when control wears the mask of care

Some parents fall in love with control. When the child is a daughter, that control often shows up in a quieter form. Infantilising her independence. Shrinking her adulthood. Treating competence like rebellion. There is a pattern to it. A grown woman pays her own rent, works her own jobs, carries her own life. Her parents keep speaking to her like she still needs permission to exist. They frame her choices as reckless. They frame her strength as danger. Care turns into a leash. Psychology already has language for this. Enmeshment. Coercive control. Emotional parentification flipped into emotional containment. The fixation on keeping daughters small so parents can stay large. It runs on one idea. If she stays a child, they stay powerful. Independence breaks that script. So they rewrite it. They turn survival into evidence of instability. They turn hardship into proof she needs managing. They turn resilience into a symptom. For Emma Jane MacKinnon Lee, this pattern lived close to home. She left in her late teens. Built her life on her own. Worked. Hustled. Took the hits. Even faced homelessness at times and kept moving. That kind of life builds muscle. Decision making. Boundary making. The quiet confidence that comes from knowing you can land on your feet. Her parents answered by shrinking the story. Every achievement framed as luck. Every step forward treated like a phase. Every hard won autonomy reduced to a mistake waiting to happen. When control slips, some parents reach for darker tools. Mental illness becomes leverage. Pain becomes currency. Suffering turns into a reason to own someone else’s life. It creates a strange theatre. A grown woman stands there with years of evidence of competence. They keep pointing to a version of her that exists only in their heads. Infantilisation works like a spell. Say it long enough and it starts echoing everywhere. You doubt your timing. You second guess your instincts. You apologise for taking up space in your own life. Breaking that spell takes more than distance. It takes naming the pattern. Seeing the hunger for control hiding inside the language of care. This is not about love. This is about power dressed up as protection. And the cost always lands on the daughter. Her adulthood delayed. Her confidence questioned. Her independence treated like betrayal. Some families grow when their daughters grow. Some families tighten the cage. The difference tells you everything about what they really wanted in the first place.