Q&A: A Child Who Comes to His Parents with Complaints
A Child Who Comes to His Parents with Complaints
Question
A child who comes to his parents with complaints because they brought him into a world in which they deprive him of things—is he mistaken or justified?
For example, a household with 15 children (with only about a year between each child) that is “barely making ends meet”—would each of the children be mistaken/justified in the complaint presented above?
Where is the line in each of the possibilities (mistaken/justified)?
Thank you
Answer
If he is suffering, he can have complaints against his parents. What does it mean, mistaken or justified? He is suffering and complaining about it.
Do you want me to write here the minimum monthly income and the full list of conditions that parents are supposed to provide for their children? Are you sure you devoted more than a minute to thinking about and formulating the question?
Discussion on Answer
There definitely is such an obligation. If you bring a child into the world, you have to take care of him. The question whether the child has a right to demand it is not clear to me. What exactly would he demand? His father has no money. You could ask whether it is morally forbidden for parents to bring such a child into the world. I think it is.
And perhaps you mean that the father is simply lazy and could earn money; then of course, morally, the child can demand that he do so. On the legal level, you’d have to ask lawyers.
The child’s demands depend on nothing. He wants what he wants. The prohibition on the parents bringing him into the world certainly does depend on culture and norms. In a situation where a child feels reasonably okay, there is no barrier to bringing him into the world. That feeling depends on what is accepted in that society.
In the end, every child feels or will feel bad at some point;
some would say it is forbidden to bring a child into the world just because of those 5 seconds when he falls on the floor.
But if you think there is value in having children, doesn’t that offset the child’s suffering?
Because an argument between the parent and the child is impossible: before the child was born, he did not exist from our point of view. So giving birth never benefited him. It created him. Only from that point on is it possible to benefit him or harm him, but from the outset he was born into that family.
There are reasonable degrees of feeling bad. But beyond that, a child will come with complaints against his parents according to how he feels, and he is not supposed to ask me when and whether to complain. The relevant question is from the parent’s perspective: is it permitted or forbidden to bring the child into the world?
As for the question of the back-and-forth between parent and child, you’re repeating things I’ve written here more than once regarding wrongful birth.
And that is exactly the question: where is the boundary for when a parent is permitted to bring the child into the world… because in the end the delta is impossible to calculate.
I’ll try to formulate it in his place:
Does a parent have an “obligation” to provide a child with some minimal conditions, and does a child have a “right” to demand those minimal conditions from the parent? Is there, in this respect, a difference between the period of the child’s helplessness (until he is able to take care of himself) and the age after that? And if such an obligation and right exist, do they depend on some absolute minimum line or on a standard relative to society?