Alternate take on that human universal: your parents had unprotected sex and fulfilled their obligation to raise the offspring produced to adulthood, this obliges you to nothing.
I'm not saying this means everyone should estrange their parents, but the idea that a child has any obligation to their parents for raising them seems misguided at best and damaging at worst, imo. Any attachment between children and parents should be due to mutual feelings of love and respect, like any other relationship - if those are absent on one side, why should the other suffer a relationship with people who they would otherwise remove from their friend group?
(Note that I have a good relationship with my parents, so this isn't coming from a place of personal pain, but rather a dislike for the idea that two humans procreating and fulfilling their obligation to the offspring that comes of it should impose any obligation whatsoever upon that offspring.)
EDIT: I should clarify that I do believe that parents who went above and beyond that obligation to show their children love and respect and receive nothing in return have a right to be upset - however, what about situations where a parent thought they were doing the right thing (based on how they were raised, religious briefs, parenting advice from a friend or magazine, etc.) but the thing they were doing was actually harmful? There's a lot of nuance in this, but I think that a blanket "honor thy father and thy mother [out of obligation]" is a bad idea.
Turns out that’s a bad way to structure a society and being hyper individualistic just ends up in your society collapsing.
The Black Death was pretty horrible and yet European society still exists.
The Black Plague is not even a cold compared to what we can engineer.
Really though I can’t imagine what you think this pedantic obsession with whether or not everyone gets blown up immediately is adding to the conversation.
We'd be 10 thousand not 10 billion and life would suck but we would survive. And the fallout would clear within a few decades or centuries.
10 000 people is not nearly enough for a modern division of labour - we'd be reverted back to prehistoric technology levels within a generation, with a bonus of fallout and absolute climate dysfunction. Given a sufficiently destructive nuclear exchange literally every single human could die.
"Societal cohesion" doesn't do too much to help us survive crop failures and wet bulb temperatures over 35C.
Aside from that, I think you might misunderstand your causal arrows a bit. It is fair more likely that massive industrialization and late state capitalism led to a society that valued the individual over the social unit, rather than that a sudden desire to be individuals sprung up in people's hearts and made a mess of the world.
All that where created by an individualistic approach. Party now and let future generations deal with the dirt.
How so? TFA attributes this modern alienation to changes in the American family structure that took place in the last half of the 20th century. All three of the threats the person you’re responding to listed, nuclear war, (modern) biological warfare, and climate change, were developed or essentially locked in in our society prior to the last half of the 20th century – largely by people born before or right around the end of the 19th century, who were presumably much more attuned to this “dutiful family obligation” mindset, since those are the very people TFA is contrasting these post-1950 changes against.
The plain history of these developments would seem to argue that post-1950 societal changes had nothing whatsoever to do with these threats, unless you’re arguing that the effect preceded the cause.
Let me guess: you are not a parent
The person you're responding to is referring to how societies worked since time immemorial, prior to the advent of such strong individualism.
One difference now is freely available contraception and a much lower birthrate, combined with more economic stability. (At least for the boomer gen.)
When parents have two children and both are estranged, it's a tragedy. When parents had ten children, five of them made it to adulthood, and two decided to leave, it was acceptable attrition.
The other difference is the absence of extended family and friends who can step in with childcare help. So parents + kids going through adolescence under the same roof becomes a pressure cooker. No one gets much of a break for 4-8 years.
Not everybody wants to share details, but I've heard enough stories from friends that I'm shocked what people are willing to forgive from their parents. I shared one story in another comment -- that person has a close relationship with their parents despite it not being a very positive one. Another friend of mine, who is queer, grew up with a father who would frequently say things like all gay people should be executed, they should be locked away from decent people, doctors should have let AIDs finish the job, etc. This person did cut off contact with their parents a couple of times but eventually heard sincere apologies and regret from their father and reconciled. That was almost twenty years ago, and now they speak lovingly of their parents and are helping care for them as their health declines.
Really it comes down to two questions: forgiveness and continuing harm. In my observation, adult children are not stingy with forgiveness for their parents. Not everybody can forgive everything, and it can take a while (I wouldn't bother asking until the kids are at least 25, maybe 30) but people forgive their parents for things they would never forgive anybody else for. They also tolerate a lot of continuing harm for the sake of maintaining the relationship. They draw a sharp line when it starts to affect their own children, directly or indirectly, and I think it's good for everyone that they do so.
I suspect this is because after becoming a parent, most people instinctively recognize the contract between generations: if you want your own kids to maintain a relationship with you in your old age, regardless of the inevitable mistakes you will make as a parent, you probably ought to give them a good example to follow.
In ancient Rome as far as the legal system was concerned, your children were your property. You could literally sell them into slavery, no questions asked[1]:
> The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject to patria potestas.
Also, your children's property was your property:
> Legally, any property acquired by individual family members (sons, daughters or slaves) was acquired for the family estate: the pater familias held sole rights to its disposal and sole responsibility for the consequences, including personal forfeiture of rights and property through debt.
Isn't that still the case today until the child is past the age of majority?
I'd talk more about the subject, but that's all I'm willing to say in my current state of (mostly) ignorance. The idea of one adult (Britney's Father) literally owning another adult's assets (Britney Spears's stuff) is still around, especially when combined with mental health + court cases of the modern life.
If you are absolutely unable to care for yourself and are in desperate need of help but there is no money to be made, you will probably find yourself living on the street in a major metropolitan area.
I spent years of my adulthood trying to find a way to reconcile with them and the conclusion I came to was it's not your burden to suffer for your parents' sins. They will change or won't change of their own volition. But you deserve to survive and thrive in kindness.
So much of ourselves is steeped in the company we keep. Choose the company that fosters the better, kinder, wiser you.
No sexual abuse or physical abuse in this story, but its pretty clear that he's healthier for leaving his parents.
IIRC, he's an only child as well. I'm not sure if he'll be willing to take care of his parents as they get older.
One challenge with abuse on all these fronts is that there is a huge amount of grey area in all of them, and judgement that would need to be drawn on what is and is not abuse. Sometimes/often it is REALLY clear cut (yeah, someone doing munchausen by proxy on their kids, or beating them, or whatever is clearly abuse).
Other times, you'll find a lot of controversy. There was a lot of discussion recently about parents getting cut off from their kids because of rabid Trump support. Is that abuse? From whom? There have also been stories of parents cutting off their kids because of their strongly anti-Trump views during the election. Is that abuse? From whom?
Mental abuse can be incredibly subtle, and a key component of many abusers is their ability to convince others around them that they totally aren't abusing anyone and it's that OTHER PERSONS fault.
Made even worse by the fact that sometimes the person being painted as the abuser IS NOT the abuser, and it really IS the other persons fault!
Sexual abuse and physical abuse can at least be generally judged somewhat accurately from a third party witness/video perspective.
"Clean up your crap" = "You can't make me, that's abuse, my dads a lawyer."
Is asking someone whose had maid service / cleaners to clean up their crap in a group situation abuse?
The other stuff is feeling "uncomfortable" or "unsafe" in situations where you are asked to take the most basic responsibilities (ie, turn in an educational assignment").
Kids will get a school counselor to excuse them from the work because it makes them feel "uncomfortable and stressed".
Asking someone to help clean is clearly not a misuse of power (e.g. abuse), but to an ill informed/molded individual, any request that they do something they don’t want to do (homework, chores, work, etc.) can ‘feel’ like abuse to them (subjectively), even though objectively it is not.
Most of our society is shifting to focusing on subjective well being over objective well being, so we get these confusing situations. (at least this framework helps me parse these issues).
Reality is underneath most kids are good. Get them out of the environment and if you can get peer pressure going the right way, they'll drop right into it. Seriously, their parents wouldn't recognize them (cooking, cleaning, being very physically active etc).
But early days can be a shock to the system. If you've been jetting to paris to shop on weekends, and then are being asked to eat a meal cooked by other kids (no meal choice at all - just one big something) and/or need to cook it, it can really feel like something way out of comfort zone.
None of my kids had this happen, but overseas the tolerance for foreigner bad behavior can be low in some cases if there is a perception of disrespect. Some of the rich kids in another group stole some liquor "as a joke". Hahaha. They were jailed and the locals squeezed cash out of parents before parents had to charter a flight to get them out (program required parents to pay repatriation expenses in these cases).
Only real downer culturally at times was treatment of women - the US kids are used to bikinis and the girls are used to agency / freedom as it should be. Locally dress / behavior etc can send a message that generates a metric ton of harassment - and it can be no holds barred even under age. Only thing I really disliked I think and female counselors doubly so - locals would sometimes not respect even the female counselor push back but need the guy to intervene. For trips that were in part about independence building a bummer. My sense over some time though was that this was changing though so by now I suspect probably much much better.
We did have all the paperwork in place of course. But what really works is actually peer pressure. I mean -> it's insane how powerful that is. Kids that age will do almost anything if it's the thing to do based on peer behavior. So you want to get the dynamic going and you are home free if you can.
People who abuse or neglect their children are often doing so because of their own mental illness or emotional instability and those issues are unlikely to resolve without outside help.
I'm in exactly the same boat. I'm the most hyperindividualist, detached-from-culture, atomized person I know, but my concept of filial (and familial) duty practically makes me an Old Country traditionalist compared to many of my friends.
> I can think of three acceptable reasons to estrange from parents: sexual abuse, severe physical abuse, and the parents disowning the child
I don't think my view is as concrete as this, as I don't want to confidently dismiss someone who claims that estrangement is necessary for their mental health. But I'm a little disturbed by the degree to which the current culture diminishes or occasionally entirely dismisses the existence of any familial obligation at all.
It is a bizarre to suppose that love is owed instead of earned or earned once instead of the result of ongoing effort. If you stop feeding your cat or watering your plant it dies same with your relationship.
I would venture to guess that the majority of estranged parents don't know this or in denial about having let the relationship die.
The article says that the majority of parental estrangement is due to divorce especially the non custodial father then successfully segues to some nonsense about identity politics.
I don't see it as a realignment of values so much as a more boring story about parents breaking up and becoming estranged spiced up with a minority becoming estranged because the values they hold are correctly deemed odious and hateful.
If you hate gay people and your kid is either gay or feels strongly about the issue they aren't going to want to be around you.
If you talk about shooting dirty liberals and your kid is a dirty liberal likewise.
If your own kid hates you the first thing you should do is ask yourself why and if you blame it on a lack of family values you are almost certainly the problem.
We both have good relationships with our kids I think you misunderstand why others don't.
I'm saying this as a child of single parent.
Meaning: for a number of children with an absentee parent, they were the reason for one of their parents to abandon the other.
This used to be nigh unto a human universal: your parents raise you up from a helpless infant to adulthood, and this obliges you to love and care for them for the rest of their lives.
I'm as deracinated Westerner as it comes, and yet I'm fairly traditional in this regard. I can think of three acceptable reasons to estrange from parents: sexual abuse, severe physical abuse, and the parents disowning the child. Even the second one leaves a lot of room for reconciliation, since they can't hurt you anymore.
I mean, easy for me to say, my parents easily earned a B+ and I was able to work out my teen angst with my father by my mid twenties. Still: casually abandoning "honor thy father and thy mother" doesn't seem to be working out very well for us.