Sublime

treating our children, not as they are, but as we hoped they would become.

Procreation has long been viewed, particularly by those who come from wealth, as a form of temporal doubling, with the child sometimes given the same name as the father or mother, extending the parent’s legacy and fortune into the future (e.g., RFK Jr.).

Children are immense mysteries. The moment you start building them up, the moment you start creating patterns and characters around them, you are imprisoning them. They will never be able to forgive you. But this is the only way they will learn, and they will do the same thing to their children, and so on. Each generation goes on giving its

Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.

For example, the firstborn son is likely to carry what remains unresolved with the father, and the firstborn daughter is likely to carry what remains unresolved with the mother, though this is not always the case. The reverse can also be true. Later children in the family are likely to carry different aspects of their parents’ traumas, or elements

First this was merely the hope of bearing better ones, and then they recognized that however the children differed at birth, the real growth lay later—through education.

Introjected parents and parental figures, each with his or her own parent Adult and Child ego states. Identity and amount will differ per individual

Usually, the child sets out on a journey to earn love from others. They become enormously eager to please and cannot say no. They are frequent targets of abuse by others because they’re so desperate for approval and have no one to report abuse to.