Parents - What do we owe them?

“After all I’ve done for you…”. A popular sentence and I am sure some of us have heard this sentence from our parents. But what have they really done for us?

The reason for us existing in this world is that at some point of their lives our parents decided to have a baby. In some cases, it might not have been a planned child, however the decision was made to bring up the child. They raised and funded us for years.
Does that mean we owe them our lives? Do we have a debt to pay for the rest of our lives?
The common opinion is that we are in their debt because they raised and loved us regardless of what we did. Having such parents you should definitely be thankful.
But what if they didn’t?


Certainly, we should be grateful and respect them to a certain extent. But do we really have to accept all of their statements? Do we have to obey and love them unconditionally?

Let me tell a story of a little girl, just a small insight.
She’s sitting in her room, thinking of how she can make her mommy proud of her, but she can’t imagine anything else than she has already tried.
Christmas is coming and she’s writing a wish list. All she writes is this: I wish that my mommy loves me. Then she hides the note in a drawer, never showing it to anyone.
A few hours later, her mother tells her she hates her more than anything else and she wishes she would never have been born. She tells her she is a slut and the worst child one could imagine and that she doesn't even deserve to be alive. She’s yelling at her for about an hour and strangling her for a couple of seconds, getting caught up in her contempt.  The reason for this is that the girl told her it was cold in her room whereas her mother thought it to be very warm and she hates too much warmth.
The girl tries to be strong, as she always does, she hides her tears until she is back in her room. There, her brother is already waiting for her, naked, as if he wanted to proof her being a slut. She screams, but nobody would ever listen.
 

I can see no love or respect here. There are so many cases of domestic violence and they shouldn't be tolerated. Unfortunately, parents do not always know what is best for their children, despite this so often mentioned argument.

Can you imagine how long it takes these children to recover any self-esteem?

So why do we still keep in touch with them? Why do we not break off all contact after having been grown up? 
In spite of all that happened, we still feel a certain liability, a duty or a guilt towards our parents.
Society tells us we should be grateful. After all they have done for you, you don't want to come home for Christmas? How can you be so selfish?
Above all, we can't erase family ties. It's still our family, after all.

When our parents betray our trust, abuse us, intentionally hurt us, do we still have to be grateful?  Parents should love their children, they should show them their love, but what if they don’t? What do we owe them?

When they wrong us, we might be willing to forgive them more easily than others, but injustice stays injustice.  

Basically, we should respect all human beings. But I don’t think we owe them our unconditional respect and gratefulness.

Respect should be mutual.
Of course, it is a good thing to respect our parents, but shouldn’t they pay us some respect too? Once we are adults, we make our own decisions and naturally sometimes (or often) we disagree with other people, which also include our parents. We have a right to form our own opinions and our parents should respect this. They should accept us as autonomous individuals with possibly different views.

Most of all, they should love and support their children when they are little, providing a basis for the respect and appreciation to be mutual.

If our family bond hurts us more than it does anything else, it is maybe time to loosen the ties and forget about the predetermined obligations.

After all, blood relationship doesn’t necessarily heal everything, it doesn’t convert injustice into fairness.