If you’re one of those kids who didn’t get everything you needed from your parents–and let’s face it, pretty much everyone is–you probably carry something with you as an adult today. Maybe you’re angry or sad. Wounded or resentful. You wonder what could have been, who you’d be, if they’d been around more…or been more patient…or loving…or understood you.

And while there is no doubt this experience was tragic, perhaps there is another way of looking at it. For instance, Robert F. Kennedy had it hard among the Kennedy kids. Not as hard as his sister Rosemary, who was lobotomized and shipped off to an institution, but he was not thought of as having much potential. He was not considered a prize to his father. He was not seen as being everything a young Kennedy should be.

Yet, as one Kennedy aide observed, “To be overlooked was a privilege in the Kennedy family. Bobby was the only one who was truly in touch with his emotions, who was able to feel. The others were cut off from theirs, made to be adults, required to be stoic.” Kennedy’s biographer, Evan Thomas, would go further: “Kennedy had been saved by neglect.”

What you went through wasn’t fun. But what if we could see it this way: it made us better people and better parents because we had to do this work on ourselves. Because we felt what it was like to not get something important. We know what it will mean to our children if they go without, and we will not fail to give it to them. You were saved by it…and now you will save them.