The Parent Paradox Part 2
A while back I wrote a post trying to figure out what duty, if any, a child has to his parents. In some ways, this is a post examining the reverse...
What happens when a parent realizes at some point in their life that they do not have a bond or a relationship with their child? I am not talking about physical abandonment, nor am I talking about a child who is a toddler or a kindergartner. I can see two types of situations - one is that the parent and child are simply incompatible types - they do not share any interests, they do not think alike or perhaps they view things from completely opposite perspectives. If they were not related by blood, these people would never want to associate with one another. Is it fair to say that just because their is a parent and child relationship, these two people need to "love" one another. It is reasonable to expect these feelings on the part of the parent?
The other situation is a little different. What if the parent realizes that they had never wanted to be a parent? Once again, it is not an issue of abandonment. Let's say that this happens when the child is an adult. You could argue and say, well, if you didn't want to be a parent, you should not have had children. But it is not always the case that you know these things before you have children. Perhaps it took years for a parent to realize this. What is his responsibility to his offspring?
PS In case my family reads this some day, this is a purely hypothetical situation...
What happens when a parent realizes at some point in their life that they do not have a bond or a relationship with their child? I am not talking about physical abandonment, nor am I talking about a child who is a toddler or a kindergartner. I can see two types of situations - one is that the parent and child are simply incompatible types - they do not share any interests, they do not think alike or perhaps they view things from completely opposite perspectives. If they were not related by blood, these people would never want to associate with one another. Is it fair to say that just because their is a parent and child relationship, these two people need to "love" one another. It is reasonable to expect these feelings on the part of the parent?
The other situation is a little different. What if the parent realizes that they had never wanted to be a parent? Once again, it is not an issue of abandonment. Let's say that this happens when the child is an adult. You could argue and say, well, if you didn't want to be a parent, you should not have had children. But it is not always the case that you know these things before you have children. Perhaps it took years for a parent to realize this. What is his responsibility to his offspring?
PS In case my family reads this some day, this is a purely hypothetical situation...
posted by e-kvetcher at 12:21 PM
6 Comments:
The responsibility is to the true duty to one's own self: standing up for decisions that one made both knowingly and negligently throughout their life and bearing the responsibility of those actions.
That means opening your heart, that means being a parent.
Anything less is a lie to oneself and spiritual suicide for it is to deny one's own primacy in one's own life by refusing to accept the importance of one's decisions and actions that followed.
Giving birth to a child automatically incurs a whole bunch of legal responsibilities. I see no reason that loving the child- or at least, acting as if you do in a manner sufficiently convincing to fool everyone including the child- shouldn't be one of them. Insofar as there exist today plenty of methods that are fairly effective at preventing childbirth, having a child can be seen as a choice. If it was a wrong one, suck it up. Knowing that a parent just isn't that fond of you is, I am reasonably sure, profoundly damaging to the child from a psychological perspective, and thus to society as a whole.
Hmm,
Just to be clear, I am talking about a child who is essentially grown up - say over the age of 18. So it is not a question of legal responsibility, this is purely an emotional analysis. So i don't think "Suck it up" is a valid response.
If you are in a marriage, and you realize that you no longer love your spouse, it is not unreasonable to get a divorce. Why is it unreasonable to have a parent that does not feel any love for a child?
Here is a concrete situation. An adult woman feels like her father does not care about her and feels no paternal emotions toward her. Now, while she was growing up, this father provided her a home, an education; she grew up in an upper middle class world. But he, for whatever reason, does not feel any emotional bond toward her and her siblings. Certainly, this is not a pleasant situation. But is the father in the wrong? How can one FORCE someone to feel something they don't? My question is, does the father deserve to be vilified?
If psychology is to believed, then feeling like your father doesn't really love you is pretty damaging, even for an adult. Unlike material duties, which the child is assumed to be able to fulfill for themselves after the age of 18, I think that some feeling of parental love remains necessary for an adult, so I don't see the place to make a distinction between a minor and an adult. If not loving your child is going to mess your child up, then you shouldn't have a child unless you can love them.
So, yes, a father whose children feel that he doesn't love them should be vilified. I'm still on the fence over whether I think he should force himself to love them or whether it is sufficient that he pretend that he loves them in a manner that convinces them.
No legal divorce really exists from children and I think the informal divorce that society acknowledges as valid is strictly a fault-based divorce, if at all.
>If not loving your child is going to mess your child up, then you shouldn't have a child unless you can love them.
Ah, but what if you have children fully expecting to love them, but many years later realize that you just don't?
>So, yes, a father whose children feel that he doesn't love them should be vilified. I'm still on the fence over whether I think he should force himself to love them or whether it is sufficient that he pretend that he loves them in a manner that convinces them.
I think it is very hard to pretend to love somebody when you don't. And oftentimes the other person can feel it. This is actually the case in the situation I described earlier. The father is trying to pretend, but it is clear that it is not there...
Besides, I still don't understand why the effect on the grown child psyche is so important to you. It could very well be that finding out my wife doesn't really love me is more painful and damaging to my psyche than finding out my parents don't. But in this case you would not vilify my wife, you'd say - get divorced.
You raise a very good question. I have nothing to add to the morality issue. Frequently there are issues of prudence. Parents realize that they need the child in their old age and don't act in such a selfish way as to totally alienate their future advocate and protector.But not always, especially in cases of divorce where it is quite frequent for fathers to walk away from the children of their first marriage, remarry and raise a new bunch of kids, younger and more huggable.
My real point is that ambivalence in feelings on both sides is rather common. Some manage the ambivalence better than others.
You know the old joke about a couple in their 90's who come before a judge asking for divorce.
"Why now?" asks the judge.
"We were waiting for our children to die."
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