Carl and Rob Reiner

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From time to time I read the Analects of Confucius, and though I do not fully understand them, yet they move me—possibly because their precepts are so much at variance with our own practice.

Among the most important of Confucian virtues, indeed fundamental to all, is filial piety. This is not exactly the first characteristic of our own culture, and I cannot claim that I practiced it with any great devotion myself when my parents were alive, or practice it even now that they are dead. If anything, we regard it almost as a vice rather than a virtue, as indicating an insufficiently critical independence of mind and a lack of real individuality.

Yet on the rare occasions when we meet with it, when children not only love but revere their parents, we immediately recognize it as something that we wished were more general. When, not long ago, I remarked to a young man (that is to say, a man younger than I) that he sounded very much like his father, he could not have been more pleased. “I worship my father,” he said—who was, indeed, an estimable man. I think that those who have this reverence for their parents are very fortunate. Confucius was certainly onto something, even if he sometimes went a little far.

It is not merely that we as a society have lost our filial piety, but have gone to the other extreme. A friend of mine lived for a few years in the United States and quickly found a line that broke the ice at any party that he attended. After giving his name, he added, “I hate my parents, don’t you?” which was immediately followed by a torrent of complaint or worse about his interlocutor’s progenitors, who were held responsible for all his or her misfortunes or discontents.

No doubt this is the manifestation of a delayed or lasting influence of Freudian psychology, refracted through a thousand films, articles, books, and psychotherapy sessions. Even the most rigid or dogmatic of determinists holds his parents morally responsible for their shortcomings. I have known more than one person who did not know that his childhood was so unhappy, and his parents so deficient, until, for one reason or another, they undertook psychotherapy with a therapist who believed that all human unhappiness derived from upbringing.

Be that as it may, and whatever the cause, an unprecedented number of children (once they have reached adulthood) suddenly break off relations with their parents, often without indicating why. It is as if they had suddenly discovered that their father had been the commandant of a concentration camp, or their mother a poisoner of widows, and that further contact with them would be morally compromising or contaminating.

I don’t know if there was ever a time when relations between parents and children were perfectly straightforward, without complication or conflict; as, for example, when children were obliged to work from the age of 4 because it was economically necessary for them to do so, as in true peasant societies. But parent-child relations have never seemed so fraught as they do nowadays.

Is this because of an epidemic of parental incompetence, ill will, or cruelty? Certainly, I have noticed a pattern that one might call neglect by overindulgence, because denial of something to a child takes more trouble than to accede to its demand. And in my career, admittedly a long time ago, I saw cases of outright cruelty or ill treatment. But somehow it is not the worst parents who are suddenly cut off by their children, but often those who have been good or even very good.

Perfect parenting is no doubt inexistent: Every parent makes mistakes, by being oversolicitous or not solicitous enough; too strict or not strict enough. The perennial popularity (and uselessness) of books about child rearing—to potty train, or not to potty train, that is the question, pace Hamlet—testifies to the difficulty of the task that our biological cousins, the gnus and the kangaroos, do not have. The nearest to a perfect childhood that I have ever heard was that of the child who did not speak and whose parents though he was mute, until at dinner one night when he was 8 he asked for someone to pass the salt. His parents were amazed and asked him why he had not spoken till then. “Up to now,” he replied, “everything has been perfect.”

This captures the part that complaint plays in human discourse. Without it, most of us would remain silent most of the time.

Anyhow, I have read somewhere (so it must be true) that up to 10 percent of young adult children no longer speak to their parents, particularly the male of the species. The question is, why? I am as pessimistic about humanity as the next man, but even I don’t think that humanity has deteriorated to such an extent as to justify so many ruptures between children and parents.

One possible explanation is the advance of psychological reflection in the minds of the young: the way they are badgered into what is misnamed emotional literacy and are encouraged to examine their own feelings with the attention that was once paid to their feces. As if life did not have enough reason for discontent unaided by such reflection, they scour their memories, or their false memories, for whatever can account, supposedly, for their present state of incomplete happiness—complete happiness being, as the World Health Organization definition of health tells us, the normal condition, and indeed the birthright, of mankind.

Hence the scene is set for an answer to the question that animates us all, “Who is to blame?” The abstract and intellectual quest for causes of a phenomenon is nothing, from the point of view of interest (I talk of the majority), compared with the search for the blame for it. A problem without someone to blame is worse than a dog without a tail.

With what relief, and even joy, we discover the reason for our misery! Yes, it’s all our parents’ fault, no need to look further! The psychologists tell us so, and psychology is a science, like biochemistry or mathematical physics. Not, of course, that a psychologist tells us so in so many words: He (or she) merely points us in the direction and encourages us to discover it for ourselves. Eureka!

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).