TRANSCRIPT
From what I’ve observed, most parents are deluded about what their children really need. Even more so, they’re deluded about what rights their children actually have. And when I say deluded, what I mean is they are not even consciously aware of what their children’s needs and rights are and don’t have any clue about that. They think that they do know; they actually believe something that is contrary to reality.
This isn’t easy for me to talk about, but why do I talk about it? I often wonder, in 10 years or 20 years or 50 years or 100 years, what of my message from these videos will still be important? What will people still consider and think about? I think this message about how deluded parents are, deluded our societies are, our world is about the rights of children, I think this is going to be a key issue for the future. I think this knowing what the real rights of a child are, what the real responsibilities of a parent are, I think the future of humanity hinges on this.
This is probably why it’s so hard for me to talk about. I’ve actually made probably seven or eight drafts of a video like this over the past couple of years already, and they all end up in the scrap pile, mostly because I become so uncomfortable as I talk about it. I can’t maintain my focus, and I stumble over my words, and I get lost in irrelevancies when I talk about it because it’s so scary. Because when I talk about this, people don’t like it most of the time.
I have a lot of friends who are parents, people who I really like, but when it comes to their relationship with their children, I look at them and I think we do not share values. I look at the way they treat their children, even when they are talking about getting pregnant and having children. They say things like that just don’t make sense to me. They’re contrary to reality.
I hear people when they give their reasons for wanting to have children, and often, mostly, they’re very, very selfish reasons. Selfish for the parents. I want a child because it’ll make me happy, it’ll give me purpose, it’ll give me focus, it’ll give me something to think about, it’ll give me someone to pay attention to. Almost like it’s like they’re getting an enhanced kind of pet. I’m getting a super cat or a super dog. Or they’re thinking, I want to leave my legacy, or I want someone to carry my family name into the future, or I want to make sure I leave my mark on the world. And they’re not really thinking about the rights of their child. Or I say they’re not really thinking; most supposedly they’re not even thinking about that at all. Because if they did think about it, they wouldn’t have children. They would say, “Oh gosh, I’m not the right person to be doing this most holy and sacred of jobs.”
A lot of times, they don’t even want this job full time. I see people who they have a child for whatever little selfish reasons they have, but they have full plans as soon as possible to return to work and pay someone else to watch their child. Sometimes in extreme ways, I’ve lived with certain people in my travels who literally farm their kids out to strangers to look after their kid. Get this kid away from me! I want my kid around when I want it.
It really is kind of like a pet who may neglect. Like, I think I’ve talked about this before. In New York City, during the day, during the work days, in the building where I live or in other buildings, you can hear dogs whining and barking all day long because their owners are gone. And the owners don’t know about it, and they don’t care. All they know is when they get home, this dog is so excited to see them, and they say, “See, I’m a great dog owner. My dog loves me.” And you see videos like this on the internet, the person who goes away to fight in a war for a year or two, an American military person, and they come back, and their dog is so excited, and it’s such a wonderful bond. What they don’t show is the misery that this dog goes through for a year because it has been abandoned. Or the dogs here that go through the misery all day long, five days a week, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve hours a day when their owners are gone, and they have to hold their pee inside.
And it’s worse with children. Most parents, they betray their children so profoundly on an emotional level so often, but they’re not even aware of it because they literally are living in a delusion. And I think the reason is, I think I see it, I’ve observed it so many times. People aren’t in touch with what happened to them in their own childhoods. They’re not in touch with their own history of having been betrayed and abandoned by their own parents. They learned in their childhood that they weren’t allowed to feel those feelings. If they felt those feelings, if they felt their sadness and grief and anger and they expressed them to their parents, their parents would like them even less, would betray them, and did betray them even more. So these people learned it’s a good survival strategy to shut down, to block out your feelings.
And then when they become adults, they don’t connect with those feelings in their child. Some connect with it more, and sometimes I see that with a lot of people. They’re marginally better than their parents were when they are with their own child. They’re marginally better parents than how their parents were, and they focus on just that tiny little margin of improvement. And they say, “See, I’ve turned around the cycle. I’m a better parent. I give so much more love to my child or my children than my parents ever gave to me.” But really, all they’re focusing on is that marginal little difference, which is like the difference between being a five percent good parent and a five and a half percent good parent.
That’s how my parents were. They were marginally better parents than their own parents were, and they focused on that margin. And that margin gave them the little window into being deluded about how great they were, of being unable to really recognize the 95 ways in which they failed me terribly and betrayed me over and over again and abused me even. They didn’t want to hear about that, those the right of mind to not be betrayed, to not be abandoned, to be loved much more deeply and fully. That was something that was beyond their consciousness. It terrified them.
And I see that as so normal for parents. They don’t open the door into looking at actually the realistic degree of their quality as a parent. They don’t see actually how bad they are and how much they actually reject their child because they can’t. It’s just too painful. And so they literally go through their lives thinking that they’re great parents. I even hear some parents say, “Well, you don’t need to be a perfect parent in the world.” But secretly, they think they’re good enough that they might as well be perfect. And I hear them tell that word, “Oh, there’s such a thing as the good enough mother. You don’t even have to be perfect. All you have to be is good enough.”
And then if you go back and read Donald Winnicott, the guy who created the good enough mother concept, what, a good hundred or so years ago, he wrote that actually you shouldn’t be a perfect parent. You should only be good enough because if you’re too good, you’ll screw your kid up. You’ll teach them that the world is too perfect. You’ll make them soft and lazy and narcissistic. And it’s like it’s totally backward. The truth is children need a lot more love than 99.9 percent of parents give them. And I’m not talking the fake love of spoiling them, of making up for their parents’ deficiencies by giving them extra things and having no boundaries and giving them all the time on the television they want and all the fancy this is and that’s that they want because that’s not love. That’s just compensation for having failed them by giving them more failure in a different way. And a lot of parents don’t know the difference. They think giving all this extra stuff is giving them real love and spoiling.
Is love, but it’s not. It’s just more betrayal. It’s more, well, being deluded. And so when I think of the rights of a child, even the rights of an unborn child, it’s to have a parent who really is mature and healed. A parent who already knows how to love him or her own self, who has already gone through the process of working through his or her own childhood traumas and developing into a mature adult.
So many parents, most parents, are still just broken little children just underneath the surface. And they’re looking to their children to love them in the ways that their parents never did. That betrays the rights of the child. The child needs a parent who is not looking to the child to give him things. Actually, the child has a right to have a parent who knows how to altruistically give from a surplus. That is the right of a child.
The child also needs two parents who love each other and respect each other and are in a mature relationship. I know so many people who get pregnant—men, women, whatever—and they don’t really even love their partner that much. It’s just more of like a business transaction, or they see this person, “Well, we’ll provide certain things that will make my life as the other parent easier.” So therefore, we can raise a child in some marginally functional way. But there’s not a real deep passion. There’s not really commonly shared healthy values.
A lot of times, parents, even when they’re very screwed up, share values, but the values are so confused and mixed up that this is how they relate to each other. And what world is that for a child to come into? That is no net to hold a child as they grow and are nurtured.
Also, what about the simplest, most obvious things? It’s so sad, but even beyond emotional needs, emotional rights of the child, the child has a right to be born into a safe environment, a safe world where there’s enough food, there’s not war, there’s not danger, there’s not violence. So many people bring up their children, raise children, have children, get pregnant in worlds where this is everywhere. This is obvious, and it’s going to become a lot more so as time goes on. I believe that will be proven true in the coming decades.
More and more people are going to keep having children in spite of the world becoming more and more screwed up. And I see it now. It’s like people are still having children in a very screwed up world that’s becoming more screwed up. And what happens is their ability to delude themselves gets even bigger and further the more the world gets screwed up.
And so I see also, well, the child has a right to grow up in a world that’s becoming healthier, not becoming less healthier. A child has a right to grow up with nature, with nature around him. And we’re living in a world that’s becoming less and less natural. It’s becoming more artificial. I know so many children who not only do not have any knowledge really of nature, they are scared of nature because it goes against everything that they know in their sequestered, blocked little world.
What about also the right of a child to grow up with friends who also are growing up in healthy environments? I know some parents who are definitely more healthy than others, and yet when they raise their children, they know that there’s very few other healthy parents around. And so they’re raising their children in virtual emotional isolation from peers, and that’s not fair to a child.
So, also, children have a right to be raised in a place where they can become educated with peers in some sort of nurturing, individualized environment. And that is so rare. And I know so many parents, they don’t even think about these things. “Oh, I will deal with that someday when the child is older.” And yet that someday comes, and it becomes really devastating.
So I consider all these things, and I don’t know if I express them in the most coherent manner, but I recognize that it’s very difficult for all. I know this will be video number nine that goes in the scrap heap of talking about this most uncomfortable subject that I feel is most important.