How not Being told Children Came from Sex in our Childhood has Tampered with Our View of Parenting

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Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) made a very true and striking argument in the 'Note From the Author' to his book 'The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God'. He used the living conditions of people who live in areas where they do not have access to regular clean water to make the analogy in the argument. People in areas like that have a saying:

Don't throw out your dirty water until you get in your clean.

But he says this saying can be very dangerous unless one adds a further saying:

This also I say unto you, that when you get your fresh water you must throw away the dirty, and be particularly careful not to let the two get mixed.

He argues that we usually don't take the advice of this second saying when it comes to acquisition of ideas and we bring in our clean water and join it with the dirty one because in one same mind we always have old obsolete ideas mixed with new and better ones, illogical ideas mixed with logical ones, etc all in the same mind. When we come across good ideas that work we usually don't take the time to look at all old misconceptions we had, find out how the new idea has cancelled them out and throw all of them away keeping only the new good idea/conception.

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When it comes to parenting, this write-up aims to show that we have made this error Bernard Shaw talked about. How?

The ancient man mainly viewed power as something that gave a person the freedom to do what he likes without much resort to morality; you can see this from the old saying 'might is right'. You can see it from how ancient kings were mostly unquestionable, free to do whatever they liked only to justify it by saying they had the right because they are kings.

You can see it from even the ancient man's conception of God, the ancient man conceived a God to be the creator of the world yet felt they had to be very thankful and offer up regular sacrifices and thanksgiving offerings to him for his provision and the good things in their lives, none of them ever said 'He's God, the one who created us with all our imperfections and needs is he supposed to make us this needy and leave us to fight out a living for ourselves? Isn't it only right that he takes care of us? Why expect any less?'

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Ancient man never thought of that, all they saw was that a powerful being could do what he likes and the devil may care. This same thinking pervaded parenting, the ancient man thought children were lucky to be brought into this world and they should be thankful to their parents and even more thankful for whatever provisions their parents made for them. The parents had power over them so no one felt the parents had to provide for them, the parents were free, based on the power to refuse to provide, starve them, sell them off to slavery or do whatever they wanted with them.

In current modern times traces of the ancient mentality still thrives in many of our societies. When it comes to parenting, though, the goal of being good parents that take good care of our children has become one we mostly strive for, the ancient mentioned that we were free to do with our kids as we pleased has been chased away and continues to be chased away by the modern goal of being sweet parents. This is really beautiful, but one more thing tries to come in the way of our becoming the best parents, and that is the lies we were told when we were growing up about how children are conceived.

As children our parents never told us how children were conceived, they never told us it was from a deliberate act like sex, we were usually told things like 'God gave you to me', 'An Angel carried you to me', etc. Understand these were our growing days, the foundation of our lives, we didn't know anything at all and not knowing that children came from a deliberate act like sex makes us not to understand how much parents owe children.

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Not knowing that adults came together, decided to have children, decide how many children they wanted, decide when they want to have them, etc served to reduce how much responsibility we understood parents owed children. And, yes, we heard a lot of times that parents are supposed to take care of children, but the misinformation that children just landed on the laps of parents by no fault of theirs left us feeling like they were doing us a favour by taking care of this bundle of needs that popped up by no fault of theirs.

Now we have grown up and found out the truth how much of the old dirty water have we thrown away? You must have thought about something, which is that the misconception that children just fell on the laps of their parents by no fault of their parents' didn't stop children from mostly feeling like entitled little buggers and you'd be correct, but remember I'm talking about when the children have grown up to become us adults and it is now our turn to pay the price to take care of children, we don't get the complete understanding that these children are entitled to everything we do for them and part of the reason why we don't get this full understanding is because of the old dirty water we still have mixed in our minds.

The old misconception that children came by no fault of the parents and that the parents are paying a price for what they don't really know about is still inside us, it was put there in our foundational days and got buried deep in our subconscious, remember? (Note the role our subconscious play in our behaviour, it influences it without the awareness of our conscious deliberate self) And just like that argument by Shaw shows, we usually don't get rid of old conceptions immediately we get the new ones. We let them mix. Hear Shaw:

We persist in pouring the clean water into the dirty; and our minds are always muddled in consequence. The educated human of today has a mind which can be compared only to a store in which the very latest and most precious acquisitions are flung on top of a noisome heap of rag-and-bottle refuse and worthless antiquities from the museum lumber room.

So, this here is one of the reasons why you still find parents who don't understand that they owe their children everything, that it is a debt. Of course there are various other factors that contribute to irresponsibility in parents, here is just one, a seemingly innocent one that we can easily fight by saying 'we did something to get you, you'd not understand the process till you come of age', something like that.

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