“I Feel Like I’m Failing My Parents” Understanding the Pressure Adult with Immigrant Parents Carry with Jay Razzouk
Featured Guest: Jay Razzouk, Corporate Attorney and Co-Founder of ProSCALE Legal
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayrazzouk
Facebook Group: http://businesslegaltips.com
Instagram: @jayrazzouk
The Invisible Pressure Adults With Immigrant Parents Carry
Aduts with immigrant parents often carry an unspoken pressure that starts early and follows them into adulthood. Roles like interpreter, problem solver, emotional support, and “the responsible one” become part of daily life, often without being named or acknowledged.
Over time, these invisible responsibilities can lead to burnout, guilt, resentment, and loneliness, even when they truly want to support family. This experience is common among second generation adults who are balancing personal goals with family expectations shaped by immigration, survival, and sacrifice.
Why This Pressure Feels So Heavy
The challenge isn’t only cultural differences or language barriers. It’s the ongoing sense of responsibility to hold everything together while building a career, relationships, and a life of your own.
Adults with immigrant parents and second generation adults often live between two truths: their family’s world - their needs, ideas and expecations as well as their own. The tendency for adults with immigrant parents is to help others and sacrifice their needs, which is not sustainable.
Unexpressed needs don’t disappear. They often resurface as exhaustion, emotional distance, or a growing sense of failure despite you not failing at all.
What This Episode Explores
In this episode of Empowered With Immigrant Parents, Allison Ly is interviewed by Jay Razzouk to explore the deeper dynamics adults with immigrant parents experience but rarely name. The conversation highlights identity, pressure, burnout, and the long-term impact of ignoring personal needs.
This episode offers insight, validation, and perspective for adult children of immigrants navigating boundaries, expectations, and emotional responsibility, without requiring self-sacrifice or family estrangement.
🎧 Listen to the full episode HERE
More about Jay:
Jay equips coaches, influencers, and mastermind leaders with the little-known legal strategies and paperwork that they don’t even know they need to scale to 7 figures and beyond. Like most people, Jay doesn’t like contracts. This is why he’s pioneering the “ProAct”™ – a turnkey framework-in-a-box designed to boost profits and build life-long relationships while protecting one’s legacy.
👉Join Jay’s Business Legal Tips group: http://businesslegaltips.com
👉Discover How to Avoid the 3 Big Costly Legal Mistakes Most Online Entrepreneurs Make: https://proscalelegal.com/gift
Allison’s Free Resources:
Stop Spiraling in Guilt Cheatsheet For Setting Boundaries: https://heyallisonly.myflodesk.com/cheatsheet
3 Easy Ways to Tackle Your Negative Self Talk: https://heyallisonly.myflodesk.com/start
Get my Free Quickstart Guide to Help You Help Your Loved Ones: https://heyallisonly.myflodesk.com/resource
Get my weekly emails for actionable tips, tools, relatable stories for Adults with Immigrant Parents: https://heyallisonly.com/email
Episode Timeline:
00:00 The Invisible Role You’ve Been Carrying
03:58 What Being “Second Gen” Really Means
06:08 Family Expectations vs Your Life
12:22 Boundaries Without Guilt
14:59 The Real Cost of Keeping the Peace
16:41 How This Quietly Affects You
22:35 Why Boundaries Strengthen Relationships
25:10 What Happens When You Don’t Set Boundaries
33:05 What’s Really Under the Conflict
34:36 Support for Adults with Immigrant Parents
