by Jackeline Vzquez

Created on: April 16, 2009

Are parents responsible for how their children act as adults?

I can understand why you would want to think that they are responsible, nevertheless part of being an adult is learning to be responsible for your own actions. At some points we must surpass our childhood and stop being victims to be the victors of our own lives. Blaming parents is as insufficient as blaming circumstances. Furthermore what would you do after the parents are held responsible? Would they then blame their parents? Dysfunction is not a spontaneous outcome; it is a pattern that unfolds itself in every generation until someone decides to break the pattern. Last, some personality or character traits are inherited. Ideally we want our good traits to be passed on, but again we have no control over that genetic selection. Should we blame parents for that too?

True it is the responsibility of the parents to mold their children's character so that they can become healthy adults and citizens that contribute in their society. There are ways of turning aggression to assertiveness. There are ways of taking anger and doing something constructive with it. A character that tends toward the dramatic can be molded to be something artistic. Every bad trait has its opportunity to be used positively. As parents we teach our children to look for alternatives to not give into our destructive feelings and do something constructive with them. We want to see in our children a better version of who we are. This of course is the ideal situation. But parenting is not that simple. There is no manual of how to raise children that from infancy have a mind and will of their own. More importantly parents may not be people who have had the best upbringing themselves. They work with the resources they have. What about their own feelings, thoughts, and shortcomings, how is it expected that they be responsible for their children when maybe no one was responsible for them? Are they expected to surpass their issues now that they have children? Should not the same standard be set then for those same children as adults? This whole idea of blaming parents brings us back to the first blame game in the Garden of Eden. Adam blamed the woman that God gave him (essentially he was saying it was God's fault and Eve's fault), Eve blamed the serpent, and the poor serpent, or not so poor depending on how you look at it got the raw end of the deal. As insufficient as it was then so it is now.

Also when does parental obligation end and personal

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