this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Yeah, there's a totally inflexible cultural expectation of parents to be there for their kids no matter what, with no regard for bedrock emotional and psychological limitations or even common sense. Incidentally, I think this is why so many people are shocked and appalled when they become adults in the big bad world and discover that it isn't devoted to them. It's a tough gig for the best of us but if you've been brought up with an illusion of god-like figures who can unfailingly be summoned at all times to protect you from everything then I think adulthood is a wake-up call that probably never ends.
Ow, well that hits me right in the childhood hah.
I think it's important to note that this kind of parenting not only sucks once the kid reaches adulthood, but can be actively abusive to the kid as a form of control tied to an expectation of ownership. By being the one to meet every one of their child's needs, the parent can make that support very transactional and conditional in private. I'm thinking of a particular model of parenting common in rural Christian communities in the US, which is echoed in "parent's rights" rhetoric.
In that environment, not only is a parent expected to meet every single one of their child's needs, but a child is also expected to not have needs their parent can't meet in the moment. If they do, too bad, they don't and are really just being ungrateful of how hard their parent works to raise them already. Children are isolated from each other in highly car-centric communities where their only way of seeing another kid is by asking to be driven, which allows a parent to decide who their child interacts with. Boys are expected to be especially unemotional, so even things like suidicidality and SA are swept under the rug and the child has so few other people to bring that to other than their parents. Girls get their own flavor of emotional negligence that I can't speak to but I think few would be shocked at the themes of reproductive control inherent there.
As an adult this has all sorts of knock-on effects, one of which can be an overinflated sense of how much the outside world will serve them - but the reverse can be true at the same time, one can also learn that the outside world will never rise to meet their unmet needs, which makes relationships pretty difficult among other things. It can also lead to alexithymia as one learns to only feel how others expect them to feel.