Absent Parent Quotes

God is an absent parent who demands loyalty despite never being around...

Just because your father's present, doesn't mean he isn't absent.

Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

Books were precious things, meant to be treated well, both because they deserved it and because if she didn't treat them well, her parents might stop buying them for her.

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word ‘lost’ comes from the old Norse ‘los’ meaning the disbanding of an army…I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private life conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places… I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count. Oh, how they keep a count.

No parent should have to bury a child ... No mother should have to bury a son. Mothers are not meant to bury sons. It is not in the natural order of things. I buried my son. In a potter's field. In a field of Blood. In empty, acrid silence. There was no funeral. There were no mourners. His friends all absent. His father dead. His sisters refusing to attend. I discovered his body alone, I dug his grave alone, I placed him in a hole, and covered him with dirt and rock alone. I was not able to finish burying him before sundown, and I'm not sure if that affected his fate ... I begrudge God none of this. I do not curse him or bemoan my lot. And though my heart keeps beating only to keep breaking--I do not question why. I remember the morning my son was born as if it was yesterday. The moment the midwife placed him in my arms, I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding. I remember holding my son, and looking over at my own mother and saying, "Now I understand why the sun comes up at day and the stars come out at night. I understand why rain falls gently. Now I understand you, Mother" ... I loved my son every day of his life, and I will love him ferociously long after I've stopped breathing. I am a simple woman. I am not bright or learn-ed. I do not read. I do not write. My opinions are not solicited. My voice is not important ... On the day of my son's birth I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding ... The world tells me that God is in Heaven and that my son is in Hell. I tell the world the one true thing I know: If my son is in Hell, then there is no Heaven--because if my son sits in Hell, there is no God.

Parents lied to children when they thought it was necessary, or when they thought that it would somehow make things better. It only made sense that children should lie to parents in the same way.

Some kids tell me their parents are never at home. How I wish. I never have a minute to myself, except in my room. Our back yard is no escape. Every time I sit by the pool, Mom is at the kitchen window doing this and that. Always watching.

Mr Babbington,' he said, suddenly stopping in his up and down. 'Take your hands out of your pockets. When did you last write home?' Mr Babbington was at an age when almost any question evokes a guilty response, and this was, in fact, a valid accusation. He reddened, and said, 'I don't know, sir.' 'Think, sir, think,' said Jack, his good-tempered face clouding unexpectedly...'Never, mind. Write a handsome letter. Two pages at least. And send it in to me with your daily workings tomorrow. Give your father my compliments and tell him my bankers are Hoares.' For Jack, like most other captains, managed the youngsters' parental allowance for them. 'Hoares,' he repeated absently once or twice, 'my bankers are Hoares,' and a strangled ugly crowing noise made him turn. Young Ricketts was clinging to the fall of the main burton-tackle in an attempt to control himself, but without much success.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

You're a grown man now, Nathan. I'm sorry for any problems you have, but part of being an adult is to stop blaming your parents for whatever shortcomings you have. That's pretty basic.

Of women who choose not to have children, most are undermothered and fear they won’t know how. Sometimes they fear they will “mess up” their kids like they feel they have been messed up. (Although let’s not forget that there are other important reasons someone may choose not to become a parent.)

The answer to the question ‘How many children do you have?’ and the one to the question ‘How many children are you raising?’ are not identical in all cases: some men are not taking care of their own children, some are knowingly or unknowingly raising other men’s children, and some do not even know that they each have a child, another child, or other children.

There are people in this home- human beings- drowning in their desire for you to look them in the eye. You made this family. And all you have to do is show up and like them. It's called 're-la-ting.' So get over whatever totally-absent-buying-your affection parenting that you received and get here, man- because this is your LIFE and you're just pissing it away!

We want desperately to believe that every mother falls in love with her baby at first sight and that the complexity of relationships, so evident elsewhere as part of the human condition, is totally absent from the connection between mother and child.

You think of dead lakes overflowing with corpses, of police stations where the rich lock up the poor, of palaces where those who follow orders torture those who refuse to. You think of distraught lovers, abandoned friends and absent parents. Of lapsed treaties and photographs that are seen and forgotten, regardless of the walls they hang on. How the world will go on without you and forget you were even here. You think of the mother, the old man and the dog, of the things you did, or failed to do, for the ones you loved. You think about evil causes and about worthy ones. That the chances of violence ending violence are one in nothing, one in nada, one in squat.

If you complain about how you spend your Saturdays taking your kid to birthday parties, that means you are taking your kid to birthday parties. If you complain about how hard it is to get your kid to read, it means you are trying to get your kid to read. If you are complaining about your kid not helping around the house, that means you have a fat, lazy kid. You joke about it. That’s how you deal. If parents don’t like being a parent, they don’t talk about being a parent. They are absent. And probably out having a great time somewhere.

Yet I’ve also found common ground sharing my story with people who, while not adopted, have distant or absent parents. Some of them, too, seek reconnection and reunion, with complicated results. A year or two after I met my birth father, I became friends with a woman who had grown up without her father, only to look for him as an adult. She seemed to understand and relate to my story as much as a fellow adoptee might.

It’s hard to see that what’s NOT THERE can be more important than what IS there. She had no idea that between her absent father and preoccupied mother, no one had taken the time and energy to actually parent her.

A child can also feel emotional distress when the parent is physically present but emotionally unavailable. Even adults know that kind of pain when someone important to us is bodily present but psychologically absent.

Frequently I go to conferences and listen to speakers decry the absent father as somehow a new phenomenon. Though their recriminations against absent or emotionally distant fathers are generally meant to help society, at the same time they are built on a lie that evolution disproves generation after generation. Fathers have often gone to war, or the long hunt on the savannah, or to work in another village or city. But only in the last decade or so have manhood and fathering been trashed completely.

There is something about being loved and protected by a parent (or guardian) knowing that I can be loved for who I am, not what I can do, or might one day become. Unfortunately it’s not usually like this in every single situation. From time to time, my parents made mistakes during my childhood. Possibly I was the mistake, or unwanted. But I don’t know. I had every material thing that I could have ever wanted, but there was still something missing, as if I felt distanced from my parents, or misunderstood, in the ways that they treated me. At times, I had felt completely loved and accepted by my parents, but for one reason or another, they were unable to care for me, provide for me, in some ways that would have been very important. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to make up for the experiences in life that were absent when I was a child.

I had always loved being loomed over, especially by beautiful people. I was, at my core, a brat who adored the guidance of a firm hand. Maybe it was because my parents had been so absent growing up, or maybe it was simply a delicious aberration in my soul, but as she looked down at me, I couldn't help but feel small and trapped and thrilled.

The absence of a parent plays the role of a parent.

enlightened geriatric professionals told me that physical therapy had benefits, even absent improvement,

When we are preoccupied with the past or worried about the future, we are physically present with our children but are mentally absent.

Seeing wanting understanding and empathy as a sign of weakness is characteristic of emotionally immature people.

Basically, everyone needs a sense of genuine intimate connection to feel fully secure and there is nothing wrong with that.

With emotionally immature parents, they have trained you to either give too much or too little,

People Who Are Immature Emotionally Are Also Shallow With Their Thinking

Hes that kind of man. Every few years he sends news of where he is, and he even turned up on the doorstep unannounced once or twice when we were still at school. He's not a bad person, just a flighty one.

I mean imagine that shit. You bust your ass as a single parent, and your kid treats the absentee parent like a rock star. But love is like water and it slides over the smooth places. Sinks into the cracks.

Internalizers are unable to recognize abuse for what it is because they look within themselves when things go wrong to seek for the reasons that things went wrong. If parents do not see their actions as abuse, the child won’t recognize it as such either.

When children have had to become tough and learn to do things on their own, they can develop an attitude of rejection towards their own feelings. It is likely that they have learned to keep away from those painful feelings which their emotionally immature parents cannot help them with.

The self-sufficiency of children who are internalizers often creates the impression that they have no needs. They are expected to be okay without anyone looking out for them or carefully watching over them. They are often referred to as “old souls” and their parents trust them to always do the right things.

Emotionally immature parents are unhelpful when their children need emotional support, they may be dismissive when their child expresses his feelings of being hurt. Internalizers, due to their natural sensitivity, do emotional work for their parents and sometimes, internalizers play the role of emotional support before they are old enough to do so.

Other attempts appear as scars, weals, parentheses in conversation, absent days in his diary. But, at the same time, according to Stuart's weird sense of etiquette on such subjects, only one son in a family is allowed to kill himself, else it puts too much strain on the parents, and his brother, Gavvy, like Jacob in the Old Testament, has stolen Stuart's birthright.

9. Your Photo Album Many people have a photo album. In it they keep memories of the happiest of times. There may be a photo of them playing by the beach when they were very young. There may be the picture with their proud parents at their graduation ceremony. There will be many shots of their wedding that captures their love at one of its highest points. And there will be holiday snapshots too. But you will never find in your album any photographs of miserable moments of your life. Absent is the photo of you outside the principal’s office at school. Missing is any photo of you studying hard late into the night for your exams. No one that I know has a picture of their divorce in their album, nor one of them in a hospital bed terribly sick, nor stuck in busy traffic on the way to work on a Monday morning! Such depressing shots never find their way into anyone’s photo album. Yet there is another photo album that we keep in our heads called our memory. In that album, we include so many negative photographs. There you find so many snapshots of insulting arguments, many pictures of the times when you were so badly let down, and several montages of the occasions where you were treated cruelly. There are surprisingly few photos in that album of happy moments. This is crazy! So let’s do a purge of the photo album in our head. Delete the uninspiring memories. Trash them. They do not belong in this album. In their place, put the same sort of memories that you have in a real photo album. Paste in the happiness of when you made up with your partner, when there was that unexpected moment of real kindness, or whenever the clouds parted and the sun shone with extraordinary beauty. Keep those photos in your memory. Then when you have a few spare moments, you will find yourself turning its pages with a smile, or even with laughter.

Emotionally Mature People Work With Reality Rather Than Fight Reality These sets of people are constantly working to change the things they don’t like, but are always aware of reality in its own terms. When problems arise, they try and fix rather than overreacting or obsessing on how things should be and if things aren’t working out a planned, they just make the best out of the situation.

children in an industrial society are “time trained”—they learn to read the clock, and they learn to distinguish even quite small slices of time, as when their parents tell them, “You’ve only got three more minutes till bedtime!” These sharply honed temporal skills are often absent in slower-moving agrarian societies that require less precision in daily scheduling than our time-obsessed society.

Mom would take me to church and say, Can you feel it, baby girl? Isn't it glorious? I tried to feel it. I did, I swear. I reached for it, squeezed my eyes shut as tight as I could and begged for it. I pretended I was stretching my hands out into the darkness behind my eyelids, fingers splayed wide, trying to find even the barest touch of something out there in the abyss. To feel the warmth Mom always assured me was waiting once I accepted God into my heart. There was nothing. Always nothing. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be. Maybe you're not supposed to feel that touch-maybe it's always been a metaphor. God is an absent parent who demands loyalty despite never coming around, and I just have to keep throwing my prayers into nothing and trust He gets them. Or maybe I am just too broken to feel Him in the first place.

They Respect Boundaries Emotionally mature people are very courteous, respect and honor boundaries. They are in search of connection and not invasion. These people do not assume that since you love them then you love what they love too. Rather, they take your feelings and desires into consideration; they are in tune with how others feel. Though this may seem like a lot, but to them it’s as natural as breathing in air.

We’ve never been a close family, so I’ve never been able to see him as much more than an absent provider who’s going through the motions for the sake of his family.” “It’s not easy,” Jende said, shaking his head as he turned onto Elm Street, where the dentist’s office was located. “Who is it not easy for?” “For you, for your father, for every child, every parent, for everybody. It’s just not easy, this life here in this world.

However, children brought up by immature parents have a contrary experience of such. Their positive qualities are usually not dwelt upon or appreciated because such parents do not have the ability to see the strength of their children. This has resulted in making the children embarrassed of every quality they possess.. They are used to encouraging the good qualities of others and feel it is wrong for their own strength to be pointed out.

When parents are emotionally immature, it is guaranteed that their children will suffer emotional neglect. This deprivation, however, is silent and is an invisible experience for these children, they will feel emptiness but they will not know what name to ascribe to it. They will grow up like this and still not be able to identify or realize that they are suffering from emotional loneliness but they will feel different from those who truly seem at ease.

This is when I forgave my parents. This big secret that was not ready to reveal itself was the reason my parents had sent us here. This colossal secret was the reason my parents had been absent from their children, had never talked too much, but clearly had plenty to give. This is when I forgave my parents. On the remainder of our silent journey to the island, my soul was anything but mute. This is when I mourned the death of Murdoch and Elizabeth Benedict for the first time.

It may feel awkward at first, and there may be any number of obstacles. In addition to the obstructions that arise as we inch into this inner mothering, we may be stopped before we start by a discounting voice (a critical parent or protector most likely) saying, “This is ridiculous.” Its tactic is to deny the need. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” “It wasn’t that bad. Just buck up.” Here is where being aware of parts comes as an advantage. Only if we can recognize that this is a part speaking up—a part that has an agenda—will we have a choice to bracket these thoughts and move forward with our intention. One of the next barriers we may face is a feeling of inadequacy. If you were not well mothered, you can easily feel that you haven’t a clue how to do it. You’re uncomfortable, you don’t know what to say or do, and you feel phony trying what doesn’t come naturally. This is enough to stop you right here. If you succeed in making an authentic connection with the undermothered parts within yourself, you may be struck by a sense of guilt that you have inadvertently continued the abandonment by not showing up earlier. No one likes to feel the sharp pain of causing harm to another. And just as I’ve mentioned earlier that a mother may unconsciously keep a distance from a child so as not to arouse her own hurt, you may feel that opening up the locked-away pain in your heart is too high a price to pay for reconnecting with child parts inside you.

The attempt to define free will is the granddaddy of these pointless quests. We understand what it is to be coerced. It is to be a prisoner frog-marched down a hill. Coercion is something tangible. Freedom is the absence of coercion, nothing more. Events from childhood do not coerce our personalities in adulthood. We are not frog-marched by parental spankings at age six into being guilt-ridden thirty-year-olds. Our genes do not coerce our adulthood. Unlike spankings, they have a substantial statistical effect on our personality, but we are not frog-marched into being alcoholics even if our biological parents are alcoholics. Even having the genetic predisposition, there are tactics we can adopt to avoid alcoholism. We can, for example, shun drinking altogether. There are many more teetotal people with alcoholic parents than you would expect there to be by chance alone. Absent coercion, we are free. Freedom of the will, choice, the possibility of change, mean nothing more-absolutely nothing more than the absence of coercion. This means simply that we are free to change many things about ourselves. Indeed, the main facts of this book—that depressives often become nondepressives, that lifelong panickers become panic free, that impotent men become potent again, that adults reject the sex role they were raised with, that alcoholics become abstainers—demonstrate this. None of this means that therapists, parents, genes, good advice, and even dyspepsia do not influence what we do. None of this denies that there are limits on how much we can change. It only means that we are not prisoners.

Tradition has it that late in life Epictetus retired from teaching introduction and withdrew to the peace and quiet of family life, under conditions imposed by old age: that is, he became a parent by adopting rather than fathering a child, and took into his home a female servant to serve as a kind of surrogate mother to the child and domestic servant for himself. That he had absented himself from family life for so long shows that he regarded philosophy as a jealous mistress who demanded practically all his time and attention, which family life would not allow. That this renunciation of family life represented a real sacrifice is suggested by the fact that he took to it immediately upon retiring. He evidently thought he had earned the comforts of home after devoting most of his life to improving the lives of others – the successive generations of students who had passed through his school. We have no more news of Epictetus beyond this. After creating this version of a family he was evidently content to settle into it and live out the balance of his years in obscurity.

generally speaking, there are two simplified categories that parenting falls into: intrusive or neglectful caretaking. Parents were either overinvolved—telling us what to do, think, and feel—or they were underinvolved—physically or emotionally absent. These challenges are across the spectrum from subtle to severe. As a response, we become anxious and self-absorbed, losing our capacity for empathy. We become the walking wounded in a battlefield of injured soldiers. For the child who experienced intrusive parents, in later years, she becomes an isolator, a person who unconsciously pushes others away. She keeps people at a distance because she needs to have “a lot of space” around her; she wants the freedom to come and go as she pleases; she thinks independently, speaks freely, processes her emotions internally, and proudly dons her self-reliant attitude. All the while underneath this cool exterior is a two-year-old girl who was not allowed to satisfy her natural need for independence. When she marries, her need to be a distinct “self” will be on the top of her hidden agenda.

Family system theory which was proposed by Murray Bowen in 1978 gives an insight on how immature parents create emotional enmeshment over their children true self.  Parents who are immature do not have genuine conversations and intimacy with their children. Such families are better referred to as housemates. Bowen further explained that when parents tend to cause emotional injuries into their children, rather than the children sitting to mourn, such children should indulge into other things that make them happy without losing themselves in the process.

These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow - a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires - but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. In the barracks they called forth a rebellious, wild craving for their return; for then they were still bound to us, we belonged to them and they to us, even though we were already absent from them. They appeared in the soldiers' songs which we sang as we marched between the glow of the dawn and the black silhouettes of the forests to drill on the moor, they were a powerful remembrance that was in us and came from us. But here in the trenches they are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong and our desire is strong - but they are unattainable, and we know it. And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not. We could never regain the old intimacy with those scenes. It was not any recognition of their beauty and their significance that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of a comradeship with the things and events of our existence, which cut us off and made the world of our parents a thing incomprehensible to us--for then we surrendered ourselves to events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was enough to carry us down the stream of eternity. Perhaps it was only the privilege of our youth, but as yet we recognised no limits and saw nowhere an end. We had that thrill of expectation in the blood which united us with the course of our days. To-day we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled--we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there? We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial - I believe we are lost.

Internalizers are sensitive to the quality and genuineness of emotional intimacy in their relationships because they are attuned to feelings. They strongly desire emotional intimacy. Internalizers need to share their inner experience; their desire for a real emotional connection is a great part of their existence. For internalizers, nothing hurts more than being around people who cannot engage them emotionally, it is not a social urge for them but rather a strong hunger to connect on a more intimate level with like-minded people who can understand them and when they are unable to make this kind of connection, they feel lonely emotionally.

Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow—a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires—but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. In the barracks they called forth a rebellious, wild craving for their return; for then they were still bound to us, we belonged to them and they to us, even though we were already absent from them. They appeared in the soldiers’ songs which we sang as we marched between the glow of the dawn and the black silhouettes of the forests to drill on the moor, they were a powerful remembrance that was in us and came from us. But here in the trenches they are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong and our desire is strong—but they are unattainable, and we know it. And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not. We could never regain the old intimacy with those scenes. It was not any recognition of their beauty and their significance that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of a comradeship with the things and events of our existence, which cut us off and made the world of our parents a thing incomprehensible to us—for then we surrendered ourselves to events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was enough to carry us down the stream of eternity.

When growing, internalizers that are emotionally neglected continue to feel as if they have to do everything on their own and then they become more adept at doing this. Internalizers are able to assimilate whatever they get from others because they like to learn and remember experiences. Internalizers also have an excellent emotional memory and will and they reach within themselves when they are not getting emotional nurturance from others. Internalizers often take on so much responsibility for other people without much thought and so are very grateful for even the tiniest bit of recognition and this is one of the specific characteristics of an internalizer.

Perhaps 80 percent of enslaved children were born to two-parent families—though the mother and father might live on different plantations—but in extant slave-traders’ records of those sold, according to Michael Tadman’s analysis, “complete nuclear families were almost totally absent.” About a quarter of those trafficked southward were children between eight and fifteen, purchased away from their families. The majority of coffle prisoners were male: boys who would never again see their mothers, men who would never again see wives and children. But there were women and girls in the coffles, too—exposed, as were enslaved women everywhere, to the possibility of sexual violation from their captors. The only age bracket in which females outnumbered males in the trade was twelve to fifteen, when they were as able as the boys to do field labor, and could also bear children.

Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there wasn’t in her, of necessity at least, a grain of the stuff of which the adventuress is made. She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely personal. She hadn’t been born with the silver spoon of social opportunity, she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her parents. It was her parents who told her story; you always saw how little her parents could have made her. Her attitude with regard to them might vary in different ways. As the great fact on her own side was that she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself, and done it by the simple lever of her personality, it was naturally to be expected that she would leave the authors of her mere material being in the shade. (…) But the general characteristic of the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them on society, and it was striking that, though in some of her manifestations a bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they. They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most part of a deathly respectability. She wasn’t necessarily snobbish, unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn’t cringe, she didn’t make herself smaller than she was, she took on the contrary a stand of her own and attracted things to herself. Naturally she was possible only in America, only in a country where whole ranges of competition and comparison were absent.

I can't bear to look at the screen itself, the women in pastels, like so many Jordan almonds. The men in suits, wearing equally angelic expressions. Members just like men, ostensibly. Who have vowed to be obedient to God's laws, and to repent of their sins. They've promised to be honest, true, chaste, benevolent, and virtuous; they've promised to be hopeful, and to endure all things, to seek after what is lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy. Only then will God provide a lasting solution to their loneliness and frustration. I imagine they comfort themselves, like I do, with the game of "wouldn't it be worse." Wouldn't it be worse to have a sick child, ailing parents, or a flesh-eating virus? Wouldn't it be lonelier to be trapped in a dying marriage, scarier to have crippling financial problems or to spend one's retirement fund on failed in vitro treatments? Wouldn't it be worse to live a life absent of faith, absent of purpose, absent of the love of God? I imagine they tell themselves, like I do, that a soul-crushing loneliness is a small price to pay, given the big picture. Everyone suffers. Loneliness is the human condition. And after the tests of our faith, we will triumph.

Would you be willing to tell me how the ladies came to be here? I mean, who are they?” Ian drew a long, impatient breath, tipped his head back, and absently massaged the muscles at the back of his neck. “I met Elizabeth a year and a half ago at a party. She’d just made her debut, was already betrothed to some unfortunate nobleman, and was eager to test her wiles on me.” “Test her wiles on you? I thought you said she was engaged to another.” Sighing irritably at his friend’s naiveté, Ian said curtly, “Debutantes are a different breed from any women you’ve known. Twice a year their mamas bring them to London to make their debut. They’re paraded about during the Season like horses at an auction, then their parents sell them as wives to whoever bids the highest. The winning bidder is selected by the expedient measure of choosing whoever has the most important title and the most money.” “Barbaric!” said Jake indignantly. Ian shot him an ironic look. “Don’t waste your pity. It suits them perfectly. All they want from marriage is jewels, gowns, and the freedom to have discreet liaisons with whomever they please, once they produce the requisite heir. They’ve no notion of fidelity or honest human feeling.” Jake’s brows lifted at that.

When that happens, when you make 'eye contact', it kills you. It kills you and it kills anybody who thinks like you. Physical distance doesn't matter, it's about mental proximity. Anybody with the same ideas, anybody in the same head space. It kills your collaborators, your whole research team. It kills your parents; it kills your children. You become absent humans, human-shaped shells surrounding holes in reality. And when it's done, your project is a hole in the ground, and nobody knows what SCP-3125 is anymore. It is a black hole in antimemetic science, consuming unwary researchers and yielding no information, only detectable through indirect observation. A true description of what SCP-3125 is, or even an allusion to what it is, constitutes a containment breach and a lethal indirect cognitohazard. Do you see? It's a defense mechanism. This information-swallowing behaviour is just the outer layer, the poison coating. It protects the entity from discovery while it infests our reality. And as years pass, the manifestations will continue, growing denser and knitting together… until the whole world is drowning in them, and everybody will be screaming 'Why did nobody realise what was happening?' And nobody will answer, because everybody who realised was killed, by this system… Do you see it, Marion? See it now.

Be a Listener When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise. —PROVERBS 10:19     I’ve heard it said that God gave us two ears and only one mouth because He wants us to listen twice as much as we speak. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had to apologize for something I haven’t said. It’s much easier and really more natural for us to speak rather than listen. We have to learn to listen. It takes discipline to keep from talking. As a parent, spouse, sibling, or friend, we need to be known as good listeners. And while listening, we’d do well to remember that there are always two sides to every story. Postpone any judgment until you’ve heard all the evidence—then wait some more. Eleanor Roosevelt, in one of her many speeches, stated, “A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.” Our Scripture verse talks to us about being more of a listener than a talker. Too many words can lead to putting one’s foot in one’s mouth. The more we speak, the greater the chance of being offensive. The wise person will restrain her speech. Listening seldom gets us into trouble, but our mouths certainly cause transgressions. When others realize that you are a true listener, they will tell you important matters. They will open up about their lives and their dreams. They will entrust you with a bit of themselves and their hearts. Never violate that trust. You have the best model possible in your relationship with God. Without fail, He listens to your every need and hope. Prayer: Father God, thank You for giving me two good ears to hear. Hold my tongue when I want to lash out. I want to be a better hearer. Amen.  

You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting “philosophies,” and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons. That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class family—Katie Brindle—sang in a choir after school. But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes: What Mrs. Brindle doesn’t do that is routine for middle-class mothers is view her daughter’s interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie’s interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter’s talent. Instead she frames Katie’s skills and interests as character traits—singing and acting are part of what makes Katie “Katie.” She sees the shows her daughter puts on as “cute” and as a way for Katie to “get attention.

During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity." Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.

In Separation, the second volume of his great trilogy on attachment, John Bowlby described what had been observed when ten small children in residential nurseries were reunited with their mothers after separations lasting from twelve days to twenty-one weeks. The separations were in every case due to family emergencies and the absence of other caregivers, and in no case due to any intent on the parents’ part to abandon the child. In the first few days following the mother's departure the children were anxious, looking everywhere for the missing parent. That phase was followed by apparent resignation, even depression on the part of the child, to be replaced by what seemed like the return of normalcy. The children would begin to play, react to caregivers, accept food and other nurturing. The true emotional cost of the trauma of loss became evident only when the mothers returned. On meeting the mother for the first time after the days or weeks away, every one of the ten children showed significant alienation. Two seemed not to recognize their mothers. The other eight turned away or even walked away from her. Most of them either cried or came close to tears; a number alternated between a tearful and an expressionless face. The withdrawal dynamic has been called “detachment” by John Bowlby. Such detachment has a defensive purpose. It has one meaning: so hurtful was it for me to experience your absence that to avoid such pain again, I will encase myself in a shell of hardened emotion, impervious to love — and therefore to pain. I never want to feel that hurt again. Bowlby also pointed out that the parent may be physically present but emotionally absent owing to stress, anxiety, depression, or preoccupation with other matters. From the point of view of the child, it hardly matters. His encoded reactions will be the same, because for him the real issue is not merely the parent's physical presence but her or his emotional accessibility. A child who suffers much insecurity in his relationship with his parents will adopt the invulnerability of defensive detachment as his primary way of being. When parents are the child's working attachment, their love and sense of responsibility will usually ensure that they do not force the child into adopting such desperate measures. Peers have no such awareness, no such compunctions, and no such responsibility. The threat of abandonment is ever present in peer-oriented interactions, and it is with emotional detachment that children automatically respond. No wonder, then, that cool is the governing ethic in peer culture, the ultimate virtue. Although the word cool has many meanings, it predominately connotes an air of invulnerability. Where peer orientation is intense, there is no sign of vulnerability in the talk, in the walk, in the dress, or in the attitudes.

Kemmer is not always played by pairs. Pairing seems to be the commonest custom, but in the kemmerhouses of towns and cities, groups may form and intercourse take place promiscuously among the males and females of the group. The furthest extreme from this practice is the custom of vowing kemmering (Karh. oskyommer), which is to all intents and purposes monogamous marriage. It has no legal status, but socially and ethically is an ancient and vigorous institution. The whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains is indubitably based upon the institution of monogamous marriage. I am not sure of divorce rules in general; here in Osnoriner there is divorce, but no remarriage after either divorce or the partner’s death: one can only vow kemmering once. Descent of course is reckoned, all over Gethen, from the mother, the “parent in the flesh” (Karh. amha). Incest is permitted, with various restrictions, between siblings, even the full siblings of a vowed-kemmering pair. Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair. Incest between generations is strictly forbidden (In Karhide/Orgoreyn; but is said to be permitted among the tribesmen of Perunter, the Antarctic Continent. This may be slander.). What else have I learned for certain? That seems to sum it up. There is one feature of this anomalous arrangement that might have adaptive value. Since coitus takes place only during the period of fertility, the chance of conception is high, as with all mammals that have an estrous cycle. In harsh conditions where infant mortality is great, a race survival value may be indicated. At present neither infant mortality nor the birthrate runs high in the civilized areas of Gethen. Tinibossol estimates a population of not over 100 million on the Three Continents, and considers it to have been stable for at least a millennium. Ritual and ethical absention and the use of contraceptive drugs seem to have played the major part in maintaining this stability. There are aspects of ambisexuality that we have only glimpsed or guessed at, and which we may never grasp entirely. The kemmer phenomenon fascinates all of us Investigators, of course. It fascinates us, but it rules the Gethenians, dominates them. The structure of their societies, the management of their industry, agriculture, commerce, the size of their settlements, the subjects of their stories, everything is shaped to fit the somer-kemmer cycle. Everybody has his holiday once a month; no one, whatever his position, is obliged or forced to work when in kemmer. No one is barred from the kemmerhouse, however poor or strange. Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. This is easy for us to understand. What is very hard for us to understand is that, four-fifths of the time, these people are not sexually motivated at all. Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart. The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex. Consider:

Only parents are to blame for any conflict between them and their children - even one of the parents is absent.

She halted before her father, the hero of her short life. He would do anything for her, wrest her from the grip of death. She would return home... or something would. Something would sit like a doll in his drawing room, saying nothing and smiling a painted smile forever. Her father's eyes flitted this way and that. He could not see her, she realized. Perhaps he never had.

Olga had never had many friends, in part because she loved to spend time with Abuelita, their minds so much alike. Her mother was so black-and-white—rigid with her principles. Her father, a dreamer, lost in impossible ideals. But to Olga, her grandmother was a hustler who actually got things done. She understood the dance, which they did together, often. Both literally, as Abuelita, glamorous and towering in her heels, loved to dance with young Olga, and also figuratively. With her parents absent for such critical years of her life, Abuelita was never afraid to bend the truth, make someone dead of another person missing, in order to procure special tutoring, or a scholarship, or whatever her grandchildren needed. The truth, Abuelita would say, is so much harder to believe than our lie, no? And it's not like we have bad intentions, si? Yes! Olga would agree. She loved it all. The high heels, the prayer, the laissez-faire relationship with rules and regulations. Whether born that way or formed into shape from necessity, the two women mirrored each other.

These images, of faith as a hangover, of religion as struggling with God's shadow, of an absent God whose calling card we still possess, describe in a general way our everyday struggle with faith and agnosticism. We still have some experience of God, though rarely is it a vital one in which we actually drink, first-hand, from living waters. Insofar as God does enter our everyday experience, most often He is not experienced as a living person to whom we actually talk, from who we seek ultimate consolation and comfort, and to whom we relate person to person, friend to friend, lover to lover, child to parent.

Anxious attachment is usually the result of inconsistent, erratic or absent parenting. Such children become highly insecure and over-focused on the parent in question, which manifests itself in clinging and suspicious responses, and a willingness to do almost anything to please that parent and secure their attention.

In the 2019 Harvard Health Publishing article on how past trauma can haunt your future health, researchers state that a person's risk for mental and physical health problems rise as the number of traumatic events experienced increases. In other words, someone with five traumatic experiences will have a higher chance of developing health issues than someone who had only one negative adverse childhood experience.

Darryl came into therapy seeking a sense of direction and purpose. As we explored his history, I learned that he grew up in a home where he was profoundly emotionally neglected. Both his parents were addicted to drugs and were often absent or intoxicated. Darryl’s trauma was related not only to his experiences in witnessing their addictions, but also to the extended periods of time he was left alone. His childhood lacked emotional and physical connection. He learned that in order to survive, he had to raise himself. He had learned to dismiss his own emotional needs. Now as an adult, he continued to feel cut off from his emotions. As a result, his life had very little depth or meaning.

Someone with a Dismissive-Avoidant attachment style will: • Generally appear withdrawn • Be highly independent • Be emotionally distant in their relationships • Be less likely to connect on an intimate level • Find it difficult to be highly involved with their partners • Become overwhelmed when they are relied on heavily • Retreat physically and emotionally as a result Their core beliefs, or the recurring perceptions that replay in their subconscious, will perpetuate a sense of defectiveness and uncertainty in relationships. They essentially believe at an innermost level that they are unsafe around people and that vulnerability always results in pain. Although the Dismissive-Avoidant may appear to have shortcomings in their relationships (as do those with all attachment styles), they can actually be wonderful partners. By having a deeper understanding of why someone is Dismissive-Avoidant, a relationship can be healthier, happier, and more fulfilling. So, why is the Dismissive-Avoidant individual so distant? Adults who are Dismissive-Avoidant typically had parents who were absent from their childhood. This absence can be in the form of physical, emotional, or intellectual abandonment. Since children quite literally depend on their parents for survival, those with neglectful parents have to learn how to self-soothe. Eventually this child is likely to develop a belief that they can only safely rely on themselves. This belief is then subconsciously brought into adulthood and manifests as distant and dismissive behavior. However, this can be remedied over time—a healthy relationship with a Dismissive-Avoidant can be built with consistent emotional support, autonomy, and direct communication.

The child who grows into an Anxious attachment style has one or more parents who are present and loving one moment, and then absent or unavailable the next. Consequently, they can trust and deeply connect with their parents and then feel a strong emotional hunger when they disappear. As Live Science discusses, connection with caregivers releases oxytocin, among other neurochemicals, in the brain. Immediate withdrawal then creates a more significant sense of longing and a deeper dependency on their parent or parents to be soothed. However, the child will not actually have enough distance to learn how to self-soothe, so they will feel an even deeper need to rely on their caregivers. Consequently, a subconscious program that revolves around the fear of abandonment begins to be ingrained in the Anxiously attached individual. They will begin to get deeply triggered when the caregiver separates from them and will often feel lonely and unloved because they hunger for closeness. The inconsistency in parental availability for the child ultimately results in the child believing they must self-sacrifice to maintain their caregiver’s presence and be worthy of their love. If they do exactly what is demanded of them in relationships, they will subconsciously believe that people will stick around. In adulthood, this eventually creates a strong sense of resentment from the Anxious individual toward those they are sacrificing their needs and values for. Without the understanding of why they are doing this, they will continue to do so and will create turmoil in the relationships they value the most. Another scenario in which an Anxious attachment style can arise is when one caregiver is incredibly present and connected and the other is very withdrawn—again, a form of inconsistency.

The child who grows into an Anxious attachment style has one or more parents who are present and loving one moment, and then absent or unavailable the next. Consequently, they can trust and deeply connect with their parents and then feel a strong emotional hunger when they disappear. As Live Science discusses, connection with caregivers releases oxytocin, among other neurochemicals, in the brain. Immediate withdrawal then creates a more significant sense of longing and a deeper dependency on their parent or parents to be soothed. However, the child will not actually have enough distance to learn how to self-soothe, so they will feel an even deeper need to rely on their caregivers. Consequently, a subconscious program that revolves around the fear of abandonment begins to be ingrained in the Anxiously attached individual. They will begin to get deeply triggered when the caregiver separates from them and will often feel lonely and unloved because they hunger for closeness. The inconsistency in parental availability for the child ultimately results in the child believing they must self-sacrifice to maintain their caregiver’s presence and be worthy of their love. If they do exactly what is demanded of them in relationships, they will subconsciously believe that people will stick around. In adulthood, this eventually creates a strong sense of resentment from the Anxious individual toward those they are sacrificing their needs and values for. Without the understanding of why they are doing this, they will continue to do so and will create turmoil in the relationships they value the most. Another scenario in which an Anxious attachment style can arise is when one caregiver is incredibly present and connected and the other is very withdrawn—again, a form of inconsistency. This time, imagine there is a child named Parker. He has a father who is ever-present, understanding, and loving. Parker’s mother, however, is always busy at work. A constant need to be clingy will arise in him because, while positive associations are being built by his closeness to his father, they are also simultaneously being taken away by his mother. He will eventually try to use activating strategies—the process of using past knowledge to make future decisions—to keep his mother from leaving. However, his energy is invested into maintaining closeness to his mother rather than learning how to self-soothe. This is why you’ll see the Anxious Attachment in adulthood ultimately working to prevent someone from leaving by doing whatever they perceive that person needs, rather than working on the actual problem at hand.

Because we all do the same as our parents in the end. Your mother was glamorous and could have gone anywhere and done anything and yet she married your nice, safe father and came to live in a one-horse town like Lough Glass for security; you’ll do the same.’ ‘And what about you? Do you love Michael, Clio?’ ‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. What’s love?’ ‘I wish I knew that too,’ Kit spoke absently. She wondered was there any truth in what Clio said, that people did what their mothers did. If so, there was a stormy future ahead of Kit.

l’instinct maternel se révèle absent chez une femme manipulatrice

No one tells you before you procreate that the hardest thing about being a good parent is that you never feel like one. If you’re absent you’re committing one big mistake, but if you’re present the whole time you commit a million tiny ones, and teenagers keep a count. Oh, how they keep a count.

family background of someone with BPD is often marked by alcoholism, depression, and emotional disturbances. A borderline childhood is frequently a desolate battlefield, scarred with the debris of indifferent, rejecting, or absent parents, emotional deprivation, and chronic abuse.

Oak seedlings to plant in earth that has been mixed with the ashes of their parents. We do this in memory of our own dead, present and absent.

The neglect and mistreatment that is part and parcel of poorly structured or even entirely absent disciplinary approaches can be deliberate—motivated by explicit, conscious (if misguided) parental motives. But more often than not, modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked or even loved by their children

Your mother doesn't know these things,” he said, a note of pleading in his voice. "She has always been that way. She is an artist. Her feet barely touch the ground. I've been the one to keep her tethered to the earth. And now it's your job. And you're too young, and it's not fair, but there it is." He was right. It wasn't fair.

Oliver is my son too,” I was afraid and rightly so. What if Alec banned me from seeing my boys? I was an absent parent, an absent mother. Somehow that seemed worse. I was fully prepared for the judgemental opinions of others which would no doubt be lobbied at me the moment everyone knew I was back. But I had refused to entertain the thought Alec would stop me from seeing our boys. I had abandoned them but I hadn’t stopped loving them. Not a day went by without them being the first thing on my mind when I woke up and the last thing I thought about before going to sleep. I was probably the worst mother alive but I bloody loved my boys, and heaven help anyone who called my love into question.

Our national epidemic of “missing fathers” is not simply a problem of single mothers struggling without a husband. It’s also that of intact two-parent homes in which the father is morally absent from his children’s lives.

The Still-Face paradigm shows viscerally that within seconds of a child perceiving their parent to be disengaged and emotionally absent, they start to feel distress and attempt to reengage the parent. But when these efforts fail, the infant disengages and emotionally withdraws. Imagine the impact on a developing child if that is a continuous experience. A cold, disengaged, partially attentive caregiver can have immediate, and potentially lifelong, toxic effects on the developing child. This child may grow up feeling inadequate, unlovable. Even with many gifts and skills, they will feel they are “not enough” as an adult, and that can lead to a host of maladaptive behaviors including unhealthy forms of attention seeking, self-sabotaging, or even self-destructive behavior.

I know how he feels. My dad's alcoholism is the reason I haven't lived with him since I was eleven. It's the reason uncle Jim thought it would be better if I lived with him and Jane. Here's the thing about alcoholism. It's destructive on many levels and to many degrees. While Jane uses it to dampen her feelings, the depression, the inadequacy; my dad was a partier. He used it to turn himself into the person he wanted to be. The person he thought other people wanted him to be. The problem was he forgot who he was when he was sober and embraced the drunk version instead. And when that happened, I never saw my real dad again. He was absent. The drunk dad pursued people and a lifestyle and forgot to be a parent. It's not that he's forgotten about me altogether. I still talk to him about once a year. Does he love me? Sure. Is he good at showing it? Not at all. That's life. I've accepted it.

It was an act of God, many alleged, that the three Saltwood children were absent when assassins struck. They were trekking in the Great Karroo with a Hottentot family, gathering ostrich plumes for sale in Paris. When they returned, their parents were already buried, and there was heated discussion as to what should happen to them. Some said they should be freighted down to Grahamstown on the next wagon heading south, but word was received that they were not wanted there. So there was some talk of sending them along to LMS headquarters in Cape Town, but they already had a flood of Coloured orphans and abandoned children. It would be quite improper to ship them off to England, where their ancestry would damn them. Put simply, there was no place for them. No one felt any responsibility for the offspring of what from the start had been a disastrous marriage. So the children were left with the Hottentots with whom they had hunted ostrich plumes. For a few years they would be special, for the older ones could read and write, but as time passed and the necessity for marriage arrived, they would slide imperceptibly into that amorphous, undigestible mass of people called Coloured.

Around the world, people who studied parenting usually divided the various styles into four basic categories: Authoritarian parents were strict disciplinarians, the “because I said so” parents. Permissive parents tended to be indulgent and averse to conflict. They acted more like friends than parents. In some studies, permissive parents tended to be wealthier and more educated than other parents. Neglectful parents were just how they sounded: emotionally distant and often absent. They were also more likely to live in poverty. Then there was the fourth option: Authoritative. The word was like a mash up of authoritarian and permissive. These parents inhabited the sweet spot between the two: they were warm, responsive, and close to their kids, but, as their children got older, they gave them freedom to explore and to fail and to make their own choices. Throughout their kids’ upbringing, authoritative parents also had clear, bright limits, rules they did not negotiate. “We’re socialized to believe that warmth and strictness are opposites,” Doug Lemov writes in his book Teach Like a Champion. “The fact is, the degree to which you are warm has no bearing on the degree to which you are strict, and vice versa.” Parents and teachers who manage to be both warm and strict seem to strike a resonance with children, gaining their trust along with their respect. When researcher Jelani Mandara at Northwestern University studied 4,754 U.S. teenagers and their parents, he found that kids with authoritative parents had higher academic achievement levels, fewer symptoms of depression, and fewer problems with aggression, disobedience, and other antisocial behaviors. Other studies have found similar benefits. Authoritative parents trained their kids to be resilient, and it seemed to work.

Bea did not want a new mother. She'd hardly even seen the one she once had, except for glimpses out the window when her mother was climbing into a carriage to go off to a party. She'd been as beautiful as an angel, all sparkling and laughing in her lovely gowns, but not much use.

In addition to the issue of distracted supervision putting children at risk for injury, at some point distracted, tech-centered parenting can look and feel to a child like having a narcissistic parent or an emotionally absent, psychologically neglectful one. In nonclinical settings, most notably in focus groups in schools around the country, the take-home message I am hearing from children of all ages is this: They feel the disconnect. They can tell when their parents’ attention is on screens or calls and increasingly they are feeling that all the time. It feels “bad and sad” to be ignored. And they are tired of being the “call waiting” in their parents’ lives.

When unconditional love and genuine enthusiasm are always present, "Good job!" isn't necessary; when they're absent, "Good job!" won't help.

Maturation in the psychological realm involves the differentiation of the elements of consciousness — thoughts, feelings, impulses, values, opinions, preferences, interests, intentions, aspirations. Differentiation needs to happen before these elements of consciousness can be mixed to produce tempered experience and expression. It is the same in the realm of relationships: maturation requires that the child first becomes unique and separate from other individuals. The better differentiated she becomes, the more she is able to mix with others without losing her sense of self. More fundamentally, a sense of self first needs to separate from inner experience, a capacity entirely absent in the young child. The child has to be able to know that she is not identical with whatever feeling happens to be active in her at any particular moment. She can feel something without her actions being necessarily dominated by that feeling. She can be aware of other, conflicting feelings, or of thoughts, values, commitments that might run counter to the feeling of the moment. She can choose. Both Peter and Sarah lacked a relationship with themselves because this prerequisite division had not yet occurred. They were not given to reflecting on their inner experience, agreeing or disagreeing with themselves, approving or disapproving of what they saw within. Because their feelings and thoughts were not differentiated enough to withstand mixing, they were capable of only one feeling or impulse at a time. Neither of them was given to statements like “Part of me feels this way and part of me feels that way.” Neither of them had “on the other hand” kind of experiences, nor felt ambivalent about erupting in frustration or about avoiding things. Without the capacity for reflection, they were defined by the inner experience of the moment. They immediately acted out whatever emotions arose in them. They could be their inner experience but they could not see it. This inability made them impulsive, egocentric, reactive, and impatient. Because frustration did not mix with caring, they had no patience. Because anger did not mix with love, they showed no forgiveness. Because frustration did not mix with either fear or affection, they lost their tempers. In short, they lacked maturity.

Where the parents are not 'good enough' the rest of the programme for life may be distorted and later stages in the archetypal sequence may fail to be realized. Thus, the boy whose father was inadequate or absent may fail to actualize his masculine potential sufficiently to establish the social or vocational role his talents equip him for, or he may be unable to sustain a relationship with a member of the opposite sex long enough for him to become an adequate husband or father himself.

A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. As far as the animals are concerned, the suburbs are an abandoned landscape, and so they roam with confidence. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places. Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely), the wonderful things that happen as a matter of course are stripped away from them. For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back. I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost. The word “lost” comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so. A recent article about the return of wildlife to suburbia described snow-covered yards in which the footprints of animals are abundant and those of children are entirely absent. As far as the animals are concerned, the suburbs are an abandoned landscape, and so they roam with confidence. Children seldom roam, even in the safest places. Because of their parents’ fear of the monstrous things that might happen (and do happen, but rarely), the wonderful things that happen as a matter of course are stripped away from them. For me, childhood roaming was what developed self-reliance, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, a will to explore, to be able to get a little lost and then figure out the way back. I wonder what will come of placing this generation under house arrest.

They behave towards their therapists as they perceive themselves to have been treated by their absent parents. They make their therapists feel very fully what it is like to be discarded, ignored, despised, helpless or even unreal and non-existent. (...) What needs to be understood in such situations is not that the child is perceiving the therapist as the insufficiently caring parent of his past experiences and revenging himself. Beyond this the child is also reversing the original situation. This time the child is identifying himself as the cruel, rejecting but powerful person and it is the therapist who is to feel rejected, hurt, helpless and…to feel the pangs of betrayal of trust and affection. In such situations the therapist cannot become genuinely trustworthy in the child’s eyes until experience has shown that he has the strength to contain the projections of the feelings that the child finds intolerable.

Shonsu, les dieux te sont reconnaissants ! Ta récompense sera fantastique : une vie longue et heureuse, du pouvoir et de grandes réalisations. (Il ricana.) Et de l'amour, évidemment ! Tu gouverneras lorsque Nnanji sera absent. Tu traceras la carte de ce monde et tu verras les cercles se refermer. Tu imposeras le sens de la justice à Katanji, la raison à Thana et la miséricorde à Nnanji. Tu voyageras à travers le Monde en tant qu'ambassadeur et tu chevaucheras au côté de l'empereur quand il retournera à Hann pour remercier la Déesse et saluer ses parents. » Les autres connaîtront gloire et honneur, mais tu gagneras l'amour du Peuple. Et quand l'heure de ta mort sonnera enfin, tes petits-enfants seront près de toi, une foule immense tiendra une veillée silencieuse aux portes de ton domaine et le Monde tout entier pleurera. En attendant ce moment, l'amour de Jja t'appartient et sa beauté ne se flétrira jamais. Elle se souciait peu d'être une esclave, mais toi, tu ne le supportais pas. Elle et son fils sont maintenant libres. Personne en dehors de vous deux ne remarquera le changement – un miracle rétroactif et le dernier. Je viens juste de le lui expliquer. Wallie

There are people─ in your home─ human beings─ drowning in their desire for you to look them in the eye. You made this family. And all you have to do is to show up and like them. It's called 'relating'. So get over whatever totally-absent-buying-your-affection parenting that you received and get here, man─ because this is your LIFE and you're just pissing it away.

When dad is absent,” she explained, “it basically provides young girls with a cue about what the future holds in terms of the mating system they are born into.