Payback

I'm still following the parenting and adulthood thread. I've always considered this wise criticism.

"Parents of my generation taught our children the codes of responsibility, restraint, and renunciation, but also we taught them how to evade the codes. Stepping through the codes was a secret game among parents in the 1970s, a little payback for being a parent. That would be all right--at least humanly normal--if the code were strong. But widely vayring codes from dozens attractive cultures flood our receptors. If we want to evade a certain element in our code, the renunciation of selfishness and theivery, for example--in which the forbidden is allowed. Some of us spend our whole lives looking, successfully, for holes in the codes. When our parents teach us how to do that at the dinner table, we find those lessons very appealing. We could say that flatness lies in saying yes to everything." [Robert Bly, Pg. 232, The Sibling Society]