Parents Without Serfdom

Family morality often describes upbringing as a lifelong advance payment: the parents invested, so the adult child now has to repay the debt with obedience, money and access to his own life.

Parents decide to have children for their own reasons: out of love, hope, habit, a wish to build a family, or because they once decided not to read the manual to the end. Along with that decision they take on the duty to care for the child.

It does not follow that adult children owe their parents nothing in the ordinary human sense. Love creates the wish to help. Gratitude creates the wish to remember what was done. Closeness creates the wish to be there in hard times.

But help and a lifelong liability are different relationships.

The dangerous formula sounds like this:

We raised you, so now we have the right to decide where you live, whom you build a family with and what you spend money on.

Upbringing does not turn a person into property. It should gradually make him capable of managing without the people who raised him.

For his part, the child does well to notice that a family’s resources are limited. Not every wish is a need. Sometimes a refusal to buy something means not a lack of love but a mortgage, medical treatment, another child, or the tiredness of a person who also exists outside the role of parent.

A good family does not keep books on every favour. But it also does not use love to write off someone else’s freedom.

Help to parents is better given because it fits your relationship and your values, not because a set quantity of soup was once spent on you.

A debt that cannot be closed works differently from an ordinary debt. A mortgage can be paid off and you get a paper saying so. The bill for a childhood has no final sum, no schedule and no last payment: however much the adult child brings, repairs or transfers, the balance stays open. This is not bookkeeping but rent. And it is usually presented not on a hard day but exactly when the person is about to make a decision the family dislikes: move away, marry the wrong woman, change profession, not come on Sunday.

So it is more useful to look not at the size of the help but at what is paid for it. Money, time and presence are normal currency between people who are close. The right to decide for an adult is another currency: it cannot be transferred back and cannot be returned in instalments.