We know, celebrating parents is not fashionable these days. All the more to blame.
Written by Gergely Szilvay and Zoltán Veczán
Mother's Day is here again, and it is expected that some radical feminists will once again voice their frustration in public posts, according to which Mother's Day and the government's family policy cumulatively put women who do not want or cannot have children at a disadvantage Faith).
According to the narrative, if the state actively encourages motherhood and builds a family policy on it, it willy-nilly treats as secondary those women who... And here, usually those who are mentioned in the first place are those who are against their will, due to illness or other circumstances they did not know how to have children - whom all sane people feel sorry for.
Then there are those who simply don't want to have children, because careers and the fight for women's rights, autonomous standing give meaning to their lives, they live out their parental instincts in the triangle of dog-cat-aunt.
It is their heart's right to do so - but why does it have to be demonstrated just for the sake of it, even on Mother's Day?
The state, the government, has the right to develop and encourage practices - especially in times of permanent population decline - that support and prioritize the longevity of society, namely childbearing. In this case, the "neutral" behavior causes the opposite effect, especially if the leadership of the political community in an anti-familistic age does not encourage motherhood and fatherhood as a career of high importance, does not counterbalance the structural - mainly material and time-consuming - factors that which act against family formation and the choice of parental profession.
Let's not even talk about the fact that it is usually the same circles that calculate and spread how much of an additional financial burden childbearing entails.
So, in general, this is the compensation that radical feminists are used to demanding from families. But of course there is the other usual feminist objection, that the special emphasis and support of motherhood creates a hostile atmosphere for those who do not choose it, as well as financially motivates families to "send women back to the kitchen" , perhaps they only undertake it for financial reasons, so to speak child, the child objectively as a source of money. This argument is untrue and exaggerated, and it does not take into account the interests of society and the common good. For the most part, this kind of policy makes life easier for those who take care of the child anyway.
The Hungarian left-wing governments pursued a so-called "neutral" policy - and society showed how much it valued this:
it was then that the desire to have children reached a historic low point in Hungary, despite the fact that there were hundreds of thousands more women of childbearing age living in the country than there are now - hence the slow and painful recovery from the new Hungarian family policy that began in 2010.
In addition, anyway, feminists do not want neutral policies either (there are none anyway), on the contrary: they imagine a highly interventionist state, with the help of which they transform society according to their ideas, by getting into the dynamics of families and relationships (now who should hide from what? )
A good example of this is the 2009 "gender mainstreaming" handbook entitled "From the Windward to the Mainstream", which was prepared as background material for the government, and according to which "equality policy solutions" are needed, which are "equal treatment, anti-discrimination, equal opportunities, positive discrimination and "gender mainstreaming" ” methods. That is: "an effective equality policy cannot be limited to making women catch up to male-centered, male-standard social norms. As a long-term goal, society and public policy as a whole need to be transformed, since the problem is with basic social norms and their institutional and public political embodiment." In fact:
"The first step in gender mainstreaming is the review and rethinking of basic social norms and institutions
taking into account aspects of equality between women and men. In particular, the social norms regarding gender roles, a good family, a good workforce, the value of work, merit in the workplace, expectations of a good leader or a good politician need to be revised."
There is no question that change, shaping, fine-tuning is necessary. However, it goes much further than that. I translate: the state must transform society, its norms, and the personal relationship between men and women from above. So, far from doing some kind of neutral politics, the left-wing faction of feminists would do a very active, intervening and worldview-committed politics.
Part of which is the desacralization of the day dedicated to celebrating mothers, mixing it up with their own political issues. Really, if you're equalizing it: in addition to Mother's Day, there's also Father's Day - if someone wants to indulge their egalitarian tendencies, they can celebrate fathers on another day instead of taking theirs away from mothers.
But we know, celebrating parents is not fashionable these days. All the more to blame.
Books such as Orökölt sors and Szabad acarat , or more recently Stolen Childhood by Bea Bibók, are understandably bestsellers these days. A classic on the subject is Toxic Parents by Susan Forward.
Until then, things are fine, and their usefulness is indisputable, as long as these books and the therapies that aim to heal and override transgenerational traumas and bad family patterns aim at healing and correcting imbalanced states.
The family is not perfect, as it is made up of people, and a well-chosen sentence, a good psychologist's insight or recognition causes an aha experience for many, it can help to solve the problems we have been carrying throughout our lives, after we realize what was the problem until then. All this is welcome. Bea Bibók directly articulates her hope that a generation can finally grow up that consciously reflects on family wounds, on its own way of functioning, and consciously tries to develop and live its human relationships. We can say: maybe he will not remain a prisoner of his schemes.
The problem, however, is that they don't stop there.
Susan Forward's Toxic Parents is of course about parents who are "functioning" in extreme and clearly bad ways: abusive alcoholic parents, for example. The author points out that the relationships and marriages of the children of such toxic parents often do not work because they always choose a partner who is in the toxic parent's way of working. And they choose this unconsciously because this is what they know. The bottom line from our point of view is that it is clear to an outsider that what goes on in these families is not normal, the parent is really toxic.
On the other hand, in the recent Hungarian literature on transgenerational trauma and bad family patterns, every parent appears to be a toxic person who spoiled the upbringing even a little, or did not meet certain expectations - which had not even been formulated in his own age - and was not "enough" a good parent”.
Parentheses: the word "toxic" is originally a terribly bad, Anglo-Roman word import (see also: toxic masculinity and others), moreover, in Hungarian it has not only a passive meaning, as e.g. in the case of the word connection "poisonous substances", but as an adjectival participle (e.g. well poisoner) it also assumes an active and conscious, i.e. malicious action, deliberate malice. That's why everyone gets confused by the phrase "toxic parent".
We would think that being a "good enough parent" means that we don't have to be perfect as parents. Except
here even the perfect parent appears as a toxic parent, as one who over-cares his children.
So a good enough parent is better than a perfect one. We understand that in contemporary psychology, survival is a subjective matter, if someone is very hurt by a childhood memory, has been traumatized by it, has planted a bad scheme in him, we do not compare it to other ways of treatment. But the question still arises in our mind, why the parents of children who grow up in relatively well-functioning, loving, drama-free families, yet for some reason are "parentified", i.e. take on adult roles, should also be "detoxified" with noble simplicity.
Surely all parents who parentify their children despite their best efforts and good intentions are simply "toxic"?
Just because it's different to be the child of an abusive psychopath or a chaotic, neglectful alcoholic, and to be the child of a predictable, caring, loving mother, who may have been "parentified" herself, so she also parentifies her child, I do that, she assigns tasks to him in the household, or prioritizes performance.
Of course, there is no need to idealize our parents. Of course, if necessary, it is worth confronting them. Sure, sometimes you can mess with them. To rewrite the family "dynamics" and therefore take on the conflict.
But we have strong doubts that the solution to the world would be to "face" the fact that our parents are definitely "toxic" if they failed to raise securely attached children. Are you sure that it is not possible to use more sophisticated terminology, and to use a less toxic adjective for more moderate "cases" instead of "toxic"? Can't you fine-tune the wording? Especially in our age, which is sensitive to alleged "microaggressions", isn't it a microaggression to detox all guilty parents?
And this also includes the latent world-changing attitude found in all enthusiasm.
If we face our pattern and deal with it and put our parents in the right box ("toxic"), then we have dealt with the past and the future will be brighter, because the new generations are already "more aware" and dare to turn to professionals. That's all well and good, but the outcome of the matter is unclear. After all, it's apparently difficult to be a "good enough parent", and you can't lump all family relationships together and offer a universal remedy.
Some people manage to process their traumas, get out of their patterns, others don't; or, on the contrary, to compensate, they fall over to the other side of the horse, even causing wounds to their child.
So it does not look like we will solve the transgenerational problems once and for all, and the wrinkles of humanity, or at least of Hungarian society, will be smoothed out. Humans are fallible, and parents coming out of the new generation who process their traumas and correct their schemas are also fallible. The next generation may also be more aware that they will turn to a specialist.
If the Christian idea of "transmitted sin" can be grasped somewhere in practice, it is perhaps the point where transgenerational problems are transmitted. It is possible to improve ourselves, but not to eliminate all this once and for all. Individuals can be helped, there is no universal solution, and although psychology is very useful, but
psychologists are not the new clergy, and they will not save the world.
The Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhrral Moral Man and Immoral Society emphasized against the rationalist-scientist-psychological views: the individual person may be able to perfect himself, perhaps even small communities, but a larger human-made group never can due to the law of large numbers. leave behind the problems arising from our fallibility, imperfection, and sinfulness. And this, although Nienuhr writes more about interests, also includes psychological problems. Of course, this also makes psychology very important, but it doesn't matter what ambitions we go into, because excessive expectations can easily lead to disappointment.
Let those who need therapy go, let's just read these books, let's be more aware, and may heaven bless the work of psychiatrists. But perhaps we should think that although there are toxic parents, most "not good enough" parents are just imperfect and fallible. Let's say: human. Mother and father.
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