"I Just Don't See The Love . . ."

“I just don’t see the love,” my son Jacob said after leaving one of our local supermarkets and on our way to the third and last grocery shopping stop of the day. Going grocery shopping together is a weekly routine for us and affords us plenty of good time to talk, discuss, philosophize and even listen to music.


I just don’t like the way in which many parents talk to their kids,” he said. “It feels so cold to me, almost as if they don’t really love them.”

Just a few hours later, I was having a little get-together at Starbucks with Noah, my oldest, who had just finished his shift at another local grocery store. Without prompting he launched into something quite similar to what his younger brother had observed earlier.

“I don’t know,” he said, “sometimes, it feels that the parents that come through the store don’t behave much different from their kids.

“For one,” he said revealing his ever-present aesthetic instinct, “they often wear things they really shouldn’t. Clothes that are too tight fitting, shirts with things printed on them that just aren’t right to show off as an adult.”

“They really look like their own kids, or worse,” he said, “and often they talk and argue like them too.”


So, the summary of my sons’ observations of parents is twofold:



a) Parents often don’t parent with love

b) Parents don’t parent with the kind of maturity we think they should have.



Let’s leave these observations for a moment and let’s ask ourselves a different, but I think, related question:


Why do we adults think that children should obey?

The answer to this question depends deeply on how we read the word “should.” If we read it in a moral sense then “should” means things like because it’s better for them, because adults are authority figures, because that’s the way the world works, and so on. However, if we look at “should” from a more naturalistic perspective, we understand that there really is no “should” in nature. Nature, instead provides us with “want.” Children want to obey and follow adults.

[The word “want” is interesting in this context as it connotates not only willfulness on the part of the child but also need. Just think of the expression that something is wanting. It means that something is missing or needed. When a child wants, something is missing]

Children, in other words, want to obey adults because they’re missing or in need of something. That something, in the most general terms, is guidance.

Guidance, however, as crucial as it is, presupposes something else, something that children already do. They do it from the moment they take their first breath outside the womb. Children press and push for independence. In this our children are no different from any other species. Some of them reach independence faster. Human off-spring definitely take the longest to reach independence and self-sufficiency. Guidance is what they want, i.e., what they are missing and what is needed, in order to reach this developmental goal.

So, back to the original question—why should children obey?—the answer is, apparently, because they need guidance on their way towards independence. So far so good.

Everything would be cleared up, if only we could say that children are willing to accept guidance when it is given. This is not the case and the reasons for this are not quite so readily discerned. It seems that another crucial element in this complex constellation is necessary for children to be obedient. This element is trust. A child may want, i.e., need, guidance to support his/her own journey towards independence and self-sufficiency, but she/he will not accept guidance from any adult who offers it (or believes he/she can provide it). It is, in other words, not enough to have the right answers or best solution for the problems our child encounters. In addition, we also need to have that child’s trust in order for him/her to accept or even listen to the solution we’re offering (to be sure, offering solutions is rarely a good idea, no matter how solid the trust, because the child will want to gather his/her own experiences rather than just following what he/she is told to do).

More forcefully put: while the child wants guidance to continue on his/her path towards independence, the parent wants the child’s trust to continue on his/her path towards successful parenting. Both parties, in other words, have something the other wants and the circumstances under which that something can be given are complex and not always easy to establish.



When a parent wants her child to trust her, but the child refuses, she may resort to a more base-level way of achieving “trust” and that is “obedience.” When I sit with parents who tell me their children are not obeying them, I know that they’re really saying my child does not trust me. That, however, is far more difficult to say because of its embarrassing and humiliating nature.



When a child wants his parents’ guidance, but the parent refuses or is unavailable to give such guidance, he may resort to rebellion, i.e., undirected guidance seeking. When I sit with a child who has been rebellious and insists on continuing on that path, I know that he is really saying there’s no one I know to trust. That is the depressing deep-down truth of child and teen rebellion.

This now, finally, brings me back to my sons’ observations; the apparent absence of love in many parent-child relationships and the depressing amount of immaturity on the part of the parents as they go about their parenting tasks. I will address this very complex issue in my next blog.

Love is the matrix of the parent-child relationship. Out of it can emerge an independent young human being as well as a successful parent. This matrix is set up as a differential between a more experienced and a less experienced human being. This differential is a kind of tension that is often experienced as a hunger or thirst (a want) by both parties.

You can see already that the love-matrix that constitutes the parent-child relationship is a relationship of strong mutual dependence. This dependence is the main reason why for both parties the stakes are tremendously high. Depending on how forthcoming each party has been with what the other party needs this dependency can cause great anxiety.

I think it cannot be overemphasized how important it is to see the parent-child relationship as one of mutual dependence. While it is probably obvious to most how children depend on their parents, it may be less clear why the inverse is also true: parents depend on their children!

Often parents like to use their dependence on their children as a way to reinforce their children’s commitment to do chores: “We need for you/depend on you to bring out the garbage.” “We need for you to keep your room clean.” Etc. The truth is that such statements tend to cheapen the kind of dependency parents have on their children, and . . . our children sense this!

So, why do parents need/depend on their children? Parents, I believe, depend on their children for a sense of love, accomplishment and confidence. We know this quite painfully when our children are angry at us, call us a name (or two) or bring home bad grades. These kinds of situations tend to shrink our confidence as parents (and, really, as human beings). A child that does not perform well conflicts with our own narcissistic view and needs as a parent. And because of this we often end up reacting with some kind of brute force (anger, pressure, time-outs, etc.), i.e., with immaturity and not with love.

What my sons are observing, apparently quite often, are parents who are threatened by their children and who are responding to that threat in cold or immature ways (including looking like their children, presumably to be more liked by them). Of course, most of these parents quite likely love their children. But something, viz. fear, gets in the way of that love. It interrupts loves mutuality and is replaced by a mutuality of anger and distrust.