Parenthood and old age

We’ve all heard the saying “Children are meant to be seen, not heard.” It was a slogan of sorts that summed up our older generations’ mindset around raising children. This mindset was born out of an understanding that the only needs children had were basic, such as food and shelter. Resource scarcity was a reality for many members of these generati

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Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix the broken person they so completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility to mend the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop

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A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. By its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor’s complexity and sadness—and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends, and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love. With infinite generos

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And that’s the first reason Winnicott gives for the mother’s “hatred” of the child: “the baby is not her own (mental) conception.” On the one hand that is what makes a child so genuinely amazing: their potential to surprise us with their development, their unfurling beyond what we know or could imagine. It is also what makes the child infuriating:

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