CHILDREN WHO DISPOSSESS THEIR PARENTS

BLOG #37, SERIES #5
WEDNESDAYS WITH DR. JOE
CHILDREN WHO DISPOSSESS THEIR PARENTS

September 10, 2014

Such cruelty has always been with us, but never, at least to my knowledge, has it been as wide-scale as it is today. Just in my own circle of family, friends, and acquaintances, the following examples have either recently taken place or are taking place as I write this:

A son and his wife are so eager to get the aged mother’s money that they gradually take more and more of it until they reach the point where they even begrudge her continuing to enjoy her health. They move her into assisted living, then openly talk in front of her about how much she is costing them, and tell her that she should hurry up and die! Which she, broken-hearted, proceeds to do.

A multimillionaire begins to fail some in terms of his mental-edge; fortunately, he has a wife who loves him and cares for his needs. The children, however, cannot wait for their father’s life to run its course. They force their father to divorce his wife so they can evict both of them from their home, put him in a “rest home,” where he’s dying with very few people who even come to visit him.

A multimillionaire begins to fail in his mid-nineties; he has plenty of money to pay for care-takers, and plans to eventually die in the home he’s lived in for most of his life. Not content with this, his children fire the caretakers and evict their father, in order to be in position to liquidate his property and use that money for themselves now rather than later.

These are just a few cases to illustrate my point. It used to be the norm that the aged were revered, admired, and looked up to in society. In many societies that is still true today. But in America, all too often, greed trumps relationships, and violates the commandment to honor their father and mother.

I can’t help wondering if the trashing of traditional marriage, epidemic of live-in relationships as the new norm, and skyrocketing divorce-rate, is not resulting in a new House of Horrors for the aged. Some of the cases I’m referring to don’t fall within the disintegration of the home category, but I’d venture to say that most of them do. Since 99% of children pattern their own behavior on that of their parents, if their parents live me-first, my gratification-first, lives, it should not surprise us to discover that life has a way of coming full-circle: as we dish out to others–think children–, so it will be eventually dished back to us.

I haven’t even mentioned another all-too-sad reality: the greed-related animosity and hatred that results when one sibling is perceived to have received more from a parental estate than did another. My father, who was a minister, often told us how monetary value of an item is bad enough by itself, but when you stir in sentimental value, a twenty-five-cent item can result in driving a permanent wedge between two siblings. That’s why my parents kept urging us to choose ahead of time which items we wanted from their possessions while they were still alive so that there would be no relationship-wrecking among us after they passed away. We are doing the same with our children.

I don’t have any answers for all this–only sorrow that it is happening on such a wide scale in America today.