I saw the title quote in the thread about gay kids. I’ve often wondered about it.
Me, I’m not a parent, but I’m 100% certain that if I had kids and they turned out to be gay, lesbian, bi, trans, etc., I wouldn’t have a problem with it. In fact, the way I’d raise them, I’d be disappointed if they didn’t tell me as soon as they knew. I’d want my kids to be happy and find love, regardless of whether it’s a same- or different-sex partner, or even good friends, and I would welcome these partners/friends into the family.
However, I’ve often wrestled with that statement (“I’d love you no matter what”) with regard to other things. What if my kid turned out to be a cruel bully? What if he or she killed or raped someone? What if they were a pedophile who actively preyed on kids? What if they were a drug addict who refused to get help and kept asking for handouts (or robbed your house?) What if they ended up as a violent racist, misogynist, or homophobe? I know many times problems like this are as a result of the way the kid is raised, but sometimes there are just "bad seeds’ who end up going wrong even with a normal upbringing.
I honestly don’t know my answer to this question. I’ve never been an “unconditional love” kind of person–you don’t exactly have to earn my love, but I also don’t consider that just because someone’s family, you’re obligated to love them and keep giving them chances.
So what say you, Dopers? Do I just not understand because I’m not a parent and never experienced the depth of feeling parents have for their children? Or are there things you wouldn’t give your kids a pass for?
I personally define love as “When the other person’s well-being is essential to your own.” When they’re unhappy, you’re unhappy. When they’re not doing well, you worry and feel emotional pain. That sort of thing.
(There’s an upside: The hitching together of statuses often means that when they’re doing well and you’re reminded of it it can give you a buzz. If you’re in frequent contact with them, then yay!)
Based on this, I can easily see a situation where the person breaks you - you just don’t have the energy to care anymore.
However I too am not a parent, so I can’t specifically speak about the resilience of parental love. Maybe it’s immune.
I’ll always love my daughter. Of course she may do bad things. Hell, it’s possible at some point I won’t LIKE her. Many, many parents I know have gone through a time - especially in the teen years - when they didn’t LIKE their kids. But they love them.
Infovore, I honestly think that your guess that you do not understand because you are not a parent is essentially right.
“Love” is a rather inadequate word in English because we ask it to cover a lot of things. The Greeks were right; they had many words for different kinds of love. I love my wife, my child, my dog, my best friend, and my sister, but those emotions really aren’t the same at all; indeed, the love I have for my wife today is simply not the same emotion as the love I had for the exact same woman six months after we met. The love I feel, and that most parents feel, for their child is not the same as the love a person has for their Mom or a friend or a lover or a cat.
Someone once posted here than when her child was born, she whispered in her baby’s ear, “I would die for you.”
I certainly wasn’t expecting the intensity of feelings that I had.
My brother is crazy and abusive. I had to walk away and block his email address, then his new one, then the next one, the one after that, and that, etc., etc. My mother had a much, much more difficult time with setting boundaries.
I have no idea what I’d do if one of my kids turned out to be a real monster instead of just your typical kid who can drive you crazy at times, but you still love any way.
But in my family (not me and my kids, but my parents and aunts and cousins), it’s not “I don’t have the energy to care anymore”, it’s more “I don’t have the time/energy/money to do anything to help them anymore” and they just give up. The loving and caring doesn’t go away, it just makes knowing you can’t do anything harder.
It is possible to love from afar. You can continue to love a toxic sibling, without engaging with them.
Even if your child is in prison for a horrific act, it is possible to still have love and compassion for them. It’s not the same as endorsing their behaviour.
I do think it’s possible. Not for everyone. And not a requirement or even expectation, but certainly a possibility.
I don’t think unconditional love is a good thing, even if it does exist. It’s not good for one’s own emotional (or sometimes physical) health to keep on loving their abuser, even the abuser is their own child.
I don’t think it’s a positive thing to keep loving an unrepentant user, abuser, rapist, or murderer even if that person is your child. A lot of people disagree with me there, though.
I think you can love someone and not give them a pass. If my kid committed horrific crimes, I’d want him to stand trial and be convicted. But I would most likely visit him in prison.
I’m just guessing, since I am luckily no where near being in that kind of situation. But I suspect I would recognize that my love was more for the memory of my hopes and dreams for the child I bore, rather than for the actual monster in front of me. But out of respect for who my child could have been, I would give comfort to the child who really was. I certainly wouldn’t help them escape from prison or anything like that, though.
ETA: Meant to say that if this theme interests you, you might want to watch the film “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”
Well, yeah. I thought about qualifying my remarks to note that the “unconditional love” from a parent assumes a healthy relationship, and there are plenty that aren’t. In the interests of brevity and not stating the obvious, I didn’t.
But now that you mention it…sure, of course there are relationships (or non-relationships) where parents don’t love their children at all, much less unconditionally. Still, those of us parents - the vast majority, I think - who feel that absolutely dazzling, life-changing, overwhelming connection to our children would agree that it’s an awe-inspiring, unexpected (even if you thought you expected it), enriching, and *completely normal *response to becoming a parent.
Or make yourself love them, if it just doesn’t happen. Not all parents love their children.
IANAParent but I’m a co-parent; I can tell you that the things my brothers, nephews or younger cousins would have to do before I stopped being willing to drop anything to help them would have to be really big. I’m also always in a bit of a “parent” mode when they ask for something: I’m willing to drop anything for them, but now as back then they have to justify it. Makes 1.Bro’s attempts at fathering me particularly irritating :p, I’ve been known to remind him that “it was ME who changed YOUR diapers, mister.”
Being a parent - I do think this quote is true. For me it doesn’t really matter what is their sexual orientation as long as it makes them happy, it doesn’t put them to a bad situations, and it helps them live their live to the fullest. It might be difficult at first but no matter what happens, I’ll still love them. A lot actually changed when I had them. I think they helped me become more mature.
Add another to the folk who consider parental (or filial) love to be a VERY strong presumption, yet one which IS rebuttable, in extreme circumstances.
You owe your minor kids approximately 18 unconditional years - w/ few exceptions. Just about ANY transgression can be overcome. After that, tho, there is SOME requirement of at least minimal reciprocity. And continued, willful, extreme transgressions can rebut the presumption.
Yes, in many situations I would gladly die if that would somehow save my kids. But that doesn’t mean I would allow them to steal the overall quality of my life for no good reason.
Note - all of this presumes some measure of physical/mental/emotional competence on behalf of both parties.
I can say that it is true that something might make me stop loving my kids, but I can’t feel it.
Partly because, if I didn’t love my kids, I wouldn’t be me. And I don’t know what it would be like to not be me. And also because I cannot imagine my kids doing anything that bad either.
This. I always knew I wanted children, but the intensity of the feelings I have for the Firebug still floors me.
No, there is nothing in this world that could stop me from loving that kid. That doesn’t mean I pretend that he’s anything he’s not: after over a decade of raising him, I’ve got a great deal of insight into both his gifts and abilities, and his weaknesses and faults.
But they’re irrelevant to whether I love him. I don’t love him because of his gifts, or in spite of his faults. I just love him, period.
And even if he somehow turned into some snarling evil monstrosity, I would still know that the boy I love now is still a part of him. If he committed horrible crimes, I would want him locked up. And I would visit as often as I could, in the hopes that he could still be reached, even though what he’d done, what he had turned into, would rip me apart inside.
When my daughter was young, one of her friends did something pretty awful. We were discussing the situation and how my daughter felt about it, when she asked me if I’d still love her if she did anything bad. I told her I’d always love her, but sometimes I worried that she wouldn’t love me anymore if I did something bad. She assured me she would.