Your Children Don’t Owe You For Being Born

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Nothing disturbs me more than a “food on the table, a roof over your head” ass parent, and I mean nothing. As a child, I knew the routine. Ask for something completely unrelated to food, clothing, or shelter, and be guilted about all of the above. My whole childhood was one big IOU. Simply being born as a direct result of my parent’s life decisions meant having to hear just how much of a financial burden I was and just how lucky I should’ve felt to have parents who provided the necessities.

I carried that pathology into parenting myself, often feeling my son was ungrateful for not recognizing all I did for him out of duty. But one day during a conversation with a friend who had been struggling to find joy in discovering that she would soon be having a child of her own, I realized our community had harbored so much on the obligatory side of parenting that we had likely missed out on the actual joys of it. None of which, unsurprisingly, had anything to do with food, clothing, or shelter, all things adults are obligated to maintain whether parents or not. It was a recreation of her parental dynamic my friend was having an aversion to, the indebted feeling that many children are made to feel when finances make it difficult for their parents to see them past their obligation to their most basic needs. But regardless of how parents see their legal and moral obligation to provide for the lives they create, no one owes you for fulfilling your parental obligations, especially not your children.

The concept of reciprocity is a beautiful one when applied within the appropriate terms. Romantic relationships, for example, are one kind of relationship where reciprocity is at the root of its survival. A business relationship is another dynamic that requires equal contributions from both sides. Children neither ask for nor contribute to their existences in our lives, we bring them into it. We figure out how to sustain them while they’re there, not the other way around. So where did the idea originate that children were tiny burdens who pop up unexpectedly to curve our summer plans and empty out wallets for 18 years straight? Well, much of what we know about parenting comes from the plantation.