly living our lives.

Your Inability To Make Your Own Decisions

If you have to call your parents every time you need to do something, you are too dependent. Our parents have instilled a sense of fear in us, where one wrong decision could mean the end of the world.

Your Inability To Finance

Many parents gave their kids everything, ignoring the fact that in the real world, they won't be able to buy everything they want. For those parents who spoiled their children, the bad spending habits and inability to cope in the real world of credit cards and taxes are just the sad effects of overindulgence.

Your Bad Genes

Even if your mom got a nose job back in '92, you're still stuck with her pre-surgery honker and that's definitely on her. We all know our parents can't control what unfortunate genes we end up with, but it's still something you can blame them for.

Top Photo Courtesy: We Heart It