Parenthood is a gift of undeserved trust

An important experience I shared with friends in my generation was that we had to find our own paths. Our parents, given how fast the world was changing, did not only often struggle to support us on that search, they might even accidentally have gotten in the way. In the last months, it sometimes dawned on me that I am now on the opposite side of this experience. L is their own person, and yet she is shaped by the world we create around her, however quixotic it might be. The universe has thus gifted us an incredible amount of unconditional power. Parents can leave deep dark marks on the psyche of their children. There are social limits to that power, sure. Parents who do too many of the bad things can lose their child to foster care. Parents who do too few of the good things might lose their children to their own independence—and might one day find out that their not-so-little ones prefer spending time with a shrink to spending time with them directly. Despite these limits it’s important to find a stance towards that power.

One way to look at it comes from Spiderman, of all people: To acknowledge the responsibility that comes with it. That too can be daunting. Freud still haunts us with the idea that parents can instill dark desires in their innocent children’s subconsciousness. Modern psychoanalysts like Gabor Maté warn us that parents’ various big and small faults carve trauma deep into their children’s bodies. Following most developmental psychologists, I think such ideas take normal acts of parenting, and thus yourself, too important. When it comes to our children’s character, our influence mostly ends at our decision where to live. “You don’t pick the kind of person your child will be,” I hear these pragmatists say. “Nature would never have allowed one generation to have that much power over the next one.”

Hence, I think the best approach is to focus less on ourselves and more on our child. While the universe gifts us an incredible amount of power, it gifted our children an incredible amount of unconditional trust. It feels special in a time in which every interaction seems to have to prove its worth right away, when we often have to prove how interesting or smart or sexy we are just to share a dinner, sometimes even with friends. I think our children’s trust deserves to be earned. The best reason to want to have a good relationship with your children, then, to want care for their needs and help them be free and happy is that you want to live a good relationship while you have it, you want to enjoy their happiness moment by moment and day by day.

Power, responsibility, and trust carry a lot of gravitas. Yet, seeing them not as an obligation to be paid in the future, as something to be considered as part of your legacy, but as the strengths of a relationship that you already live day to day, they feel anything but heavy. When I’m lying on the blanket next to L, she sometimes complains when I don’t entertain her enough, sometimes I silently complain that I’m bored. And yet it is because of the trust and responsibility that we do it, that we will do it for hundreds of hours more. It’s through those hours that we deserve what we already have, even if we are just bored and present with each other.