Reply to When did you realize that your parents didn't care about you?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Love is different from care and nurture. Maybe you can have the former, but due to circumstances that lead to absence of the latter, it's a misplaced love that ends up not benefiting the child.

But if you can't identify any signs of nurture beyond food and shelter, is love really there?

I have often wondered about this - where is the line? It's clear my grandparents had way more kids than they should have had. My mother was the 7th and last, had a neglected and abused childhood, and her mother told her she was not wanted, and they did the legal minimum in terms of education. They might not have loved her.

However, my husband was raised by war-scarred and emotionally-unavailable parents - he is also emotionally unavailable to his children, particularly his son, as if he believes fathers and sons need to have a authoritarian relationship without hugs or verbal expressions of affection. Yet my husband has tutored our son for hundreds of hours in math, he's willingly spent tens of thousands in schools, activities and therapies for him, and he is ready to pay for any college of his choosing next year. I think that's imbalanced parenting, not necessarily unloving parenting.

Parents are victims of their upbringing and their own, possibly antiquated or limited knowledge and social beliefs. If they hurt their children while thinking they are raising them to be strong and resilient, do they still love them? Is the effort they make the sign they care? Or is total neglect the definition of unloving?

[/quote]

I don't know, but when my mom didn't help me after I was beat up by my sister's boyfriend and told me not to tell her stories, I wanted to kill myself. I remember trying to figure out how to do it and then deciding not to do it because I had to protect my younger siblings. I grew up believing she didn't love me. She fed me, dropped me off at school, gave me gifts on Christmas and my birthdays, but she also never hugged me as a child, said she loved me when I was a child and she blamed me for all the problems in our family. Whatever parenting method that was really sucked from my point of view. I still don't know if she loved me.[/quote]

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