Your Kids Don’t Owe You Anything

Photo by Zen Chung from Pexels

“As long as you’re living under my roof, you’ll live by my rules.”

This sort of admonition, and others like it, operate on the same basic – and faulty – principle. Our kids live in our house. They follow our rules. They exist to be at our beck and call. They have to show us, indeed they owe us, obedience. Gratitude. Respect. They owe us for all the years we put into raising them. They owe us for giving them a warm place to sleep. They owe us for feeding them, for bathing them, for doing their laundry, for buying their clothes and their toys and their electronics.

If that’s something that resonates with you, you’re not alone. Society in general tends to favor this sort of top-down parenting approach: 1) Parents do the work and make the rules. 2) Kids owe it to their parents be quiet and compliant. They should be GRATEFUL.

But you’re wrong.

Our kids did not ask to be here. Let’s just start there. Kids are here because we decided to bring them into our world. In a very real sense, they are our invited guests. Do our guests owe us anything? I’ll get back to that.

Our literal job as parents is to take care of our kids. It’s our job to meet their needs, no matter what they may be. We see to it that their physical, mental, and emotional requirements are all attended to. We do our best to make sure that they have a safe place to sleep, good food to eat, and clothes to wear on their backs. We drive them where they need to be, we help them with their homework, we cheer for them at their soccer games. We celebrate them on their birthdays. We comfort them when they’re sick, we soothe them when they’re heartbroken, we listen when they need an ear. We play with them, we make memories with them. We try to give them happy experiences, whether it’s through family camping weekends, trips to the beach, or game night around the dinner table. We try to make their lives easier, and happier, and more comfortable.

And we do it all because we’re parents. Because that’s the job. Because we decided to have children. Because we invited these people into our lives.

When we invite people into our homes, do we expect them to owe us anything? Of course not. We try to make their stay as nice as possible. We are hospitable. We are kind. We are patient.

You may argue that it’s not the same. That our kids aren’t really visitors. That they are our children, little people that we are trying to prepare for the world. Fair enough. But wouldn’t that be MORE reason to treat them with unconditional kindness, not less? We are trying to show our children how to treat people, how to interact with the world, and how to respect themselves and others. Is approaching parenting with a sense of entitlement really the best way to accomplish that?

Want your kids to respect you? Start by respecting them first. Want your kids to have a grateful heart? Start by showing them what that looks like. Want your kids to listen to you? Start by listening to them. Start by treating them like people. Start by focusing on the relationship, not the rules.

Most of all, stop putting the onus on your kids to pay you back in some way for the privilege of being parented.

Your kids owe you nothing.

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5 Comments

Filed under gentle parenting, mindful parenting, parenting

5 Responses to Your Kids Don’t Owe You Anything

  1. Charlotte

    LOVE this post. A welcome reminder that we choose to bring our kids into the world and parent them and they are stuck with that decision. Thank you.

  2. Sarah

    Beautiful. Thank you

  3. Lisa from Iroquois

    Once again you’ve engaged with a difficult topic from a unique angle and been eloquent doing it. Thank you. I hope you don’t mind if i share this on my FB feed. Powerful words.

  4. Adrian van den Enden

    if you thought that you owned your children, what happened when they got old enough to fight back in their teenage years? I can only hope that the fact that our grown children are our friends as well as relatives, indicates something was done right.

  5. Talitha

    Beautiful and true

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