Most parents have children simply to have someone take care of their loneliness, someone condemned to accept them no matter how shitty they are; the ultimate permission to be an odious human being. Their motivation behind procreating is not to offer love but to take love from an innocent child, no less, who has no choice but to worship them by default: the ultimate validation for those who especially don’t deserve it.
Selfish procreating
The narcissistic parent has children to satisfy her emotional needs. She decides to have a kid before the kid exists. She doesn’t care about some child she’s never met, so it’s not about loving what she doesn’t experience. She has a need — not to love, to nurture, to empower — but instead to be loved, to be nurtured, to be empowered by a human pet, a loyal doggy who will love her no matter how cruel she is to it.
Narcissistic parents assume that kids are there to make the parents happy, when it’s the opposite: all decency dictates that you bring children into this world to make sure they are happy. That should be your only motivation for having children. Anything other than this makes you a monster I’d never want to meet, a monster whose children I feel sorry for.
Debt
Selfish parents assume that their kids owe them. What is there to owe? Your kids owe you absolutely nothing at all. You owe your children everything because you chose to pull them out of the absolute peace of non-existence and force them under your leaky roof. Obviously, you see yourself as someone equipped to be a good parent. But that is for your 30-year-old children to judge, not you.
Your children had no choice whether to be born or not, and worst of all, they never got a choice of parents. They were stuck with you. You, on the other hand, have the greatest impact on your children by far. You get to mold them as you wish, and they are helplessly shaped by your action and inaction, without having a choice in the matter. Tell me again why you feel entitled to be owed by your children.
How to spot selfish narcissistic parents
You can tell a selfish, narcissistic parent a mile away. They blame children for lesser things that they would excuse in any other adult, an adult without excuses, no less, since adults can control their emotions and actions. Children are impressionable and naive, and it is harder for them to control their emotions. This is why we don’t hold them accountable, legally and morally. Adults, on the other hand, are accountable because whatever they do is still under their control.
So it baffles me how certain disgusting parents presume to justify spanking children (literal child abuse punishable by law) for the most insignificant indiscretions, while they tolerate and make up every excuse in the book for much worse behaviour by adults; adults that are out of excuses, no less. This is why this world suffers from schizophrenic-level mass cognitive dissonance.
Evil parents believe that spanking, yelling, and emotional abuse are somehow “justified” to “discipline” a child for the slightest of indiscretions. But when an adult does way worse to them, they don’t justify spanking the adult. We think we can reason with an unreasonable adult who is out of excuses, yet we can’t reason with an innocent child who deserves the benefit of the doubt of innocence and naivete?
We are so retarded as a species, yet we still think we deserve anything better than an apocalyptic idiocracy?
You know this archetypical narcissistic parent: The father who spends money on everything except what his kids really want, so he can buy permission to completely neglect them, forget they ever existed, and watch politics and spectacle sports on TV all day long. He then feels justified in telling himself what a good father he is for buying off his children’s mental state with cheap trinkets of his choosing. His kids are confused: they get all the toys that money can buy, but they don’t get their father’s time, a currency more valuable than anything, since it grants them self-esteem. Kids measure how much they matter to someone (especially to their parents) by the time they spend with them. If a parent is always away, the children conclude that they don’t matter to the parent; they are not worthy enough. And if you think about it, it’s true. If your children matter to you, if you find them worthy, you choose to spend time with them; you feel a need to. Instead, if you think an hour of shitty TV is more important to you than an hour connecting with your child, then the child is right to conclude that he doesn’t matter to you… that his value is less than some shitty TV programme.
Here’s another example: The mother who obsesses with babying her children through her passive-aggressive laundrying, house cleaning, and meal preparing so she can ignore her children’s emotional need for bonding. Not only that, but she guilt-trips her kids, always taking the role of the victim who “takes care of everyone” and isn’t appreciated enough for it. The truth is she doesn’t appreciate her children enough for taking care of her emotional needs (a sick, twisted role a child should never have to take).
All these are aspects of narcissistic parenting: self-serving acts that fit the parents’ arbitrary caricature-blueprint of what constitutes a “good parent”, not for the well-being of their children, but for their own emotional needs; the same selfish hubristic needs that compelled them to have kids in the first place.
End
People without self-esteem procreate simply to own a human pet, an emotional tampon, a slave to their whims and emotional dumping, doomed to be attached to their abusive parents. This dynamic conditions children to have no self-respect either, so they become narcissistic parents too, and on and on.
Parents without self-respect, principles, virtues, self-accountability, and compassion, especially for innocent children, should at least have the redeeming grace of choosing not to have children. But they keep having children, because shitty people are shitty people, and they want to make more of them.
And it seems like the worst of people tend to have the most children, and the least advanced societies have the highest birth rates. Idiocracy? Or abusocracy?
Keep spinning the cycle of abuse.
Last note
I keep hearing people making up creepy excuses for child abuse:
“I was spanked as a child, and I turned out alright.”
You advocate child abuse and make excuses for your abusive parents. No, you didn’t turn out alright. You are so deeply traumatised that you don’t even realise you are traumatised. Your children will pay the price.
The cycle of abuse
Abusive people are that way because they have accumulated internalized trauma, enough so that they have identified with the humiliations of their past. This is not an excuse; it is an explanation.
What you owe your children
Your children owe you nothing. You owe your children everything. If this sounds preposterous to you, this article is for you; your children’s happiness depends on it.
There were parts of this that were painful read. Self esteem in the shitter mostly. It took me over fifty years to finally to discover why.
My dad was like the one you describe. Bought me lots of stuff, chucked money at things but rarely had time for us (me and my brother) and when he did it felt like a favour rather than a true interaction.