Our Children Owe Us Nothing

My wife works in a skilled nursing facility and deals with many elderly people, many of whom depend on their children for various things: transportation, moving, emotional support, even financial support. She see very large differences in how willing the children are to help out their parents in their later years and says that people should be good to their children if they want to expect help from them later on.

What???

Be good to your children?  You mean other than give them life, feed them, shelter them, and wipe their nasty asses? You mean other than deal with all of their meltdowns and their complaints all while raising them to be good, successful human beings? Isn't that enough? Why should we have to be nice to them as well? Make them like us? Don't they just automatically owe us for everything we've already done for them raising them? If we changed their diapers when they were babies, shouldn't they be happy to change our diapers when we are old and decrepit? Isn't that part of the deal?

There was no deal.

Our children did not choose to be born. We chose to have them. We chose to have the pleasure and responsibility of being a parent. If we didn't want the hardships that come with parenting, then we shouldn't have made the choices that led to having children. While we may hope to have great relationships with our children after we raise them, we are not owed this. We have to earn it by going above and beyond what we committed to doing by bringing them into the world. And even if we do "earn" it, they don't owe us. We can only hope for reciprocation of the love we give them just as we can only hope for the reciprocation of the love we give anyone else.