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Yes, but for many of us in the West, without the tradition common to East and South Asians of reciprocal obligation. This used to be nigh unto a human universa

Yes, but for many of us in the West, without the tradition common to East and South Asians of reciprocal obligation. 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.

tolbish 5y ago
But mental/emotional abuse and neglect are perfectly fine? Those can be just as irreparably damaging as physical abuse.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  This is what caused me to cut the cord with my parents. My father is a massive criminal, got himself into prison for a large part of my formative years, never said I love you. Mother is untreated borderline, was emotionally abusive my entire life. 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.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Ex: I have a (former) coworker who told me his life story. He's homosexual and his parents sent him multiple times to gay conversion therapy. Learning to accept himself for who he is required him to leave his parents: because they would not accept a homosexual child. 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.
- lazide 5y ago
  Considering the posters background, they may have just not taken it into account. 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.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    If you've ever worked as a camp counselor for rich kids - the term abuse can work out as follows: "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".
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      This is an interesting example of subjective versus objective well being. 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).
mullingitover 5y ago
> 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. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias#Children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias#Children
- thereare5lights 5y ago
  > Also, your children's property was your property: Isn't that still the case today until the child is past the age of majority? Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v10DWClP7NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v10DWClP7NA
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    Britney Spears is probably the more important example of that...
    - thereare5lights 5y ago
      Explain
      - dragontamer 5y ago
        I don't fully understand the legal issues myself. But it appears that when Brittney Spears was put into a mental ward in 2008, her father + lawyer was granted "Conservatorship" and therefore was placed in charge of Britney Spears and all of her assets. There's a court case going on right now about whether or not this conservatorship should end. 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.
jdavis703 5y ago
What about people raised by single parents? What do they owe to the absentee parent?
- bostik 5y ago
  An apology?
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    You might be confusing the question. A child does not have to apologize to a parent that left before they were born.
    - bostik 5y ago
      Sadly, I wasn't confusing it. The world is cruel, and a non-zero fraction of absentee parents became so because of the child in question. Meaning: for a number of children with an absentee parent, they were the reason for one of their parents to abandon the other.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        Isn’t this ignoring consent? The child had no choice in whether to be conceived; at least one of the parents did :)
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  Knocked out teeth.
- scotty79 5y ago
  Gratitude for removing him/herself from your life and saving you all the drama that would inevitably end up happening. I'm saying this as a child of single parent.
shadowoflight 5y ago
> 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. 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.
- thereare5lights 5y ago
  This is the individualistic take. The person you're responding to is referring to how societies worked since time immemorial, prior to the advent of such strong individualism.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    You'll have to go back a very long way to find stable families that didn't have children leaving because they were bored, ambitious, abused, angry, or - in royal families - literally wanted to kill either or both of their parents and perhaps also their siblings so they could take over. 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.
michaelmrose 5y ago
Why would someone giving birth to you oblige one to forgive severe physical abuse merely because you are too big to beat up at this point? 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.
0xB31B1B 5y ago
I think you presuppose that the abuse is in the past and not the present. My dad actively emotionally abused me, regularly insulted my wife, and tried to destroy my relationship with my mother. By necessity he made it a choice between a relationship with him and a relationship with my mom. My estrangement wasn't about something I remembered, it was about him being terrible to me when I was 25 and didn't need him for support or money anymore.
dkarl 5y ago
Reciprocal obligation is the key. I've heard people spin it so that children owe their parents an infinite debt that justifies anything, but that is not reciprocity. Reciprocity means equivalent behavior on both sides. People get a chance as adults to discuss what happened in their households as children, and some people find out that their stories are radically outside the norm. Usually all they want is some acknowledgment from their parents that mistakes were made and it wasn't ideal. Denial and justification are the things that trigger estrangement. Or continued exploitation: people who cared for their drug-addicted or otherwise needy parents for years starting in childhood and decide that however much their parents still need them, they have to separate themselves from that pathology so they can have their own healthy life. 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.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  > people forgive their parents for things they would never forgive anybody else for 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.
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
This view seems predicated on the idea that people who estrange their parents do so because of past actions. I'd argue that in my personal experience and my experience with other such adult children the reasoning is more often about the current behavior of the parent or parents than past behaviors. 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.
wutbrodo 5y ago
> 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'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.
eternalban 5y ago
Asia also has a western end. And being from West Asia, I can assure you that "reciprocal obligation" (dare one call it love and respect?) is very much a thing at those coordinates as well.
damnyou 5y ago
I grew up in the sort of family you describe, and it is structurally an extremely abusive environment. To hell with the idea of filial piety.

tolbish 5y ago

But mental/emotional abuse and neglect are perfectly fine? Those can be just as irreparably damaging as physical abuse.

emptysongglass 5y ago
This is what caused me to cut the cord with my parents. My father is a massive criminal, got himself into prison for a large part of my formative years, never said I love you. Mother is untreated borderline, was emotionally abusive my entire life. 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.
dragontamer 5y ago
Ex: I have a (former) coworker who told me his life story. He's homosexual and his parents sent him multiple times to gay conversion therapy. Learning to accept himself for who he is required him to leave his parents: because they would not accept a homosexual child. 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.
lazide 5y ago
Considering the posters background, they may have just not taken it into account. 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.
- slownews45 5y ago
  If you've ever worked as a camp counselor for rich kids - the term abuse can work out as follows: "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".
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    This is an interesting example of subjective versus objective well being. 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).

mullingitover 5y ago

> 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. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias#Children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias#Children

thereare5lights 5y ago
> Also, your children's property was your property: Isn't that still the case today until the child is past the age of majority? Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v10DWClP7NA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v10DWClP7NA
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Britney Spears is probably the more important example of that...
  - thereare5lights 5y ago
    Explain
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      I don't fully understand the legal issues myself. But it appears that when Brittney Spears was put into a mental ward in 2008, her father + lawyer was granted "Conservatorship" and therefore was placed in charge of Britney Spears and all of her assets. There's a court case going on right now about whether or not this conservatorship should end. 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.

jdavis703 5y ago

What about people raised by single parents? What do they owe to the absentee parent?

bostik 5y ago
An apology?
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  You might be confusing the question. A child does not have to apologize to a parent that left before they were born.
  - bostik 5y ago
    Sadly, I wasn't confusing it. The world is cruel, and a non-zero fraction of absentee parents became so because of the child in question. Meaning: for a number of children with an absentee parent, they were the reason for one of their parents to abandon the other.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Isn’t this ignoring consent? The child had no choice in whether to be conceived; at least one of the parents did :)
EvilEy3 5y ago
Knocked out teeth.
scotty79 5y ago
Gratitude for removing him/herself from your life and saving you all the drama that would inevitably end up happening. I'm saying this as a child of single parent.

shadowoflight 5y ago

> 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. 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.

thereare5lights 5y ago
This is the individualistic take. The person you're responding to is referring to how societies worked since time immemorial, prior to the advent of such strong individualism.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  You'll have to go back a very long way to find stable families that didn't have children leaving because they were bored, ambitious, abused, angry, or - in royal families - literally wanted to kill either or both of their parents and perhaps also their siblings so they could take over. 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.

michaelmrose 5y ago

Why would someone giving birth to you oblige one to forgive severe physical abuse merely because you are too big to beat up at this point? 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.

0xB31B1B 5y ago

I think you presuppose that the abuse is in the past and not the present. My dad actively emotionally abused me, regularly insulted my wife, and tried to destroy my relationship with my mother. By necessity he made it a choice between a relationship with him and a relationship with my mom. My estrangement wasn't about something I remembered, it was about him being terrible to me when I was 25 and didn't need him for support or money anymore.

dkarl 5y ago

Reciprocal obligation is the key. I've heard people spin it so that children owe their parents an infinite debt that justifies anything, but that is not reciprocity. Reciprocity means equivalent behavior on both sides. People get a chance as adults to discuss what happened in their households as children, and some people find out that their stories are radically outside the norm. Usually all they want is some acknowledgment from their parents that mistakes were made and it wasn't ideal. Denial and justification are the things that trigger estrangement. Or continued exploitation: people who cared for their drug-addicted or otherwise needy parents for years starting in childhood and decide that however much their parents still need them, they have to separate themselves from that pathology so they can have their own healthy life. 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.

jkhdigital 5y ago
> people forgive their parents for things they would never forgive anybody else for 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.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago

This view seems predicated on the idea that people who estrange their parents do so because of past actions. I'd argue that in my personal experience and my experience with other such adult children the reasoning is more often about the current behavior of the parent or parents than past behaviors. 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.

wutbrodo 5y ago

> 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'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.

eternalban 5y ago

Asia also has a western end. And being from West Asia, I can assure you that "reciprocal obligation" (dare one call it love and respect?) is very much a thing at those coordinates as well.

damnyou 5y ago

I grew up in the sort of family you describe, and it is structurally an extremely abusive environment. To hell with the idea of filial piety.