I’ve been talking to my sister more since having a baby. She’s twelve years older than I am, and went to boarding school and then college in the United States, so I mostly only saw her during holidays. I got a little emotional on one phone call – I said, “When I was a kid, you were the only person who really listened to me.” She replied, “I know.”
I’ve heard people say they felt better about their parents once they had children themselves. I’ve experienced a bit of this and expect more in the future. Right now though, I actually feel more judgmental. I can’t imagine so regularly dismissing my child’s interests and point of view. To love her is to love her as a person in herself, and therefore to be interested in those things.
Based on growing up in Korea and talking to other Asian Americans, I have the impression that, in that culture, parents by default did not love their children in that way. In the interested-in-them-as-a-person way. How is this possible? Is interest in your child’s point of view a Western individualist/humanist thing?
Works like Shostak’s Nisa or Lancy’s Anthropology of Childhood seem to indicate so. My childhood indicates so. But it doesn’t feel like it from the inside. The curiosity about what she’ll want and think seems to spring from a deep, primitive, “pre-cultural” part of me.
After typing out this confusion, I thought more about Nisa (the memoir of a !Kung hunter gatherer woman). One of the things that stuck with me is how much conflict Nisa had with her parents as a kid because she was hungry, and they couldn’t or wouldn’t give her food. Because there wasn’t enough.
Maybe parent/child relationships are so harsh in premodern societies because early food conflict sets the tone. Maybe a small part of the answer is that you can only (emotionally) afford to relate to your children that way – mind to mind – if you can provide for most of their material needs as they grow up and you’re not in deciding every day which of your children low-key starve.
I grew up in a culture that was less than a century out of food scarcity being a serious presence in families. Maybe it hadn’t adapted yet.
If someone’s screaming at you most days for food – clearly in pain about it, pain you viscerally understand – and you have food, but you need the food yourself or you’ve decided to give it to your other kid – maybe you don’t want to linger on their interiority and point of view.