I love my kids to bits

[Sarover]

I often read on here that someone loves their kids to bits. As if that was a virtue. Or a celebrity can’t be all that bad because they love their kids. But everyone loves their kids. It’s a pretty easy thing to do. It doesn’t involve any discipline, virtue or skill. It’s just the basic minimum of parenthood and happens by default. I don’t get why people say this, as if it were some kind of defence, or even a boast.

The same goes for loving your partner. A friend of mine with an abusive alcoholic partner told me she put up with him because he loved her (and she him). Well yes, of course he loves her because she’s lovable. But loving someone isn’t enough.

It’s easy to love your kids or your partner. But you can also be a shitty awful parent and partner at the same time. In fact that’s really common. Love isn’t magic. It doesn’t make everything ok and it very, very often exists alongside negligence or worse.

Yes I often see that on celebrity interviews like “they have a daughter, whom they dote on”. I mean, does that really need saying?

I think people say it when they know they are underperforming to try and justify to themselves that they are doing ok really.

Yup. “How dare you call me a bad parent for doing cocaine at the weekends! I love my kids to bits thank you very much!”
And apparently everyone’s doing it so it’s ok now.

This is so true - my Mother would proclaim at every given moment how much she loved her kids but she was an awful person and an awful parent. Words not deeds.