Love Between Parents and Children

Love Between Parents and Children
    The parent-child relationship is unique among human relationships. Parent-child interactions are among the most common interactions during a child’s formative years. This relationship is nonvoluntary and endures over the life course. Because of the obligatory interdependence involved in child rearing, even if the relationship is stressed, parents and children rarely sever their ties completely.
    The infant, at the moment of birth, is wrapped up by his mother’s affection; she hugs the little creature with tender hands and gazes him affectionately, fostering him with milk juice, expecting him grow up healthily and carefreely. This is mother’s love. When the child grows and develops, he becomes more capable of perceiving love; he will be feed when he cries for food; he will be helped up and comforted by mother when he falls; he will be praised when he has a bowel movement. All these experiences become crystallized and integrated in the experience: I am loved. I am loved because I am mother’s child. I am loved because I am helpless. I am loved because I am beautiful, admirable. I am loved because mother needs me. To put it in a more general formula: I am loved for what I am, or perhaps more accurately, I am loved because I am. This experience of being loved by mother is a passive one. There is nothing I have to do in order to be loved–mother’s love is unconditional. All I have to do is to be–to be her child. Mother’s love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. Here is a vivid manifestation of mother’s unconditional love: in 1945, when Harry S.Truman was elected as president, a journalist visited and asked Truman’s mother: “you must be very proud of Harry since he is so prominent.” The mother smiled and replied slowly: “ That is true. But I also take pride in my youngest son who is digging up potatoes in the fields.”
    To understand the differences and connections between motherly love and...