I feel for your sister. I was married to an emotionally abusive man diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder for over 30 years. Raising two kids by myself would have been very tough financially, but that’s not the main reason I stayed. I stayed because over time, someone with NPD warps an SO’s reality. It took me a long, long time to get out, and though I’m MUCH happier, I’m permanently damaged by those years.
I loved my in-laws, but having one of them live with us would have been as mitigating as adding an ice cube to a vat of boiling soup. I hope your sister gets out. She’s likely not even recognizing how dearly she’s paying for that financial benefit.
Maybe that dude’s $300,000 lawsuit against Best Buy for assigning work to him on Saturdays (and NOT in the cell phone department!) works out… then his parents will be sorry for 86ing him!
The job of a good parent is planned obsolescence. If you raise your child right, you will be rendered obsolete. They will not need you. They may still want you, love you, care for you, etc. But they won’t need you, your money, your roof, your anything in order to survive.
Being a parent is a lifetime commitment. Being a provider is not.
Oh, so you think parents should support their kids until the kids are middle-aged and beyond? Why? I’m glad his parents are suing this lazy scum-bag. He’s an entitled 30 year old and a pathetic piece of garbage. I could see it if he were physically/mentally incapable of working & his parents were supporting him because he had no possible means to support himself. But, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence here that he’s incapable of work - just that he’s afat, lazy piece of fucking shit.
My job is very stressful & I’ve been working there for years, but I obviously need to work to survive. And will need to work until I retire (and probably beyond that) - as do most people. So, I have no sympathy for entitled losers like this. In fact, when I see lazy scum-bags like this creep it makes me sick to my stomach.
Ready to toss millions of years of evolution to the side, eh? Human children are dependent a lot longer than those of other species, but I fear you might be taking things a bit too far. How is a child to become an adult if they never learn to fend for themselves? It’s bad enough today’s kids are under virtual house arrest until they go off to college, where many seem to have trouble coping with all these strange people they find there. These kids nowadays, (to coin an expression), never really experienced that Lord of the Flies cultural assimilation that happens among unsupervised kids at play. Instead, they’ve spent their lives in their rooms, or being carted by mom to the occasional “playdate”.
Moving out and paying your own bills, dealing with roommates, living with lovers, kicking out, or getting kicked out by either of the two, getting a job and holding it down because you have to, are all important learning experiences. Besides, no one wants to fuck at your parent’s house. I mean, maybe in high school, when your parents were out of town, but not if you plan to date other adults.
Don’t worry, you’ll still be responsible for them. Believe me, they’ll be showing up for handouts, free meals, and to use your washer and dryer for quite some time to come. But at least they’ll be learning to be independent. That ain’t gonna happen if they never leave the nest. I wouldn’t let ‘em stay very long after college. And ideally, they should go away to college to start the process.
Funny story - I grew up in LA. I got into UCLA with a full ride, and a Bay Area college, no Aid. My parents had a sweatshirt bought and my bags packed for Northern California before I finished reading the second acceptance letter.
Funny story–I grew up in North Jersey. For my sixteenth birthday, my Father got be a birthday card that had an inscription on the inside: “Get a job.”
Best birthday advice I ever got.
Mom also took me to the airport when I was leaving for college in AZ. It wasn’t to wish me goodbye–it was to make sure the door on the airplane closed and the plane took off.
One point that has barely been touched on is the adult child’s point of view: living with mom and dad is a recipe for insanity for some. We have lived with both sets of parents for a few months at a time as we searched for jobs or homes. We love our parents dearly, and love to visit them (something we can rarely afford to do) but live with them? I pray that we never have to for financial reasons. It is very likely that we will live very near, if not with, Mr. CK’s parents to help take care of them as they age, but there are few things I would enjoy less than living long-term in their house and sponge off them. I love them, but I don’t always like them.
Despite these events, yes, I do have a nice place for them. They’ll get bridge, bocce and canvas painting; not bingo, tiddlywinks, nor macaroni glued to construction paper. Ben Stiller will be nowhere in sight.
Tripler
With a little of their ‘tough love,’ I think I turned out alright.
My parents had the rule that you could stay as long as you like, but once you were out of high school you had to be either in school furthering your education or get a job and contribute to the household.
It worked out pretty good. We all moved out for college at 18, most of us bounced back for a couple months here or there (after I finished my first year of college I did the math and figured out I couldn’t cover my costs until the next term started so I was home for one summer until I moved out for good, one of my sisters started college, had some issue or other, then moved back home for a couple years before going back and finishing a degree, during which time she had a job, paid for her own car, kicked some money towards rent, did chores, etc.). It was nice to have the safety net, but honestly, whether you move out or not if you’re an adult you need to working or educating yourself (or both).
I’m going to go back to this coupled set of comments from early in the thread, because it’s the crux of the OP’s viewpoint. And I see that the OP has at least temporarily exited the discussion without answering some salient questions posed (what does the child do when the parents die prematurely, for example?). But I’d like to get back to this crux.
It seems that the underlying assumption society makes that the OP is not accepting is that life itself is a gift to be cherished. The OP notes that a human being doesn’t choose to be born. Rather, they are dragged unceremoniously into the world and, once there, forced to suffer existence and all that comes with it.* But that misses the essential viewpoint of most people on the Earth, that existing is preferential to non-existing. Given that the alternative is that you the person would not have existed at all, existing, being born, can only be seen as a positive. You may not have had a say in it, but you do obtain the benefit of that choice by your parents to procreate.
In light of this viewpoint, it would be hard to support the position of the OP. Parents bring children into existence for all sorts of reasons, some more well-thought-out than others. Having brought a child into being, the child owes the parents for the fact that his/her existence is the result of their moment of reproductive action. The reason is really irrelevant. If we were to view the parents as then having an open-ended responsibility to the child, based on the fact that they created that existence, we’d be denying the fundamental underlying assumption: that the child has already benefitted tremendously* by having been born. In short, you weren’t dragged into the world without consent; rather, you exist and owe your parents for the gift of having given you that existence.
However, our society DOES place on parents some obligations regarding their children. It’s instructive to see what the reasoning is, and to examine whether or not some arbitrary cut-off date is valid.
Living things exist to procreate. As Chairman Shen-ji Yang so pointedly notes,
If, as appears from another thread posited by the OP, the thrust of the argument is that parents shouldn’t be procreating, and the whole human race should just be allowed to die out, there’s not much one can do to argue with the OP, because that fundamental assumption is quite at odds with the raison d’être of life. But assuming that the OP accepts that procreation of humans is a good thing, then we must examine the claim about parental “responsibility to the child” in light of how it furthers the main purpose of life.
Humans have evolved to having a complex society. We aren’t just social animals, we’ve taken that trait and developed it to a set of well-thought-out rules about how we interact. The purpose of those rules, broadly, is to promote the interests of the group of humans as a whole. In many cases, promoting the interests of the group requires that we protect and develop the individuals in the group, since you can’t have a forest without the individual trees. So let’s examine what society has evolved to do about parental responsibility in relation to this rationale.
Before a complex society was developed, parents could simply abandon a child to the forces of nature. This could happen at birth (the child doesn’t smell right, or is crippled in some way, etc.). This could happen later. But the essential point is that the society in place didn’t insist that parents provide for children. Obviously, as society has evolved, that’s changed. The reasoning is simple: by putting on society the onus for ensuring that offspring reach the age they can themselves procreate, society ensures continuity (remember: the point of procreation is to create grand-children!). The most obvious grouping within society on which to place that onus is the parent (some societies place it on others, or on society more generally). Thus, in most modern societies, parents have the burden of seeing to it that their children reach adulthood adequately fed, clothed, housed and educated so that those children can enter society as adults (procreating society members) capable of themselves providing the proper support for their children.
And, yes, it’s a circular logic, but it’s rooted in the fundamental assumption: society exists to further the existence of the society.
So, then, it seems clear that the societal responsibility to a newborn brought into the society ends when that newborn is, or should be capable of properly caring for their own newborn children. In earlier times, that would have been much closer to the age of puberty, depending upon the society. Thus, for example, the quinceañera and the Satere-Mawe Bullet Ant Glove, ceremonies designed to designate the passage of a child to adulthood to accept the mission of procreating. In America, we tend to identify 18 as the age at which we believe most offspring should be able to properly fend for themselves in society. At that point, society removes the responsibility of raising the child from the parent, and places the responsibility of properly functioning in society on the child.
Could we do that at a later point? Yes. Must we? No.
In short, then, the OP fails to accept that life is a gift, for which the child is eternally indebted to the parent. Parents don’t have an indefinite obligation to their children to care for them, because society doesn’t accept the proposition that the child has somehow been unfairly forced to exist in the world as a result of the parents’ desire to procreate. But society furthers its existence by ensuring that children are brought up to be able to properly function and procreate in society, so society burdens itself with seeing to it that that happens. That burden in many (most?) societies is placed upon the parents primarily. That burden then ends when the offspring is, or in the view of society should be capable of properly existing in society and producing their own offspring.**
I agree with the OP that the dichotomy of “live or die” should not be accepted in addressing this point. Just because someone is alive and not happy to be alive doesn’t mean that their only viable option should be to terminate their life. If we were to accept the underlying theory that a child has no say in his/her birth, and is, thus, forced to accept the creation of their existence willy-nilly, that does not force us to accept as the only possible alternative that they end that existence if they are not happy with it. Indeed, society postulates endlessly that people who live a less-than-enjoyable life should NOT seek to terminate their existence for that reason.
** I would like to point out that, if we were to accept the postulation of the OP, society itself would have to be substantially re-worked. Assuming that the parents bear endless “responsibility” for having dragged the child into the world, and given that the existence of the parents for the life of the child is not only not guaranteed, but indeed generally unlikely, we would have to accept that society itself would bear that burden. That, in essence, turns society into the life-long guarantors of the happy existence of the members of society, providing their every reasonable need, etc. We’ve experienced some difficulties in adopting such societies in the past. :rolleyes:
I think there was a similar case in Germany. But in both cases I just wonder what sort of child-parent relationship it is, that ends in court with a demand for separation. And the idea of kicking kids out of the house at 18 is just too arbitrary. I certainly think that children have to make their own way in the world, and that means leaving your parents, for a while at least. I had to return home for about a year in mid-twenties after my first job fell part, but by the end of that year I just wanted to get out on my own again. The one point that seems to have been omitted in this discussion is that apparently many kids (in the USA, primarily) live at home because they cannot afford to move out, and this after graduating and maybe a job or two. No job; so what do you do? Just how hard-hearted can a parent be? And for how long? I don’t think there are hard and fast rules here.
It’s true that the immense majority of people are extremely averse to their own death. That doesn’t demonstrate that existence is a “gift.” Being extremely averse to our own deaths is simply how we’re wired.
What “benefit?” What have I gained from being born? We always exist in a deficient state, and we are always striving to get to 0, at best.
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Every single one of them selfish. Logically, a thing cannot be created for its own ends, but only for the ends of someone else.
So it’s sort of an implicit contract, where the child is emotionally manipulated and guilt tripped into fulfilling “their end,” of the bargain, despite having no say in the matter.
Is-ought fallacy.
This is incredibly barbaric, but somewhat understandable since there was no effective contraception.
If you are indebted to someone because of something they gave you, then it is not a gift. It is an imposition. If you receive a thing, and cannot easily get rid of it, it is not a gift, it is a burden.
These entitled, lazy pieces of garbage can go screw themselves. If I were their parents, I would be kicking their asses out on the street too. AND, ANYONE THAT THINKS THE PARENTS ARE IN THE WRONG HERE - IS PART OF THE PROBLEM!!!