Suing Parents

Children went from being our employees to our bosses, replacing responsibility with entitlement.

by Rabbi Benjamin Blech for aish.com

Parenting isn’t what it used to be.

In a fascinating new book by Jennifer Senior, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, the author tells us that the concept of family life as we now know it didn’t really begin until after World War II when the idea of childhood, as we now know it, first made its appearance.

Throughout most of our country’s history children understood that their role took for granted the notion of reciprocity. In the earliest days, they worked in the fields while at the same time helping to care of their siblings. With industrialization, their contribution to the family’s income came, at a very young age, from jobs in factories, in mines and in mills, in street trades and the very popular task of delivering newspapers to neighbors. All in all, everyone understood that the relationship between parents and children was asymmetrical. All were partners in the difficult task of assuring the needs necessary for their mutual survival.

Better times produced not only an economic but a psychological transformation as well. Children were no longer expected to contribute anything. They went from being helpers to total dependents who had to be spared any of life’s hardships. The way social historians describe this transformation, they went from “useful” to “protected.”

Jennifer Senior sums it up this way: “Children stopped working, and parents work twice as hard. Children went from being our employees to our bosses.”

Yet even this short summary doesn’t do justice to the sea change of the parent-child relationship that had its most shocking illustration last week in the judicial system of the state of New Jersey.

Rachel Canning is an 18-year-old who is suing her parents. She brought a lawsuit to force her parents to pay for her private school education and her personal expenses.

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