TRANSCRIPT
What do children owe their parents? Adult children, children who have grown up, what do they owe their parents? But this might as well apply to young children when they’re still dependent on their parents because the answer is the same in both cases: nothing. Children don’t owe their parents anything.
When children are born, when children are created, when children grow up, when they take from their parents, they’re not taking out a loan. They don’t have to pay anything back. Everything they’re getting is free, is freely given, whether the parents think this way or not. And often the parents don’t think this way. Often parents—I’ve seen this, I lived it—parents look at their children as a personal investment. Now, in a way, children are an investment. In a way, they are the ultimate investment. But they’re an investment for themselves.
A parent gives to a child so that the child will have the best opportunity to grow, to become a self, to become a broad-minded, well-rounded person who can go forth into the world and be a wonderful human being. But they’re not an investment that’s going to come back necessarily to help the parent. And I really do think a lot of the world, a lot of parents, a lot of cultures, societies—my own included—don’t see children that way. They see children, well, maybe sort of as a kind of farm animal that you buy, that you put money into, that you feed, that you nurture, and give a barn and give safety to, so that it grows with the ultimate idea that it is going to become big and strong and work for you. And maybe someday, in a metaphorical way, you will even eat this creature.
And I think a lot of parents really live that way. They indoctrinate their children to think about their own selves that way. And many, many children—most children, in fact, to one degree or another, often in a very great degree—grow up thinking that they owe their parents a debt, that they feel guilty if they don’t live their lives for their parents. In a way, they think of their parents as parasites, something that they have to give to at the sacrifice of themselves. And I just don’t see the parent-child relationship that way, no matter how much it gets distorted by parents, by my own parents.
Now, just take a step back. When I originally formulated this video, it started in a different way. I wanted to ask the question: what do I now owe my parents? And I thought about it, and it was pretty simple to me: nothing. Except the thing that came to my mind, and maybe this is the only strange kind of exception to what I’m saying in general, because I think it applies to everyone. What do children owe their parents? What do I owe my parents? I think, in a strange way, I don’t just owe it to my parents, but I owe it to the whole world and primarily to myself.
I have a responsibility to be the best person I can possibly be, the most mature, emotionally mature person I can possibly be. I have a responsibility to grow. I have a responsibility to life, to heal my wounds, to heal the deficits in my personality that came from the neglects, the traumas of my childhood. I have a responsibility to fulfill my destiny. And in a strange kind of way, even though my parents harmed me in so many different ways on my path forward, by becoming the best person I can possibly be, being the best version of myself that I can possibly be, the most healed, healthy person, the most self-loving person, and by extension, loving of others kind of person, I honor my parents.
And is that a debt? Meaning, do I actually owe them? I don’t know. But maybe that is our debt, everyone’s debt to life, that we have this opportunity to be alive here and now. And hand in hand with that opportunity, with that gift, comes a responsibility. And maybe by being given that gift of life, there is a kind of debt. But I don’t think we specifically owe it to our parents. And so maybe still the answer is no, we don’t owe our parents specifically anything.
Certainly my parents don’t see me becoming the person I have become, a better person than they ever certainly intended to raise me to be. They don’t see this as any gift to them. They hate it, in fact. They’re threatened by it. They dislike it. They wish I could be much smaller, much more broken, much more lost and self-hating and conventional. Because if I were that way, I would fit into society’s mold of still, well, living to make them happy, living to plug up the holes in their personality, letting them feed off me, letting them feed off my soul, sacrificing myself and my growth to their denial, being in a way the parents that they never had. That’s what they wanted me to be in so many different ways. That was the idea that they put in me, that that was my debt: to love and nurture them in the ways that their parents failed to do because their parents were traumatized, and my parents were traumatized, and they wanted to keep this pattern going forever.
Much like, in general, I see is going on in most of the world, almost everywhere, in all culture, this is the norm. The job of the child is to love the parents in all the ways the parent was not loved. It’s a setup for failure. It’s a job that no child can succeed at. It’s an impossible job. It’s a debt that can never be fulfilled. It ruins the child along the way. It screws them up. But in a way, it creates a sort of logic that the next generation can then try to fulfill this impossible debt for their parents in the way that this child failed to do. And going all the way back throughout history, and it’s wrong. It’s incorrect. It doesn’t work fundamentally. Emotionally, it’s illogical. It helps explain why our world is so profoundly screwed up. And yet people still believe it. People still want to be the parent for their parent, and they still try.
And why do they do it? It’s because they still want to get loved. The little hurt, wounded part of me—parts of me that are still hidden in there, that the roots haven’t totally been plucked out of my soul by my grieving process—I am still, to some degree, an unfinished product of healing. Those parts of me still want my parents to love me. Those parts of me still feel, believe that I owe my parents something, such that I come up with questions in my head like, “What maybe do I owe my parents?” And then I think that’s when I come to say, “Oh, I think I’ll try to break this down and analyze it in a video,” because I know it’s my distorted thinking from my unresolved childhood wounds. And yet I felt it was worth it to open it up to more than just me because I do see this as a universal problem.
I remember at some point—I may have talked about this in a video—but I wanted to make a whole video: Are children slaves for their parents? And I think by and large the answer is yes. I think most parents look at their children as slaves, that the parents think they own their children. They think the children are there to live for them and work for them and make them happy, and that the children really are not free, independent beings who are supposed to grow up and leave and not have to look back if they don’t want to.
I was raised in some degree of this slavery. I think a lot of people got it a lot worse. I think the actual literal slavery—legal ownership of children and adults by other people, the slavery that we had in the United States of African-American people and other types of slavery that still go on around the world and well have gone on throughout history in humanity—I think this comes as a displacement of the fundamental psychological slavery of the average child in the average family.
And I think the reason why so many cultures around the world thought that slavery was a normal thing, and some people still think that slavery is okay and normal, is because their childhood was a childhood of slavery. They were slaves, and they now take slaves of their children. And in a way, they think if their children ever really want to be free, their…
Children have to buy their freedom from them. Their children owe them a debt and have to pay it off before they will ever become free. Except the little thing that they never acknowledge to anyone is the debt is too high to pay. They want their children to be there for them forever, until the day that they die. And because of this, writ large, this dynamic played out billions of times throughout our world now and throughout history. This is why our world is such a mess. People have it backward.
I think that we as a species and we as individuals will never get it right until we heal our traumas. We’ll get it more right as we heal our traumas more and more. I think it is happening more and more in the world. Parents are seeing their children more and more as independent entities, as owing them less. They’re getting the dynamic more correct as time goes on, but it’s happening slowly, very slowly, too slowly.
I think we’ve made such a mess of our world. And when will we figure this out? When will we solve this problem? Will we? Will we ever reach a tipping point when people heal more of their traumas than they don’t heal their traumas? I don’t know. These are the questions I have. What will the future be? This, in a way, keeps me curious, among other reasons to keep on living. I want to watch. I want to observe. I want to see what happens. How much more will I live? Twenty, thirty, forty years? What will happen in our future?
Oh, the idea of children becoming more free and parents waking up more and traumatizing their children less—that gives me hope. I really do hope for this more. Meanwhile, the work that I do is to keep healing myself more, strengthening my inner self, becoming more free, becoming more aware of how I don’t owe my parents anything. But I owe myself more strength, more courage, more fight to heal, to know my history, to know who I am, to grieve, to grow, and to share.