When does the labour of love actually begin? Somewhere around conception, with the first scan, at birth, or perhaps long before any of them? Whatever the answer, parenthood has the peculiar habit of continuing long after the child has become perfectly capable of looking after himself or herself. That is when love, protection and something rather more uncomfortable called control can begin to overlap.
There is probably no definitive moment at which somebody becomes emotionally a parent. Biology can tell us when conception occurs and medicine can chart the development that follows, but neither can identify the instant at which another human being’s welfare begins to matter more than your own. For some it may arrive with confirmation of pregnancy, for others with the first scan or movement, and for fathers it may develop differently altogether, but once established the instinct appears remarkably reluctant to retire.
The early years make the arrangement uncomplicated. Children need decisions made for them, dangers identified before they recognise them and boundaries established precisely because they do not yet possess the experience to establish their own. Parents feed, educate, protect, save, sacrifice and worry, usually while repeating a sentence that will accompany the family for decades: we only want what’s best for you.
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The interesting part begins when the child no longer requires somebody to decide what is best. The eighteen-year-old becomes thirty, forty and eventually fifty, acquires a career, perhaps a spouse and children of his or her own, yet can still discover that an elderly mother wants to know whether lunch was eaten and a father has an opinion about a decision nobody actually asked him to make. The child has become an adult; parenthood apparently hasn’t noticed.
There is something deeply affectionate about that and something occasionally suffocating too. “We only want what’s best for you” can represent extraordinary selflessness, but it can also become the most persuasive justification ever invented for retaining influence over another adult’s life. The difficulty is that the parent exercising control may genuinely experience it as love.
That distinction is becoming more visible because today’s younger generation appears less willing to accept parental authority simply because it comes from a parent. They have grown up with access to information, cultures, relationships and career choices their parents often never encountered, and many regard adulthood as carrying a much stronger entitlement to personal autonomy. They may welcome advice while rejecting the proposition that advice becomes an instruction merely because it originated from somebody older.
That can produce an extraordinary collision of good intentions. Parents look at experience accumulated over fifty or sixty years and wonder why their children insist upon learning lessons the difficult way, while the children look at a world dramatically different from the one their parents entered and wonder why yesterday’s experience should automatically determine tomorrow’s decision. Both may believe they are being entirely reasonable.
Sri Lankan and wider Asian family culture makes the question particularly interesting because independence has traditionally meant something rather different here than in many Western societies. Families frequently remain closely involved in decisions about education, careers, marriage, money and children well into adulthood, and that closeness can provide an extraordinary support system when things go wrong. The same closeness, however, can make it difficult to establish where parental concern ends and an adult child’s right to make an unpopular decision begins.
Perhaps the most difficult adjustment in parenthood is therefore not raising the child but relinquishing authority over the adult that child becomes. For nearly two decades responsible parenting requires intervention, correction and sometimes an emphatic no. Successful parenting must then gradually transform into something almost opposite: offering experience without demanding obedience and remaining available without insisting upon being in charge.
That is considerably easier to describe than practise. Parents can often see a bad decision approaching because they made something remarkably similar themselves, and every instinct developed over decades says prevent the pain before it arrives. Yet there comes a point when protecting an adult child from every mistake may also prevent that child from acquiring precisely the judgement the parent is attempting to provide.
The younger generation has responsibilities in this bargain too. Independence does not make experience irrelevant, and fashionable language about boundaries should not become an excuse for treating parental concern as an intrusion whenever the advice happens to be inconvenient. The mother asking whether you have eaten may know perfectly well that you are capable of finding a sandwich; what she may really be saying is that after all these years she still needs to know you are all right.
There is no obvious retirement age for being a mother or father. The job description simply changes, often without anybody informing the people doing the job, and perhaps that explains why families spend so much time negotiating the difference between caring and controlling. Parents are learning to let go at precisely the same moment their children are learning to stand without them.
The labour of love therefore does not end when the labour ward is left behind. It continues through school fees and examinations, broken hearts and first jobs, marriages and grandchildren, successes celebrated and disasters quietly repaired, until the people who once needed everything from their parents eventually need something much more difficult to give.
The freedom to decide for themselves.
Perhaps “we only want what’s best for you” remains one of the most sincere sentences a parent can utter. The test of that love comes when the child answers, with equal sincerity, that what is best is now something he or she must be allowed to determine.
Be that as it may.
