"You don't owe your parents anything"

[climbingqueenie]

I've seen a lot of this sort of thing bandied around on TikTok and other social media and I wondered if it was the norm to think this these days. I'm obviously not talking about abusive parents- my Dad was emotionally abusive and I don't really have anything to do with him as an adult - but just in general, is it really wrong to expect a reciprocal relationship with your adult children? I spend time with my DM and help her out because I love her and she does the same for me. I'd be pretty gutted if my DC grew up and didn't want to see me or didn't consider my feelings or spoke to me rudely. My mum was by no means perfect but what parent is? She had her own traumas and flaws as we all do but essentially her heart is in the right place and she loves us all, and always showed it. So no I don't "owe" her anything but I appreciate her and I like to help her out.

I don't know, I just feel there is a lot of tendency these days to put all the blame for any problems you might have on your parents and it isn't very healthy. Is there anyone who parents in a perfect way that has no damaging effect whatsoever on their children? Surely we are all a little bit dysfunctional and that's just part of being human? To reiterate, I'm not talking about abuse. I just feel there is significant pressure on parents these days to centre their children's emotional wellbeing- as is obviously completely right- but also to display no thoughts or feelings or emotions of your own. I have a friend for example with a teenage DS who speaks to her like dirt - one time after he'd spoken to her particularly badly she cried and he told her to do that was emotionally manipulative.

Is that where we are? Do you have to just allow your children to say what they like to you and have no emotional response?

I'm genuinely interested in this because I know it has many layers of nuance.

I think some of this is coming out of the movement which seems related to the trans movement for people to reject their families and instead join a kind of internet community - it's a bit culty TBH and I get a bit twitchy when I see it because I don't think it's helpful.

That said, it is healthy not to feel beholden to parents. There are some unhealthy dynamics which have sometimes been around for decades and it's helpful to have voices saying hey, you can actually choose not to be a part of this. Kind of like how MN Relationships has a reputation for saying LTB to everyone - it's not really true, but it can seem that way sometimes because it runs counter to the cultural expectation that women should constantly be the glue holding relationships together.

No you do not owe your parents anything.

Did you ask to be born?
No
Did they do you a favour feeding and clothing you as a child?
No. That was their obligation as the people who chose to bring a child into the world.

If they did their job right, they raised you well and there is mutual love and respect.

In that case you will want to be there for them. You will love them and care about them and want to support them.

You will do things for them not because they are owed it but because they earned it.

I personally agree that kids don't owe their parents anything. Having kids is essentially a totally selfish act - they didn't ask to be born. When you have a kid you create a whole new person with a whole life to live. You can't know whether that life will be a good one or a not so good one. So of course, if it's a bad one, you are to blame for bringing them into this world in the first place. You forced them into this life.

(Yes, I have kids.)

This is a really interesting post and been helpful for me to read because I am one of those people you're referring to that genuinely don't believe I owe my parents anything. Like any other relationship, good feeling, love and loyalty is earned and my mum in particular hasn't earned that from me.

She had had several marriages and always put whichever man she's been with firmly ahead of her children, even watching as one husband scapegoated her son (my DB) at 15 and threw him bodily out of the house despite him having nowhere to go. She then didn't speak to DB for best part of 2 years afterwards.

I have tried repeatedly to build a relationship with her but after my maternal grandmother died she stole mine and DBs inheritance (not much, but not the point) to pay towards new house with new husband. Lied about it and tried to cause a rift between us.

I still tried to reach out to her periodically but after I'd text her following a serious operation she didn't even bother to reply to me.

Doesn't bother with either my or DBs children, no effort to contact anyone, no cards, no birthday or Christmas phonecalls. Nothing.

Do I owe her anything. No. Do I blame her for any troubles I have had in my life. Also no, i dare say her own difficult childhood and bad relationship she had with her own parents accounts for some, if not all of her behaviour but I don't have time for people who don't value me and mine and would actively seek to do us harm. I don't feel bad about it.

Thing is, we may not have been asked to be open, but our parents didn’t ask either. They made the best life for themselves they could and that often means - like we do - having children.

Do you think this is always the case though? And that if an adult child is an arsehole it's because they were badly parented?

In the case of my SIL and her brother, there are four of them altogether and only one is rude, arrogant, misogynist and selfish.

With respect, that sounds to me like your mother was abusive and therefore you are most definitely not who I was referring to. I don't speak to my Dad for similar reasons.

Depends IMO what you mean by ‘owing’.
Dh and I have always had a very good relationship with long grown up dds, but would certainly never expect (or want) them to look after us in old age, if such care is ever needed.

A normal, friendly relationship is a different matter. When there’s been no apparent reason for adult dcs distancing themselves, being inconsiderate/rude or selfish, etc. it’s just very sad.

I don't know, was she abusive? If anything I would describe her as terminally disinterested. It has taken me 8 years to get my head around the fact that I can want a relationship with her as much as I want but ultimately you can't force someone to love and value you. I was able to move on mentally once that penny had dropped!

I think there's a lot of truth in what you're saying, especially your second point about people's tendency to trace all of their issues back to their childhood and blame their parents for them.

It seems like it's every last thing these days and people expect perfection from parents and for them to predict every potential outcome of every single minuscule thing. In reality I think for the average person this is just life. Parents are just people, not robots with the perfect algorithm for the ideal upbringing. What they do might influence how you grow up but this is just something we all need to deal with.

YY to this movement and it affects the whole LGBT community from what I understand. My friend - let’s call her Mandy - is a lesbian and came out to her parents aged 20. They weren’t over the moon instantly - it was the early 00’s and I think there was still a stigma around it - but they didn’t kick her out or anything extreme. It was a shock to them and it took them a while to get their heads around. Possibly because her older sister is also gay and there are no other children so I think they were thinking how grandchildren possibly may never happen .

Anyway, everyone got over it, and they are all close and Mandy recently married her girlfriend. Her girlfriend’s parents are strict Catholics so they DID effectively disown her so didn’t come to the wedding. Mandy’s mum gave Mandy away and her dad gave her fiancée away at the wedding. It was a very powerful, touching moment that showed how much they loved their daughter and their DIL, and how their happiness meant a lot to them. Everyone was in tears!

But 3 years ago, before Mandy met her lovely wife, she dated a woman who was a few years younger and frequented the LGBT groups and cafes (something my friend had never really done) and they started to go together. She told me a huge reason for their breakup was that her girlfriend was indoctrinated into these clubs where other people told Mandy that it’s disgraceful that her parents weren’t immediately accepting and that she should ‘go NC’ because her parents are homophobic and toxic. Mandy kind of said “well no they’re not they just got a shock and took a while to come to terms with it” to be told she’s not an ally because she’s supporting homophobia 🙄 she said it was scary just how cult-like these circles are. And she was right not to listen to them.

I suppose the point I was making was that some people have excellent reasons for not maintaining a relationship with their parents and its not just because they are looking for a reason to act the martyr on social media.

We need to stop making people feel bad for making decisions which protect their mental health. We genuinely don't owe anyone happiness at the expense of our own.

Broadly speaking yes. I do believe you get out what you put in.

Of course there are always exceptions. We are all a product of an environment wider than our parents. Also personality disorders are real.

Additionally I think we should not fool ourselves that parents always treat all their children the same. There's a reason golden child/scapegoat is a thing.

Children born in the same family can have hugely different childhoods and as a result grow up to be very different. They can experience things inside and outside the family unit that affect them in different ways. You don't even need to go outside Mumsnet to know that!

Finally, children don't come with a manual. None of us can ever truly know how good a job we've done until our children are grown. Maybe we did ok. Maybe we were fab. Maybe we were shit. Maybe we made lots of tiny mistakes. Maybe we made one gigantic fucking mistake that screwed our child up for life and we couldn't even realise at the time because we were also screwed up. Etc etc.

I know I made mistakes. I made one gigantic error of judgement that has had a horrific effect on one of my sons that I am still trying to help him overcome and he's 21.

I don't hold my view because I think I'm perfect. I hold it because I know damn well I'm not and I know how badly you can screw your child up. Even if you didn't screw up your other one.

I dunno, I often feel like I owe my young DC happiness at the total expense of my own 😅

Exactly that, Lydia. People's reactions are not always perfect, that doesn't mean they are homophobic (or transphobic or whatever) however they probably have grown up in a homophobic/transphobic (and I mean actual transphobia, not just using the wrong buzzword) culture, we all have internalised misogyny, homophobia, racism, classism etc and moving through those biases and reaching a new understanding is a process which takes time.

It's fair to protect yourself if you're struggling with family reactions to something like this, by reducing contact if you need to, but advice to actually cut people off because they haven't gone through that process yet is not healthy or helpful to anybody.

In my case, I actually persevered with my parents for years after I moved out, despite them being completely hopeless, neglectful parents for most of my childhood. My Father's ineptitude was down to his addiction issues, but aside from that he was a decent enough person, especially after he became teetotal. My Mother on the other hand is narcissistic, thoughtless, cold, vindictive, uncaring, mean, completely lacking in any self-awareness, and totally oblivious to her own callous and hurtful behaviours.

I kept in touch with irregular phone calls etc, more out of civility to my father than anything else, but in the 30 years after I left 'home' my mother never once lifted the phone, never once visited or attempted to arrange a visit, so it was always quite clear to me that no matter how she might describe our lack of a relationship to other people, she simply didn't care enough to make any effort.

My father passed away a few years ago, and since then my mother's behaviours have just confirmed for me that everything I always thought about her is true. Throughout Covid I did my level best to stay in touch with her, offered to go and physically support her on several occasions, all of which were rebuffed or met with no response at all, and then afterwards she had the nerve to tell me that I 'clearly didn't give a shit' because we'd been having a short convo over a messaging app and I had not started it by enquiring after her health.

So if a woman who paid no attention whatsoever to her own child, and made no effort whatsoever to get in touch over a 30 year period can turn around and claim that the child 'doesn't give a shit'...

It wasn't the neglectful parenting that did it for me, as I said, I made an effort, it's the fact that my mother still carries on in the exact same way that has led me to realise that there's no point in bothering to be civil. I get nothing in return, and my life is happier and less of a pain without her in it at all, so I am absolutely no contact with her now and would rebuff any attempt whatsoever from her to make contact.

I'm totally onboard with 'kids owe their parents nothing'. People don't get to choose their parents or family, so the idea that they owe a debt to them purely because they are related by birth is a nonsense. If my mother had behaved in a normal human manner I the years since I moved out, I suspect we probably could have buried the hatchet and formed some sort of relationship as adults, but quite simply, she's not the sort of person I'd spend any time around if we weren't related, and in fact, she's so abrasive that she was any other person I'd met in other circumstances I'd have known after five minutes I never wanted to meet her again if it could be helped.

So you had an abusive mother. So again you are not the type of person I was referring to.

I guess the word "owe" can have different meanings. I see it often used in abusive situations where someone is staying in a toxic relationship because they don't think they're allowed out.

I do think some online groups can promote distancing young people from their parents when often the parents aren't bad people. It's so those groups can have more control over those young people. It seems strong in groups which don't accept other viewpoints, so religious groups and trans groups as examples.

I do think that community and family are important and that it's a bad idea to be so focused on yourself. Actually helping others is beneficial. Being self-obsessed isn't.

Well yes, that's a little different - and as a parent of young children who depend and rely on me for everything I feel the same!

But I am nearly 40 and my DM is 60, we are adults and she hasn't shown me the love and loyalty that you would expect from mother to child, even when I was the young one, totally reliant on her. She hasn't earned anything from me.

I agree really. I don't think my child owes me anything. Unless something goes horribly wrong though we have a relationship that means she would not just abandon me but care for me in old age just as will be modelled to her via me caring for my parents and us caring for my husband's parents (as far as possible).

This type of thing is modelled in families. Look at Asian cultures, they live with older generations until they die. You can easily model that in your family or not and children will be influenced accordingly.

No, but you asked what else would cause people to cease contact with their parents, and in my case, it wasn't the abuse, that stopped 30'odd years ago, it was the lack of reciprocated effort.

I spend time with my DM and help her out because I love her and she does the same for me.

There's your answer. If you have a child and they don't feel that way about you, either they have some sort of psychological dysfunction or (more commonly) you just didn't do an adequate job as a parent, even with all of the social and biological factors which actively encourage a child to bind emotionally to their parents (for better or for worse).

People bring children into existence for their own sake and the child gets no real say in the matter, so I do think it's right to say that children don't OWE their parents anything.

You don't OWE your parents anything but a loving parent-child relationship normally results in voluntary help and support in both directions.

There are obvious exceptions, offspring may travel for work, or emigrate with a partner. They may have the kind of job or family that does not allow for popping round on a weekly basis.

I rang my dm weekly. I took her for her annual Xmas shopping trip to Knightsbridge (my idea of 10 hours hell). I helped her with tax paperwork and paid her gas bill. Occasionally had her to stay. But I travelled abroad most weeks with work and so nipping round to do her shopping was never going to happen. I didn't share everything with her because my world and hers were so different, she couldn't understand my motivations. All she wanted was for me to marry a nice boy and have babies 😕

My DS is 14. I expect him to leave in the next 5-10 years. I don't expect him to live nearby, he will have his own life and his own priorities. He is free to leave, as I was. We get on well, although there is still time for that to change. I hope he stays in contact. I will continue to help him where I can. He is just starting to carry shopping for me and open doors. I don't expect it but it's nice. He hates Tiktok 😊

I don't think my SIL's brother has a psychological disorder, and I don't think their parents did an inadequate job, I think he's just a selfish arsehole. Sometimes people just are for no real reason.

I have a child with MH problems too, which are blamed on me. I never see her. She will sometimes answer emails. My other 3 children reassure me, as does my ex, that this is the illness talking, and they all have very different memories of what life was like for her as a child,,,, they refer to her as the favourite, I used to get very distressed, and try to make things right. Now I just accept I can do nothing, I send money and cards at Birthdays and Christmas, and hear nothing back. I do the same for her children as I have no idea of their needs or interests, and never hear from them either. It's hurtful and sad.
I'm sure you and I are not alone in this.