Empathic Parenting

You Can Never Get Enough of What You Didn't Want in the First Place

...At present, families are disintegrating at a rapid rate under the impact of economic pressures that force both father and mother into the workforce, easy divorce, constant mobility and rootlessness, and the new ethic of selfishness. The task of caring for and initiating children is increasingly turned over to professionals, as both mother and father choose to centre their identity in the economic rather than the familiar.

More accurately, the crisis in the family goes along with a modern re-definition of "economic". The word "economic" originally meant the art and science of managing a household. Under the impact of the omnivorous market-mentality, it changed its meaning and became "the production, distribution and consumption of commodities". The subversion and destruction of the family can be measured in the distance between these two definitions - between home economics and corporate economics...

...No number of products, money, or abstract goods satisfies us. This is the fundamental mistake we make in substituting the economic for the familiar as the root of identity. Economic man is driven by insatiability because, as my friend Anne Valley Fox says, "You can never get enough of what you didn't want in the first place". Beyond the level of comfortable survival, goods become a substitute for the primal goodness we were denied - familiarity, intimacy, kindness..

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