Imagine you’re leaving a family business meeting, but you don’t want to say goodbye just yet.
Drops of rain hang from the pine needles outside. You can’t help mentioning to everyone, who came from near and far to attend the meeting, how much the moist air takes you back to springtime when you were children.
“That’s just like something Dad would have said,” another family member notices.
And you hear it, too: your father’s voice in your own, your mother’s outlook on life, just like yours.
For better or worse, you might be turning into your parents. And as you age, this phenomenon may affect how you step into new roles in the family—and in the family business—however profoundly or subtly.
“It actually begins much earlier in life,” says Karen Fingerman, professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s department of human development and family sciences, and director of the Texas Aging and Longevity Center. “I think if you asked a 19-year-old or 16-year-old and said to them, ‘Oh, you’re just like your parents,’ they would be deeply offended. And yet, when you’re in your 60s, it’s kind of amusing.”
For all the attention paid to the generational divide, it helps to remember that families are never static. They evolve, and recognizing your parents within yourself might signal real changes in family priorities. As a classic example, aging adult kids, as they become like the patriarch or matriarch before them, might start avoiding risks, focusing instead on wealth preservation.
How then do researchers view this sense of turning into our parents? Are there ways to understand it beyond family anecdotes and in-jokes, especially with so much at stake in enterprising families?
Connection and shared perspectives
For Fingerman, a key characteristic is acceptance. Seeing other family members within yourself reflects a sense of positivity, she suggests. In a positive environment, you’re more open to the idea that a shift is taking place and that the younger generation is taking on parental roles, she says.
Turning into Mom or Dad occurs “in places where there’s affection, and you feel affection for your parents,” she notes. “The feeling of connection and shared perspectives matters.”
At the same time, your parents are more than just Mom and Dad. They have forged relationships and lived a lifetime of social milestones. It’s an esoteric point, but the traits you share with your parents exist amid a backdrop of life experiences, says Paul Anisef, professor emeritus in the department of sociology at Toronto’s York University.
“People grow within certain social structures—family, education. They then move out and get jobs and work. They get married. It’s an enlarging social structure that they go through. And so all of these kinds of things impinge on the development of these people as they grow older,” Anisef says.
There are always key messages from generation to generation.
Shelley Forsythe, BMO Family Office
So, we may emulate aspects of our parents, yet we recognize there’s so much more to them than just their roles as Mom and Dad. Whether it’s in business or life matters, orientations to risk likely change with age and become something we also emulate.
In 1972, Anisef started a decades-long study following Ontario high-school students into adulthood, looking at changes in their lives over time. It found dramatic shifts in social structures—for example, how adult children can become more dependent on parents as traditional markers of adulthood such as buying a house become less attainable.
Paul Axelrod, professor emeritus at York University’s faculty of education and co-author with Anisef of The Story of a Generation, a book based on the study, also ties social structures and milestones back to our relationships with our parents and possibly seeing aspects of them within ourselves.
“If parents stay present in their kids’ lives, the kids appreciate that in the long run. They value their parents and the broader family in ways that even they wouldn’t have necessarily anticipated at a younger age,” Axelrod says.
This suggests a kind of through line between generations. When parents are part of our lives and we feel closely connected to them, perhaps we emulate them more.
Shelley Forsythe, national director of family enterprise planning and legacy planning at BMO Family Office, notes that links between adult children and parents can also be seen in terms of skill sets. This is especially true in chaotic times of war, tariffs and the advance of artificial intelligence. In a family operating business, making sure the right family members are in the right roles can help link the generations.
“This is where the next generation can really step up with the skill sets they can bring, because the pace of change has changed so much,” Forsythe says. So, while some in the younger generation may have more energy and tech-based strengths, parents can still be crucial role models.
“There are always key messages from generation to generation. There are always things that we’ll remember,” she says. They are the lessons learned and the sayings that parents would say.
Fingerman at the University of Texas points out that looking ahead—even acknowledging the simple fact that older generations won’t be around forever—can help keep the family dynamic and business moving forward positively.
“It’s really easy to get caught up in the things that are annoying or not going well, as opposed to shifting toward, ‘How can we maximize this relationship?’” she says. “[It’s] an awareness that this is not going to last forever.” The younger generation will supersede, carrying with them character traits from their parents.
Families who emphasize the positive and emulate elders “are more likely to focus on, ‘How can I get the most positivity out of the relationship that I have right now’—which is to say, they are often willing to overlook conflict, because ‘I don’t want to spend the time that I have left fighting.’”
Guy Dixon began his career at Dow Jones Newswires in New York before joining the Globe and Mail, covering financial markets, business news, the arts and other topics over the years. He has written for the CBC and The Walrus among other publications.
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