Are parents too self-sacrificing? Or not self-sacrificing enough?

Individualism is a dead end

Credit: Disney

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I like to keep an eye on what the zeitgeist says about families because it influences decisions. Case in point: Here’s a recent advice column in which the writer says “everyone” told her “parenthood was relentless, exhausting, and thankless.” I heard the same type of things in the years before I had kids, and that influenced my decision to delay parenthood — which I now regret. Which is to say, the stories we tell about parenting matter.

But curiously, I’ve recently noticed two increasingly popular narratives about parenting out there right now that happen to completely contradict each other. The first of these narratives suggests parents sacrifice too much for their kids and should put themselves first. But the other narrative implies that parents are failing their kids and need to apologize for not giving up more.

These are very mixed messages, and they strike me as unproductive means for creating harmonious relationships because they prioritize the individual, not the group, above all else. Let’s take a look at what’s going on.

Parents as too self-sacrificing

The wildest example of this genre was published recently in the Sydney Morning Herald. The piece tells the story of a woman who had a brief flirty encounter with a man, decided he was her soulmate and abandoned her husband and two kids to pursue a new relationship — which the man apparently rejected.

The essay went viral and was widely mocked. Most people seemed baffled by the rashness of the woman’s decision. Which raises a question: Why would this writer voluntarily subject herself to worldwide ridicule?

There are probably a lot of good explanations but I think part of the reason is that the “I-abandoned-my-family-to-pursue-personal-fulfilment” is a growing genre that is treated with seriousness, and sometimes praise.

For example, here’s a piece from Slate about a woman who abandoned her kids and became a novelist. It’s an interesting piece that explores the complexity of the woman’s situation. But the writer of the Slate piece seems to imply that she began studying the woman because she imagined her as “a great advocate of freedom.” In the end it’s more complicated than that, but it’s interesting that the project began as an attempt to find a hero who sacrificed family for freedom.

This idea also came up in discussions about the recent movie The Lost Daughter, which tells the story of a woman who abandoned her kids for several years. It’s a complex movie that explores complex ideas, and much of the media coverage of the film was similarly complex. But The Atlantic’s favorable write up captured the mood of the conversation when it wrote that The Lost Daughter challenges “ideas about what women owe to their children—and to themselves.”

And that seems to be the overarching thesis¹: It’s time to consider the idea that parents owe more to themselves and less to their kids.

This is an interesting debate, and different parents are going to have different ideas about how much they owe to their kids. Personally, I don’t think parents should be putting themselves first. If you bring a life into the world it’s your job from that point on to take care of that person².

But whether or not all these examples are correct in their arguments isn’t the point of this post.

Instead, what’s exceedingly curious is that even while we as a society are complicating the idea that parents should put their kids first, we’re also fixated on stories in which parents have to apologize to their kids for not being sufficiently accommodating.

Parents as not self-sacrificing enough

Parental apologies have been a recurring theme in popular movies lately, to the point that Vox published an entire trend piece on “the millennial parental apology fantasy.” The piece focused on Everything Everywhere All at Once and Turning Red, but also mentioned Encanto and The Mitchells vs. the Machines. To that list I’d add Coco as well. And as Vox put it, these “are stories where the parent has to realize how badly they’ve treated their child.”

What strikes me as odd is that the parents in these stories aren’t really very bad by any conventional metric.

In Turning Red, for example, teenage protagonist Mei has an overbearing mom. Mei’s mom wants her to abandon an unusual superpower, but the mom’s motivation is to help Mei live a more normal and stable life. Mei’s mom might be misguided or wrong. But compare her to the examples in the stories above. She didn’t abandon Mei. She didn’t meet her soulmate and run away. She’s not a “great advocate of freedom” who left Mei behind. She’s basically a normal, if imperfect, mom who by any real-world standard would be considered a good parent.

This is true of Encanto too. The main conflict in Encanto is between Mirabel Madrigal and her overbearing grandmother, who is the matriarch of a multigenerational family. Mirabel is the only member of her family who doesn’t have a magical power, and the grandmother doesn’t handle that situation well. Mirabel is treated like a junior varsity member of the family.

But the grandmother is trying. She devoted her entire life to creating a stable situation for her family. Her sins against Mirabel weren’t made out of selfishness, but were rather tactical errors as she tried to hold the family together.

In any case, the thesis that starts to emerge from all of these movies (which I generally liked, by the way) is that even good parents haven’t done enough, or done the right things.

So what is it? What are parents supposed to do? Should they be focusing more on themselves, or sublimating their views in order to stop apparently traumatizing their kids? You can’t really have it both ways; how would Encanto have played out if 30 years before the story began Mirabel’s grandma jetted off to Eat, Pray, Love?

What both the “parental apology fantasy” and what I’ll call the “parental freedom fantasy” have in common is that they’re both arguments in favor of radical individualism. Depending on who gets to be the protagonist, either the kids or the parents on the periphery don’t really matter. Both fantasies are narratives about self-actualization, collateral damage be damned³.

But there is an alternative.

One of my favorite things I’ve read lately on this topic was Freddie deBoer’s response to Turning Red. He criticizes the movie for the way it treats Mei’s mom, and for suggesting that Mei’s journey of self-actualization means she doesn’t owe her parents much at all.

The simplest argument against a cultural fixation on the individual getting whatever they want is that it’s entirely unachievable. But the deeper and more important problem is that several thousand years of human progress has advanced in the direction of the common good rather than of the selfish individual. We owe each other things, and sometimes this means sacrificing our own wants and desires to support others. Like bending a little to satisfy the expectations of the woman who gave you life. If a dogged insistence that the individual’s wants are ultimately of less importance than the greater good of the whole is actually a part of Chinese culture, as suggested by this movie, I think that’s something worth defending, not treating like a cartoon villain.

So, the alternative is focusing on the group and whatever most benefits everyone. And it’s significant that all of the stories in this post are family tales. Maybe, then, the question we should be asking about parenthood isn’t whether parents are too or insufficiently self-sacrificing, but rather about which behaviors, pursuits, attitudes and journeys most benefit the group.

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Note: I’m experimenting a little with publishing on different days, which is why this went out on a Monday rather than a Friday. Also, I had previously mentioned I’d write one more time about childcare. That post is still coming.

Headlines to read this week:

New Report Confirms Most Working Parents Are Burned Out

“‘Parental burnout isn’t just going to end magically when the pandemic finally ends,’ said Bernadette Melnyk, dean of the College of Nursing at Ohio State and an author of the report. ‘The chronicity of the pandemic has taken a toll and depleted many parents’ coping reserves that will take time and patience to build up again.’”

Nothing Beautiful Survives the Culture War

“But where is the lobby for children, and who stands to benefit by making a fuss about the fact that they’re granted few rights in our society? Kids don’t vote or donate to campaigns, and concerned parents tend to be worried about their own children, not the interests of children as a disenfranchised and mostly helpless group of people. There really is no political force for them, though almost every party claims to champion their interests at one time or another.”

1. Here’s a Vanity Fair write up on several other recent movies that explore this theme. I want to be clear that I’m not criticizing the existence of these movies, and in fact I have not seen most of them. And either way, it’s fine to tell stories about protagonists with whom one disagrees; I enjoyed Breaking Bad, for example, but don’t condone Walter White’s behavior. My point is merely that the idea of parental freedom at the expense of children is having a moment right now. Not everyone is endorsing the idea, but there seems to be a growing willingness to wrestle with it.

2. While there’s clearly a double standard for men and women when it comes to being a parent, we typically call a man who walks away from his family a deadbeat. The goal should be fewer deadbeats of any gender. Taking a more accommodating view of parents who abandon their kids reminds of a Portlandia sketch in which anything is allowed, including serious crimes, as long as they’re committed by someone “living their truth.” It’s a joke, but that’s basically what we’re saying by championing both apology narratives and abandonment narratives. In other words, you need to apologize for being a bad (or, more often it seems, normal) parent, unless you did so in pursuit if self-actualization, in which case literally any behavior is justified.

3. And there surely will be collateral damage. The kids whose parents abandon them in the pursuit of freedom are, just a few years later, going to be the same kids looking for an apology for the way they were treated. And they’d probably be justified in asking for such an apology.