My brother and sister are angry at my parents. I feel caught in the middle. What can I do? | Leading quesstions

"Doesn't one of us have to be wrong? is the plea on both sides of a family disagreement like this, I think. One person says this was totally unacceptable, the other says it wasn't; we know we can't both be right, so the disagreement feels like an accusation that we're the one seeing things incorrectly. Sometimes when you try to talk that impasse through with other people, they'll fall back on family things are all subjective. That's fine, but it doesn't go very far."

"The whole problem is you and your siblings both feel as if you're telling the truth, the rap-your-knuckles-on-it truth. This was or was not acceptable parenting, same as it was or was not raining yesterday. The facts of your childhood are important, which means getting them wrong is important too. One thing that can help break that impasse is to ask whether you're disagreeing about what happened or you're disagreeing about how to weigh those things in the moral accounting."

"For instance, do you think that parents ought to be judged by whether they tried their best or by what they actually did? Are we talking about degree of difficulty or absolute performance? Yes, they shouted that horrible thing, but how many jobs were they working? How much support did they have, how hard was life on them, what tangles in their heads did they inherit from their own parents? Another big split is whether we focus on what parents are like"

Siblings remember the same childhood very differently, with some emphasizing parental absence, manipulation, and arguing while another recalls love, home-cooked meals and stories. Parents are now trying to make amends but remain criticized and seen as ungrateful by some family members. The core impasse arises because each person feels they are telling the truthful account, turning the disagreement into an accusation of error. Breaking the deadlock requires clarifying whether the dispute is about what happened or about how to morally weigh those events, and considering factors such as parents' efforts, hardships, support, and inherited patterns.

Read at www.theguardian.com