Parenting Quote by Frank Pittman

Pittman nails a quiet cruelty that often passes as love: the parental gaze that never quite lands on who you are, only on who you might become. The line "distrust ourselves" points to an internal sabotage more potent than outright disapproval. When your earliest mirrors keep reflecting "not yet", you learn to second-guess your own perceptions, desires, even your comfort in your skin. Self-doubt stops being a mood and becomes a default operating system.

"Works-in-progress" is the masterstroke. It borrows the language of craft and improvement, the kind of phrase a parent can say while believing theyre being supportive. But it also carries the chill of perpetual evaluation: youre not a person; youre a project. The subtext is conditional regard. Approval is deferred to some future version of you that will finally be tidy enough, successful enough, calm enough, grateful enough. It explains why even "helpful" advice can feel like a verdict: it isnt guidance, its a reminder that the current you is insufficient.

Context matters here: Pittman was a psychiatrist and family therapist, and this reads like clinical observation distilled into a sentence with edge. Hes not indicting all parenting so much as naming a pattern in families where control masquerades as care. The cultural resonance is obvious in an era of curated achievement and intensive parenting: when adulthood gets treated as an endless beta test, the hardest skill isnt self-improvement. Its self-trust.