We Need Love, But We Also Want Independence

As a result of China’s effective “birth-control”, most Chinese families have one child. Children in these single-child families get a lot of attention and love from their parents. While we don’t deny the fact that parents’ love is a natural part of a child’s growth, too much love could do just the opposite. Too much love from parents may increase a child’s dependency on his or her parents and exert pressure on the child.

To begin with, if we get too much love from our parents, we will never become independent. We rely on our parents for everything. They will plan for us, cook for us, wash clothes for us, and sometimes even make beds for us. This may make some sense when we are still young and unable to take care of ourselves. But, eventually, we’ll have to leave our parents and start our own lives. Many of us will continue our studies in universities in other cities or even in other countries. Who is going to wash clothes for us then? Who is going to make beds for us then? The answer naturally lies in ourselves. Our parents are not going to be with us all of our lives. So, we need to become independent and to start our own lives as early as possible.

Furthermore, too much love from parents can turn into pressure. Parents’ love is, in the mind of a child, expectations. Every parent expects their children to do well in school. This is one of the main reasons why our parents are always prepared to do everything else for us. They want us to concentrate all our time and attention on our studies. What if we didn’t do well? What if we didn’t get a good score in our exams? We may experience a sense of betrayal. Why? Because our parents have done so much for us, and expect us to reciprocate with good examination results! Parents don’t understand that their excessive love has actually turned into pressure in a child’s mind. Take one of my good friends as an example. Her parents love her very much. They satisfy all her material needs. Their only request is that she get good marks in examinations. My friend also loves her parents. She feels that she must study hard to please her parents. So, she studies with intensity all day. She rarely has time to play with us. Though we see her studying all the time, her results are not satisfactory. In the end, she failed in the High-school Entrance Examination. She feels that she has “lost face” in front of her parents. This is really pitiful. Had her parents let her grow in a natural way, the result might have been totally different.

So, we can see from the above examples and reasons that although we need love from our parents, too much love may become an obstacle to natural growth. We live in the shadows of our parents. What we really need is a stage of our own, both materially and mentally.