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Comment by mrxd | Hacker News Reader

This mostly comes down to parents who have more traditional cultural values than their children. It’s like watching two sports teams argue about who broke the rules, but they can’t agree because fundamentally one team is playing soccer and the other is playing baseball.

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Ultimately the role of parents is to provide their children the means to become successful and self-actualized adults. Their traditional values and feelings have little to do with that if their kids are opposed. If you decide to have kids, you owe them everything. Your needs, values, feelings, hangups, etc. now take a backseat to what your kids need. If you're unwilling to do so, the reasonable response from the child is to cut you off to some extent, from making certain topics of conversation off limits all the way up to complete no contact.

That's a nice way to look at the world, but you have to realise that it's a biased view of the world.

Try to to step out of your own skin for a second and look at childrearing like an anthropologist might.

A key insight is that before modern countries and governments, there were essentially no pension plans. Some companies offered them, but in general they were rare.

Your pension plan was literally your children.

When you got too old to work in a field, swing an axe, or chase after animals in the forest, your kids would feed you. When your teeth fell out, they would chew your food for you.

You still see remnants of this in less well-off, or more "primitive" cultures. Families aim for about 10 children, end up with about 2-5 surviving to adulthood. Their culture has a very strong focus on children supporting their parents, far more than in developed, Western nations. You see this with Asian kids that work 12-hour days, 7-days a week to send money back to their parents. As do their siblings. Each might contribute only 20-30% of their income, but between a bunch of kids it adds up to enough to support the parents.

For more than half the planet's population, kids absolutely are raised primarily to support their parents, not the other way around. The kids in turn will eventually get support from their own kids, etc...

An alternative but roughly equivalent model is that in a hunter-gatherer society, a male human maximises their own safety and comfort by having children. Kids take very little calories to raise, but can be a multiplying effect on overall productivity. A lone hunter may be on foot for days, during which he can't take care of his "stuff". But a wife with kids has many little hands to collect berries, dry meat, repair baskets, etc...

(PS: Where this "fails" is that once a country's medical system advanced to the point that not too many of the kids die, everyone ends up with 10+ kids surviving to adulthood, and the population explodes. The older generation doesn't "hold back" on reproducing because this is directly contributing to their own wealth in retirement. The younger generation is screwed, but that wasn't obvious at the time they were born. This is happening right now in the Philippines, as a random example.)

I don't disagree with you from a very materialist, evolutionary, and anthropological point of view. But we're humans and we can rise above this base analysis.

I am coming at it from more of an ethical point of view, largely utilitarian, I guess, although I don't necessarily describe myself as a utilitarian. Nobody chooses to be brought into this world. To be wrenched from the void into consciousness. It's something inflicted on them by others - specifically their parents. It's the heaviest, most serious ethical decision most people will make in their lifetimes.

I think that by having children you are implicitly saying one of two things "I believe that I will be able to provide this new human I've decided to create the resources, skills, and life such that, on the balance, their joy will outweigh their suffering." or "I care little to none for whether their joy will outweigh their suffering. I want to perpetrate my genes and culture and I need another body to help with the work and secure my comfort in my old age."

I think the former, if carefully considered in an honest way, can be an ethical decision. I think the latter is wholly unethical and more or less amounts to a desire for filial slavery.

Kids require enormous energy to raise. Or even just to carry to term.

Love doesn't work when you treat it like a bank note, to be collected by the creditor when due. No one is the debtor, no one is the creditor. If you love your children, you don't do things that cause them to cut you off. Likewise, if you love your parents, you don't cut them off when they they don't do what you want. You forgive.

Every day, you choose to be a part of each other's life, and help each other get through life. How you do that changes through life. Not every child will be successful, self-actualized or achieve anything near their potential. Not every parent will make good choices, be successful, or even be worthy of respect. People mess up. They make mistakes. The way love really works, is you forgive. And keep forgiving. You keep the relationship alive. You celebrate the good, and you sympathize through the bad. The greatest gift a parent can give is loving their child despite it all, and the greatest gift a child can give is loving their parents despite it all.

It is, of course, possible to love and damage a child at the same time. When that child becomes an adult, they have every right to recognize that the power dynamic has shifted, and they can establish any boundaries they see fit - including cutting them off.

In non-western countries the norm is filial piety, which means showing respect, devotion and obedience to one’s parents. The West is really the only region that has shifted to the values you describe.

I believe there are advantages to the Western way. But the claim that any other way is abusive seems quite ethnocentric to me.

You have no fucking idea what you're talking about me. None. This is about abuse, not cultural values.

This website describes my parents to a T, and myself and my siblings have all had periods of no contact with them. Their cultural values are completely irrelevant, they were simply extremely abusive and refuse to acknowledge it. They tell me that my siblings and we made up our childhood abuse.

My parents cultural values and political leanings are actually extremely liberal (and extremely similar to my own). Everyone in my family of origin are atheists. This is about abuse.

Call it what you want. If you believe someone owes you something for the rest of their lives just because they exist or you exist, you're wrong, period. I don't care if it used to be the way of the world.

I would point out that while cultural mismatch can certainly cause problems, normal functioning people will either resolve them without estrangement, or self-select out of these forums.

This series of articles makes a very clear case that something more than cultural mismatch is going on here.

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