Honor your father and your mother

Abstract

While on the one hand there is much mutual love and care in the relationship between parents and their offspring, there may, on the other hand, be also much mutual ‘sound and fury’, which sometimes is far from ‘signifying nothing’ (William Shakespeare, Macbeth). Indeed, from conception on, individuals are confronted with parent-offspring conflicts of all kinds. Initially these conflicts concern physiological matters (implantation, nutrition, weaning, etc.), but later in life the accent is on psychological (‘you must this’, ‘you must that’, ‘don't do that’ etc.) and social affairs, and phenomena such as child abuse, infanticide and incest may occur. It is, therefore, certainly not self-evident that children honor their parents. To reinforce their position, parents (societies) may appeal to a ‘divine’ commandment which helps them make their children suppress any tendency to conflict toward them (and hence to their culture), so that children conform to their parents’ norms and values. When such psychological and sociological parent-offspring conflicts are not resolved satisfactorily, it can be suggested, children may (consciously or unconsciously) have aggressive feelings toward their parents: Freud's ‘Oedipus complex’. This complex, it is argued, can also be seen as a parent-offspring conflict. Given their biological basis, parent-offspring conflicts can hardly be considered as abnormal. Conflicts between adults and their offspring have always existed and will always exist, simply because it is inherent in our genetic make-up: parents and offspring of sexually reproducing species - humans included - are only about 50% genetically related and hence have different interests at all levels of being. Indeed, parent-offspring conflicts are such stuff as we are made on, and our little life is rounded with its consequences (adapted from William Shakespeare, The Tempest).