Does love really become non-unconditional when one commits a horrible crime and his or her parents turn him or her in?
Could the parents be turning their child in for the good of their child? Perhaps their child can receive some rehabilitation, courtesy of the legal system?
I love my cat unconditionally. That doesn’t mean I place him above others, just that there is nothing a cat can do to make me stop loving him.
I love people more than I love my cat, but people pretty much always have that capacity. My condition on my love is “Don’t be an evil monster.”
So I see a big difference between unconditional love and amount of love.
My parents love me. The only qualifier I’m in the position to add is “enough”.
How could I possibly know if they have unconditional love for me? I’ve never done anything bad enough to warrant them disowning me. I’m not the perfect person and there a plenty of good reasons to dislike me, but just as they love me enough, I am loveable enough too.
I don’t really put a lot of stock in “unconditional” love. Totally unconditional love is creepy, IMHO. And I’m not sure I would want it. I want someone’s love to be based on some iota of rationality…to make some kind of sense. Unconditional love throws sense out of the window.
My Dad didn’t understand me, but he loved me to pieces. Mom has no interest in her children as individual human beings, from where she sits we look like extensions of her; what’s important in “[name], my child” is the “my”.
My dad would die for me, I’m sure of it, but the one thing he wouldn’t do is quit the alcohol. He started drinking heavily when I was little and then quit after I finished school and moved out. :dubious: That’s why I said conditionally.
Mom, on the other hand, will always love me unconditionally. I love my mommy too! 
Both my parents love me more than anything in the world. I don’t usually realize it until I read some very sad threads here on the Dope that make me want to go hug them.
My mom loves me unconditionally, but I may be the least problematic child, lol. But seeing how she still loves the others even when they’re big pains in the ass, and I mean BIG ones, I believe she loves, always, unconditionally.
My dad, I put conditionally, because I know he gets disappointed in people when they don’t make the most of themselves, and I’ve definitely been on the slacker end of things. But he still loves, just probably isn’t very proud, lol.
As far as the ‘would they turn you in if they believed you’d committed murder’, I’d say yes, and I’d expect nothing less. They know we know it’s wrong, and know we couldn’t blame them. There’ve been a couple times I really wanted to commit murder, one of them on my mom’s behalf, but didn’t, for lack of opportunity really. Not sure what she’d do in that case, but we were raised to accept the consequences of our actions, and if I were pushed to actual murder, it would be knowing that the consequences would be worth it. As that would emotionally slay my parents, that’s a huge factor in NOT doing it, of course.
I’d say both of my parents loved me the best they could. It was unconditional in that I doubt if there was anything I could do to make them love me less.
My father did love alcohol more.
I’d say with both of them my sister and I were extensions of them. My mother wanted to turn me into a mini-mom only I would do all the things she didn’t get to do. If we did anything wrong my father was positive we did it on purpose to make him look bad. Everything kind of revolved around them.
When I was a teen and got caught smoking pot the first thing my father said was, “How can I face the guys at work?”. Next was from my mother, “What will the neighbors think?”. Then “Do you know what this will do to your chances to get into college?”. Finally “Do you have any idea what this can do to your health?”.
Of course I didn’t point out there was no way the guys at work or neighbors would know unless they told them. I got caught, not busted. However, I knew when to keep my mouth shut. My father had a pretty quick backhand.
I always thought that summed it up pretty well, what other people think is way more important than I am.
Then again they could be pretty cool. I was grounded for months but my father did say, “Don’t tell your mother I said this, but if I was your age I would have smoked pot too.” Later my mother said, “Don’t tell your father I said this, but if I was your age I would have tried pot too”.
As far as if I committed a crime would my parents have turned me in? Hell yes! I wouldn’t expect anything less.
My parents felt that it was child abuse if you didn’t teach your kids right from wrong and if you allowed them to get away with bad behavior. It was their job as parents to prepare me to be a productive, law abiding citizen. I heard over and over how the parents who let their kids run wild and do what they wanted didn’t love their children.
If I committed a serious crime, in their eyes turning me in would be an act of love. To allow me to get away with murder or lead a life of crime would mean they didn’t care.
Of course they would have hired the best lawyer they could afford.
My Dad doesn’t give the tiniest shit about me. He’s kinda evil.
My mother, I think, may have loved me a bit when I was tiny, but not when I was older. Now she’s not as messed up and vile as she was when I was a kid, and she tries to do the mothering thing in her own way, but it’s a confused way of trying to fit into a role she’s tried to take on far too late. From most of her actions, body language etc it’s very obvious that she strongly dislikes what little she knows about me.
My GF is far more bothered about this than I am, though. If it’s what you’ve always known, then you just shrug it off. And I don’t love either of them at all, thankfully.
My mom loved me unconditionally.
My dad loved booze.
Unconditional love can have a flip side. My parents have certainly acted as enablers for me at times, allowing me to keep up my own particular brand of self-destruction. What’s more, they have done so even when I have repaid them with nothing but ingratitude and scorn, ignoring them for long stretches and picking up the phone only when I needed their money again. And they’ve kept doing it even when it must have been obvious to them what was going on.
I noticed a thread earlier concerning the story about the boy and the giving tree. Yeah, that one hit a sore point with me. Maybe sometimes a few conditions even to a parent’s love isn’t such a bad idea.
Love should be unconditional.
Relationships might have conditions.
Why should love be unconditional?
If I stop loving you if you try to kill me, does that mean I didn’t really love you?
If my love is conditional upon a person not trying to kill me, does that mean my acts of love towards them are any less loving than if I had unconditional love? How would the person being loved even know the difference? And how does someone really know they have unconditional love if their love has never been tested?
Seriously, I don’t see the appeal of unconditional love. A parent who stops loving their child over petty, ridiculous stuff is obviously someone who is messed up. But there’s nothing wrong with a parent who stops loving someone who is simply unloveable.
Perhaps ‘should’ was too absolute a word.
But I do believe parental love should be darn close to unconditional. A child should not have to worry that normal differences and disagreements would result in loss of love. Perhaps it’s idealized, but I do believe that your parents should be the one source of love that you can count on. As a child you had no say in bringing brought into that relationship and its one fraught with power imbalances. Virtually unconditional love should be part of the deal or you spend your life earning it or fearing losing it. How can you be sincere in your relationship if you’re always auditioning for your parents’ love?
Note that I was was responding to the post about enabling. I was contrasting the unconditional love with a conditional relationship. You can love a child that is self destructive without enabling that child through keeping the relationship when stepping away is better.
Monstro, you understand completely because you don’t have kids. That is the one relationship that I believe should include unconditional love. Biological children are half you genetically and you have the power in raising them. If anything goes wrong, it is partially your fault and always your responsibility. No one has to have children in the first place outside of exceptional and tragic circumstances. Once you decide to create another person, you need to be prepared to back that up with responsibilities and emotions until you one of you dies.
Responsibilities, perhaps. But even then, I think limits are reasonable.
You can’t “should” an emotion. It’s either in you to have or it’s not. I think love is absolutely a requirement for having a child. I just don’t feel comfortable stamping something as absolute as “unconditional” on it.
No, I shouldn’t have to worry about my parents hating me just because I decide not to come home for Thanksgiving. That would be crazy. But why should I feel entitled to their emotional support under all scenarios, no matter how extreme? Isn’t that also crazy?
I can understand how unconditional love is the ideal when it comes to parents and children. But I can also understand how someone can NOT have unconditional love just because that’s an unreasonable pinnacle for that person to attain. I think everyone has a limit. It’s just that most of us have never been tested hard enough to see it.
There are parents out there who make plans for how their children should live and they withhold love when the child doesn’t do what they say.
My mother planned out my life for me. She wanted me to live the life she didn’t have. I may have frustrated her, disappointed her, angered her, embarrassed her but she didn’t love me less for it.
That is unconditional love.
Some parents will withhold love if their son/daughter elects not to go to med school or decides to marry outside their culture.
That is conditional love, love used to punish or manipulate.
You can disapprove of you childs actions without withholding love.
I can’t think of anything my son could do that would make me love him less. Even if he was a serial killer I would still love him, but I sure wouldn’t approve. I’d want him in prison, I’d wonder what I did wrong as parent, I’d feel horrible for what he did, but I would still love him.
There is no doubt in my mind that my mother loves me unconditionally. This does not mean that she never disapproves of my choices or gets angry with me. To me, it means that I am always her daughter, and she will always love me. She has even said that if I committed murder, she would love me and visit me in prison. (She’s also told me later that if it were a justified killing, she’d better be at the top of my list of People Who Will Help Me Move A Body, but we agreed that this was all hypothetical.)
My father?
Up until the age of 25 or so, I believe he loved me unconditionally. Then I discovered that he wasn’t interested in treating me as an equal, as a knowledgeable person (with a few odd exceptions), or as someone who ever had the right to question him. I’d have written this off to him having difficulty transitioning from father-of-a-child to father-of-an-adult, but it turned out, he didn’t have this issue with my brothers.
I discovered that when my religious and political beliefs didn’t reflect his, he did love me a little less. I discovered that he would have been willing to disown me over a misunderstanding. He loved me a little less because I am a daughter and not a son. He loved me a little less because I am fat. He loved me a little less because I could and would argue with him.
He loves me a lot. I know this. He once told me he’d die for me, he loved me so much. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d rather he just respect me than lay down his life for my benefit.
I’m so glad that unconditional love is in the lead on both parents. The way people talk on here, I thought most Dopers did not have loving parents.
I’ve done some shitty things in my life, but my parents have always loved me anyway.
So what? The whole point about love is that it’s irrational. And murder is not going to increase because of parents not turning their kids in because it’s very rare indeed for the parents to actually do so, so we don’t have to start complicated worries about significant damage to society.
Out of interest does your answer change if there is a death penalty? Would you report a child to be killed?