If the consequences are something that will affect you - an unplanned grandchild that you will have to help financially support, or a drug or alcohol habit that will lead to your safety or wellbeing being put at risk - then you SHOULD be asking questions and wanting the answers!
No, I am looking at each action by Catholic standards. Why would I look at one action with one standard, and the other action with a different standard and then compare the two?
Sometimes children don’t have to ask for their parents’ help to get an education. It’s the parents who offer to help their children because they love them and want them to succeed in life. If the parents are well enough off to be able to help, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. I have copies of a number of deeds from early 18th century Massachusetts in which members of my family transferred property to their sons “For and in consideration of the fatherly love and affection which I do bear toward my loving son.” They did this because they wanted to get their sons off to a good start in life by setting them up with a farm. Lots of parents still help their children out for “love and affection.”
I lived with my parents for the whole time I was in graduate school which was quite a long time. It might not be a common thing, but then most other graduate students I knew didn’t have parents who lived within easy commuting distance of the university they attended. And as to whether I had to live according to my parents’ “rule of life” while I was living with them, I’m not sure what their “rule of life” was. I don’t think that my parents ever had any real rules that they told me about when I was growing up, probably because I was always a pretty easy child who rarely caused my parents any problems. I didn’t drink, use drugs, use foul language, stay out late, get into fights, cause disturbances in any of my classes, etc. Like the title of the classic account of “growing up gay in America” by Andrew Tobias which was first published in 1973, I was “The Best Little Boy in the World”. Tobias explains in his book that his parents praised him when he was a child as “the best little boy in the world” because he was always studious, polite, well behaved, and deferred to elders. That sounds like me, although I was a little bit spacey sometimes because I have ADHD (Predominantly Inattentive Type).
True. And there are just as many wills where children are cut off without a cent for things along the lines of entering a relationship which was deemed inappropriate. And so plenty had the same dilemma than as now.- deciding whether the relationship with bf or gf was important enough to risk parental disapproval or not. Not an enviable position but it doesn’t make the stricter parents necessarily wrong.LilyM:
Sometimes children don’t have to ask for their parents’ help to get an education. It’s the parents who offer to help their children because they love them and want them to succeed in life. If the parents are well enough off to be able to help, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. I have copies of a number of deeds from early 18th century Massachusetts in which members of my family transferred property to their sons “For and in consideration of the fatherly love and affection which I do bear toward my loving son.” They did this because they wanted to get their sons off to a good start in life by setting them up with a farm. Lots of parents still help their children out for “love and affection.”
This sort of thinking is rather brutal. Please, do not say these things to your children, I have seen many women choose abortion because their parents expressed exactly these sentiments.
My husband saved sex for marriage & we married while he was still working on his PhD. Sure we lived on a shoestring. So? We were young & happy to make it work. We even got pregnant right away. It was an adventure but I wouldn’t trade it for anything!
There are a lot of people in this thread who seem to worry that parents might end up spending any money to help their adult children (i.e. in getting an education, etc.) or their grandchildren. I never asked for financial help, but my parents were always very generous nonetheless.LilyM:
This sort of thinking is rather brutal. Please, do not say these things to your children, I have seen many women choose abortion because their parents expressed exactly these sentiments.
The problem is that these days those who disagree on morals tend to mutually write each other off as irrational–or small-minded or lacking in charity or fill-in-the-blank. You’d think that no one believes that people of good will could possibly have serious differences on the important questions of life. Considering how few of us are approaching sainthood, there is a bit of irony in that!
Normal by secular standards?
If you lived somewhere that belonging to the KKK were the norm, would that make it OK?
My point is that what people find to be abhorrent depends a great deal on the attitudes around them.
Inspired!! The world would be a different place if more people followed this counsel!!
It’s also evidence that there are indeed things she considers bad enough to give anyone living in her house the choice of continuing or leaving.
