Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

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Parenting, like life, is the accumulation of the consequences of decisions/actions.

Unless a child has the grace to grant a parent forgiveness for their (forgivable) failures, and unless a parent was able to create a safe and loving environment in which a child could grow up with such a mindset, estrangement is inevitable.

Usually, the crux which this revolves around is the realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams, and that it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life.

Many people who are (rightly or not) disappointed by their parents and troubled by aspects of how they were raised will view this as something private and will only open up in therapy, or some other private interaction --- some folks consider the anonymity of online intercourse to have a privacy of/distance from their real life that it is safe to mention things --- I guess in my day it was the "bartender effect".

Consider your question as coming from a position of grace/luck and count your blessings.

I'm not sure making children the "central focus" of the lives of the parent will turn out to be as healthy as we think it in the current moment. I would agree if this qualified "[one of] the central focus[es]" and what you mean by "best possible" in terms of the cost the parent makes for the "best possible" instead of "adequate".

Beats other options such as:

- children are a burden to be complained of and minimized

- children are a resource to be exploited

- children are incidental and may be ignored

- children are a way to increase one's social security payout

- children are god’s future army and their entire purpose in life is to prepare for an afterlife by expanding that religion

- children are inherently sinful; nothing they can do is good enough in god’s eyes; the most important thing in existence is to believe in this particular story and to dedicate one’s life to this belief

I truly believe it was love for their kids that drove my parents to instill such an extreme and harmful worldview. Primarily because of some pretty major unresolved Traumas with a capital T in both of their lives. Decades later, I’m still unwinding what remains a complex relationship in therapy.

The point of this anecdote was just that there’s a subset of us who had parents extremely focused on their kids and who really did invest the time into focusing on what’s “best”.

They just saw the world very differently, in ways that turn out to be extremely harmful, and I’m a messy product of that.

Love is not love when it does not realize that the person being loved is their own unique individual self. Moreover, as I tried to express, that the function of a parent is to help that child become the best version of themselves, hence my noting:

>...realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams...

That your parents labeled how they treated you as "love" does not make it an act of lovingkindness (to pull from my wife's Master's thesis) --- it is important that people should evaluate things without considerations for labels applied by others, and then arrive at a reasoned, impartial perception which is valid in terms of logic and correlation with the facts of the past. (Q: How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? A: Four, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.)

The drunken and enraged parent who claims, "This will hurt me more than it does you." as he unstraps his belt is lying to himself and to the child, and it is important for the child to realize that --- understanding the self-deception which makes such an act possible may be helpful, but it is more important to understand the facts of the matter --- by way of contrast, the toddler who bites another person has to be slapped because their intellectual engagement does not yet admit of other people having feelings (which is why they are able to inflict pain since they do not realize that others will feel pain), and since they are on the cusp of that realization, explaining afterwards along with some natural consequence will help guide them to that realization.

> the realization that ... it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life

Unwise of you to state "realization of" to a statement that is not broadly agreed upon. I bet you also believe "you didn't choose to be born"?

What's not to agree with "I didn't choose to be born"? Is there a child who asked to be born? Is there a child who consciously decided to be, or not to be, born? There's no "believing" here; it's just a biological fact: people don't get born because they want to. I really don't get what you're trying to say.

It has to do with you disassociating yourself from your biological being.

When the sperm and egg fused, thus you began, and you very much wanted to be alive: it is literally programmed into your genetic makeup. It was you who decided to divide and divide continually at that point.

My point is that when you use the word "I" you seem to imply only the little bit of yourself which exists in your prefrontal cortex is you, and the rest is !you.

If you regret being alive, that is different from claiming you didn't want to be alive at one point. Wasn't it you who suckled on milk? Who cried for care and love?

> When the sperm and egg fused, thus you began,

I'm sorry, I don't talk to people who think a single cell is a person. I'm too old now to waste time pointing out fanaticism and trying to correct it in random Internet encounters. Good day to you.

On that basis, I assume you're vegan? Animals actively try to avoid getting killed.

Do you also think rape victims "enjoyed it" if they climax?

It is interesting, even, "you were the one who chose me before birth" in new-age spiritual belief terms was used as posthoc rationalization for things that were committed against me growing up by a parent, that I still deal with now. Unarguable because it's just my belief, see. I have trained myself to see people espousing it as a red flag.

If you think providing for a child is not appropriate as a central focus of a parent's life, please take that into consideration before doing anything which might involve a child.

While politics are something I prefer not to discuss, I hope that every woman who has ever found herself in need of a tampon, and every person with a concern for how laws requiring that society investigate every reported miscarriage as a potential crime shows up to vote in the next election, and that that coalition then puts in place a legal framework which makes giving birth a free and uncoerced choice.

Unfortunately that doesn't really help with the right for straight men to not be fathers. Obviously it's a difficult topic considering once the deed is done, it's done. But it does take two to tango.

One word: vasectomy. Freeze some sperm if you think you might want it later.

I won't need any later; I'm gay. But yes, men do need more birth control options to both share in the responsibility for it as well as to empower them to proactively make a decision before it can be taken away from them.

Or, one can make a conscious decision to only be sexually intimate with a person with whom one has a sufficient emotional connection that raising a child together is a reasonable premise.

Isn't that a one-sided requirement, though?

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