Altruism: the Ultimate Guilt Trip

[MysterionMuffles]

This is an interesting article someone posted on Facebook about the pitfalls of declaring and inflicting the guilt of altruism on children. A MUST read!

 

https://drhurd.com/56795-2/

 

 When you convey to a child that, “I did all this for you,” it sends that child a number of contradictory messages.

For one thing, “I’m doing all this for you” means that I – the parent – am doing this for your sake, not for mine. But why?

The mother in this example scraped and struggled for years, as a single parent in a third world country (Jamaica) to ensure that her kids were educated well.

If she did all this so that her children should have happy, functional and flourishing lives, then what does this convey to the child?

On the one hand, the mother is a self-sacrificer and this is supposed to be a good thing, something to cause admiration or pity for her (or both).

At the same time, the mother is obliged to live a life of self-sacrifice, while the sons are (hopefully) free to grow up and be all they can be, to live self-interested lives of personal fulfillment.

Why does the mother live by one moral standard, while the sons a different one?[/quote

 

[DaVinci]

I think most parents do things for their kids with the idea of getting "paid back" later in life. It's the "I spoon fed you as a baby, you spoon feed me as an elderly person" kind of thing. This is usually never actually discussed with the children, because then it would have to be brought up that the baby being spoon fed had no choice. 

 

I also think many parents have had this done to them by their parents and so they feel it is "fair" that their kids do the same. If they don't push their kids into this fairness fulfillment role it will mean they are the last person in their family to be treated like crap, and that is double unfair! 

[Will Torbald]

 

“I have given everything up for you.” That’s quite a load to place on someone; most especially, an emotionally and intellectually developing child.

 

So the parent in question should either lie about their sacrifice, or not sacrifice at all in the first place. Since they have already sacrificed, and the author is lamenting the revelation of their sacrifice to their children, then only lying is what is available in this case. Or the mother could have had the children, and then not sacrifice at all for them, and not give them any sort of quality education or food because that would be sacrifice. Or she should have aborted and ended the deal then. Or she should have not gotten pregnant twice in the first place. Or she could have - and inifinite regression of different outcomes from an infinite set of probabilities in the past.

 

Isn't that guilt justified, though? It's instantaneous. Someone does something for you, and you just feel it, the need to reciprocate. Otherwise we would call that sociopathy or any other sort of lack of empathy state. Is it really a guilt trip to tell your kids that you did things for them? Not rhetorical either, I am asking. Because the alternative is to say "I've done nothing for you! That job I gave up? I just wanted the free time. That career I didn't pursue? I wasn't good at it anyway" - the message intended to convey is "I love you, and that's why I spared time for you. Don't think that I don't care about you". To me it says more about the children when they heard “If after all I have sacrificed for my children at least one of them cannot retire me by the time I reach the age of fifty-two, then I have not done something right.” because it is true. What can a mother do that would make her children abandon her after taking care of them for their entire young lives? Even after they admit it "I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my mother" they still don't want to actually do anything in gratitude because it was a 'guilt trip'.

 

The real guilt crime would be if the father had come back and asked for retirement. That would have been a massive fail.

[AccuTron]

I recall from my childhood, observing that one generation after another was miserable so that the next generation was better off, but still miserable.  That made no sense to me.  There was no way to discuss this of course, not in a home where communication was rare, but it was a major influence on my development.  What was the point of anything?  Now, I can understand that not everyone might be like that, but back then it was sort of a given, it's source hard to pinpoint.

[mahayana]

I can't count how many times my mother lamented over how she sacrificed herself and carried me for nine long months. She would constantly remind me that she had to give up so much for me. She thought she was getting me to appreciate & respect her but it only increased my resentment towards her. It was very belittling and terrible for my self esteem.

 

Taking care of your children is not a sacrifice. Having children is a choice and prior to making that choice the parent has hopefully taken into consideration all of the responsibilities that will be required of them. To consider the necessary requirements of child rearing (having a job, giving up certain activities, caring & feeding of children, etc...) a sacrifice is completely absurd. Children don't ask to be born. They come into existence because of the parent's decision to have them. You can't demand appreciation from your children, you have to earn it.

[Mister Mister]

That's a very interesting topic, RJ.  Maternal guilt trips are very powerful and can be quite toxic.  But I don't know if "sacrificing for your kids" quite fits into the same category of altruism as other self-sacrificing behaviors, for two reasons: one is that your children are your responsibility, as you brought them into the world, the other is that it is perfectly in line with biological self-interest to want prosperity for your progeny.  The problem, I think, is when a parent claims they are owed something, because of what they gave up for their kids, which reveals duplicity.  If you just want your kids to be happy and prosperous, then that's all you should ask of them.  If you did stuff for your kids because you wanted stuff back from them in the future, don't pretend it was for some altruistic reason.

[J. D. Stembal]

I can't count how many times my mother lamented over how she sacrificed herself and carried me for nine long months. She would constantly remind me that she had to give up so much for me. She thought she was getting me to appreciate & respect her but it only increased my resentment towards her. It was very belittling and terrible for my self esteem.

 

Taking care of your children is not a sacrifice. Having children is a choice and prior to making that choice the parent has hopefully taken into consideration all of the responsibilities that will be required of them. To consider the necessary requirements of child rearing (having a job, giving up certain activities, caring & feeding of children, etc...) a sacrifice is completely absurd. Children don't ask to be born. They come into existence because of the parent's decision to have them. You can't demand appreciation from your children, you have to earn it.

 

What I find fascinating is that many parents cannot articulate why they wanted to have children. It takes a lot of ex-post facto justification to square the circle when the child is counting on you to raise them peacefully. We talk about parents making a choice before having offspring, but what ratio of parents are making a well-informed choice? Most appear to be throwing darts at a board in order to make this choice.

 

Kids? Yeah, seems like a good plan!

[Matthew Ed Moran]

I think you're drawing a false dichotomy here. You don't lie. You tell the truth about the fact that this was not "self-sacrifice" for the sake of your kids. This was pursuing your own goals and interests, which included having children and giving them the things/education/lifestyle you deemed paramount to other priorities: your career or free time or whatever. The parent is responsible for all these choices, examines all the trade-offs and opportunity costs, and makes decisions accordingly, including whether or not to have the child in the first place. Any "sacrifice" a parent makes is to his/her former self. If I "can't" go out with my friends or travel or buy a bigger house now, it's because who I was 10 years ago made that decision necessary, and now I am paying for the choices she made back then. I hope this makes sense. It was clearer in my brain.

 

Great post. I like the phrase "submitting" better than sacrificing in the last sense which you used it. You are submitting to the fact that you made choices in the past which obligate you into the future. I don't think you continue "paying" for your choices in the past, because what has be done cannot be undone whether you chose to "pay" or not. It is just that you will feel worse if you go out with your friends, or buy a bigger house, at the spite of fulfilling your moral obligations to your child. It is still not a sacrifice to do the right thing, because the alternatives are worse. Instead, it is for your own benefit that you do the right thing. If you didn't, then you'd be sacrificing your children for the sake of material pleasures, which I think is a worse sacrifice of the self that would be difficult if not impossible to reverse if done for long enough.