The Most Important Thing

Blackmailing children with our love, children who are, kidnapped, by the need, for our love, translated…

A few days ago, I’d asked Mimi Chou who was seven, “What is the most important thing to you?” without hesitation, she’d replied, “the fact, that you love me”.

Normally, as parents hear this, they’d felt bliss and happy, I suppose!  But instead, I’d felt, quite, ambiguous.  After many unsuccessful relationships, it’d made me realized, that building my self-worth on someone else is, such, a dangerous thing; as the love slowly disappears or changes, the self in the attachments would, suddenly, collapse.

Or maybe, some would say, that that, is the love between a man and a woman, based on infatuations, not the love from parents to children, the love from parents to children will never change.  But, I don’t believe that’s so.  On the one hand, objectively speaking, because of work, I saw so many “parents who can’t love their young, based off of societal expectations”.  Most of the world sees, the extremes of the cases, and would, scold these parents “no sense of responsibility whatsoever, and if you can’t afford to care for them, don’t have children!”  But, in the normal cases, there were, a lot of traumas in the parents’ lives, that they can’t, cope well with, and, in the circumstances, the children became, secondary victims.

We’d often delegate the responsibilities, solely, to the parents’, said that children are innocent, but, this doesn’t help at all.  It’s not that they don’t want to love their young, but, because they’re having difficulties, loving themselves already.

On the other hand, in the more regular parent-child love, the parents believed, that the way they showed love to their young, may not be what they wanted; even if it was, what the child wanted, sometimes, there would be that gap between the recipient and the giver, with those involved in the midst, not knowing this had happened.

For instance, awhile ago, there was a viral video from online: a social experiment host from China, to show how bad the conditions of child assault are, the individual had, used, a number of measures, to get the kids to undress themselves, posing as a bad man.  As most of the comments related to how the children had NO sense of danger, and just done what they were told, I saw that as the parents entered into the frames and grilled their young, the fears that, shone from the children’s eyes.

On the adult’s perspectives, naturally, they were, worried that their kids can’t protect themselves, this isn’t wrong, it’s, just that in the eyes of the children, the parents were, blaming them, with the adults who’d told them to take their clothes off, the children felt they’d, disappointed their parents, that they’d not, lived up to the expectations of what a “Good child” would be.

So, I still believed, that parents needed to, be alert with “children love me”.  Sometimes, this love will become, this enormous burden the child asks her/himself to live up to; for children like these, once they failed to live up to the expectations, s/he may fall into this self-blame cycle, or, to mask up how s/he really cared, by rebelling.

Sometimes, when Mimi Chou and I spat, as I realized that I may have gotten, mean with her, I’d apologized, “Mimi, I’m sorry, I was very mean to you, although you’d done something wrong, I’d handled it awfully”.  And she’d always cried and told, “No, you didn’t do wrong, I’m the one at fault.”, that, was what worried me the most: the child loved you too much, and would believe, that all your demands of her/him are correct, so, they’d, swallowed everything down.  For a long time, I’d told her, “it’s most important, that you love yourself”, but, at this age when she still needed to attach to me, this game seemed to, not be as effective one bit.  So when she’d stated to me, “I just needed to make sure, that you do love me”, my worries of having kidnapped my child in her own right, weighed more than the joys.

So, this, is how the child is socialized, they valued themselves, based off of what we, the adults showed them.  This, is especially important to know, because, we, as adults, need to make sure, that we treat our own children right, and not unknowingly, kidnapping our own young, using the excuse of L-O-V-E!