Did I Cause My Adult Child’s Mental Illness? Why the Blame Doesn’t Help Either of You

It’s 2 a.m. and you’re replaying it again. The divorce. The move in middle school. The night you lost your temper. The relatives no one talked about. Somewhere in there, you’re sure, is the moment you caused this.

You’re far from the only mom lying awake with that question. In 2025, 20.6% of U.S. adults, about 54.6 million people, had a mental illness in the past year, according to SAMHSA’s 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Why do we keep asking what we did wrong?

I think we all want answers. We want to find out “how did this happen,” and then we want to know “what is the cause,” and ultimately we want to arrive at the underlying “what did I do wrong” answer.

A lot of it comes from what I call the “Mom Code.” It’s how moms are taught to behave, and it goes like this: if your child is hungry, feed him. If your child needs a place to sleep, give her a bed. If your child needs x, give him or her x. When we live by that code, anything that goes wrong in our child’s life can feel like something we failed to give.

Everyone I’ve worked with over the years has done the very best they could, with the life tools they had at each moment in their life. And that is all any of us can do.

When did I start blaming myself?

I know this question from the inside. This is how I’ve told my own story:

On December 4, 2013, my almost perfect life crashes and burns, when I receive a disturbing phone call about my son.

This conversation is going to turn my world upside down. I’ve taught the right values, surrounded my boys with loving family, and worked hard at being a good parent. My reward is my happy family and my healthy grown children. I know I delivered two wonderful men to the world.

That is what I know to be true before that phone call.

Now, at almost 22, my intelligent, literate son has suddenly slipped into psychosis. He’s landed in the hospital. The doctors are unsure whether Eric’s problems are a result of mental illness or drug usage.

I am confused and in terror.

It becomes obvious, to me, that I did something wrong. I fell asleep at the wheel. I allowed bad things to happen in my family.

It’s my fault, so it’s up to me to find a way to “fix” it.

This is the start of MY journey.

…

I live in worry about his safety and welfare and cannot seem to focus on anything else. My pain is constant and intense, and I feel powerless to change things.

I start to work informally with parents who are in pain and feel powerless to help their child. I also talk with lots of parents who have moved beyond the pain. I talk with parents who were able to find peace and joy, not connected in any way to their child’s well-being.

Patterns emerge.

What started as an attempt to fix someone eventually became a lesson in fixing myself.

It’s not an easy lesson to learn, but learning it changed my life.

And it changed Eric’s life also.

It was a painful and scary journey. But finding peace and joy in my life while my son was at risk and in active addiction was something I had to do. I didn’t achieve this all the time, but did manage to find more and more minutes each day, every day.

…

Eric is now in recovery (recovery date 4/30/18). He got there not because of what I did, but because of what he learned and did.

…

I found my own peace long before Eric entered recovery.

How common is this kind of self-blame?

Very common, in my experience. When I asked a recovery specialist about it on one of our calls, I put it this way: probably what my moms want to know is, is there something they have all done wrong as they raised their children for this terrible thing to have happened in their world?

Research describes the same thing. In a small 2003 study, researchers who interviewed the parents of 22 adults with schizophrenia in secure care found that many of them felt guilt, usually without anyone blaming them.

In other words, a lot of us are carrying blame that no one has handed us. We pick it up ourselves.

What do health organizations say contributes to mental illness?

I’m not a medical professional, and I can’t give a medical opinion about what causes mental illness; if you want to understand your child’s diagnosis, that’s a conversation for their own clinicians. What I can do is tell you what major health organizations say, and share what I’ve seen in my own life and in the lives of the moms I work with.

The World Health Organization’s fact sheet “Mental disorders,” updated September 11, 2026, puts it this way: “At any one time, a diverse set of individual, family, community, and structural factors may combine to protect or undermine mental health.” The same fact sheet goes on: “Protective and risk factors include individual psychological and biological factors, such as emotional skills as well as genetics.”

What I notice, as a mom, is how far it is from the single moment we replay at 2 a.m.

What does self-blame look like from one day to the next?

Blame rarely announces itself. It shows up in the small choices we make every day. Maybe you recognize some of these:

• You say yes to every request, because saying no feels like failing him a second time.
• You apologize for things that happened twenty years ago, hoping this time it will make a difference.
• You cancel plans with friends, because enjoying yourself feels wrong while she’s struggling.
• You keep searching for the one thing you did, sure that if you find it, you’ll finally know how to fix it.

Each of these comes from love. And each one keeps us looking backward, at the one part of the story none of us can change.

What does all that blame do to us?

Most of us acquire more “life” tools as we move through our life’s journey. And then, we look in the rear-view mirror and beat ourselves up thinking that we should have done something differently. That’s pretty useless. We can only know what we know at that moment in time. Anything else is unrealistic and only hurts us.

What I can speak to is what the blame does to the moms I work with: it keeps us stuck, and it doesn’t help our child one bit.

Let’s move forward, without labels, without certainty about what transpired. Because our tendency is to get stuck in these places. And that’s not useful to anyone.

When our loved one is ready to get to the root of things, they can work with a professional to do that.

Why can’t my child just tell me I was a good mom?

Many of us look to our son or daughter to settle it for us. We ask, sometimes out loud, “where did I go wrong?”

We do that because we want our kids to reassure us that we’re good moms. And it’s not their job to reassure us that we are good moms. I can reassure you that we’re all good moms.

What if I really did make mistakes?

And even if you are convinced you did something “wrong,” there is nothing constructive you can do now except to move forward.

We have our own life experiences, our own challenges, our own demons, and we navigate them as well as we can. Moving forward starts with how you speak to yourself.

We can work on healing our own developmental traumas. We can grow! And each of us can choose how much deeper we want to go within ourselves. Any answer is okay.

Why does being kind to yourself help?

Researchers have a name for speaking to yourself with kindness instead of harsh criticism: self-compassion. In a 2012 series of four experiments in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, people who were guided to treat themselves with compassion after a mistake reported greater motivation to make amends and avoid repeating it than people in the comparison groups.

And a 2023 review in the journal Mindfulness pooled 56 randomized controlled trials and found that self-compassion focused interventions had “small to medium effects on reducing depressive symptoms, anxiety, and stress” right after the intervention, compared with control groups.

One of the simplest ways to practice it is to say to yourself what you would say to another mom in your place.

Does setting down the blame mean none of it mattered?

No. Setting down the blame doesn’t mean deciding that nothing you did mattered, or that you’ll never think about the past again. It means you stop carrying it every hour of every day, so your hands are free for the life in front of you. That’s the part we can still do something about.

Here’s something you can do today.

Most of the moms I work with find it far easier to be kind to another mom than to themselves. My worksheet uses that. It takes one page and a pen, and when you’re done you’ll have your own best advice, in your own handwriting, written to you.

If your child or anyone else is in immediate danger, call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or call 911.