FRACTURE

“I’ve been raising you my whole life with so much effort, spending tons of money—and this is what you give me in return? Why can’t you get good grades like all the other students? It was my fault giving birth to you…”

I have a very genuine question. Asking this may seem like complete nonsense to some people, but that won’t stop my curiosity—it never has. My question is: Why do parents love their children?

The most common answers I hear are: “I love my children because they will take care of me when I get old,” or “I raise them so they can take responsibility for the family,” or “I care for them so they can get a job,” or “because they will uphold the family’s status in society,” and so on.

We often hear these kinds of answers because, nowadays, most parents tend to raise their children with expectations of return—almost like transactions. But in my view, if that’s the mindset, then one may not truly understand what parenting means.

If you truly love someone, you should not think in terms of personal gain. You should not expect anything in return, but instead do your best to protect and support them until the very end. You cannot truly “love” someone while simultaneously treating that love as an investment. When expectations of return exist, self-interest begins to outweigh care for the other person.

The moment you bring a child into the world, you implicitly accept the responsibilities of being a parent. And when you rejects that responsibility simply because your child did not achieve an A+, it becomes clear that the issue was never the child—it was the lack of understanding of what parenting requires.

Making a paper plane does not make you a pilot. Likewise, giving birth to a child does not make you a parent. Love, effort, care, and presence are what earn that title.