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misplaced social values or a warped concern with status. In some cases,
anger may give motivational strength to action, though this is least true
in the personal realm, where inactivity is not likely to be a major problem.
and where anger can surely motivate people to do things both good and
bad. A person’s capacity for anger can also be a deterrent to another per-
son’s bad behavior— although a relationship of trust that sustains itself
only through fear of the other party’s anger is doomed already.12 But even
when these modest positive roles are present, anger should always be
promptly transcended in the direction of the Transition.
III. False Social Values: Shaming and Control
Anger in intimate relationships often goes astray through a host of false
social values concerning what a wrongful act is, or how serious it is. For
example, the search for independence and even sheer pleasure in child-
hood has often been viewed with extreme disapproval. Similarly, many
cases of anger in marriage involve expectations shaped by unjust gender
roles; women’s search for independence and equality, in particular, has
been found very threatening by men. It is often difficult to disentangle
cases in which anger is inappropriate because the person has violated
some bad social norm but has not done anything really wrong, from cases
in which there is a genuine wrongful act. After all, we are all creatures of
our place and time, and our own intuitions about how children should talk
to their parents, how much independence they ought to have at various
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ages, when sexual activity ought to begin, how wives and husbands
should pursue career aspirations and divide domestic labor— all these are
contingent and fallible. We feel we see clearly what was wrong with par-
ents, and spouses, of an earlier era, when they got angry at things that we
now think appropriate or at least permissible. But we know that we don’t
know what later generations will find wrong with our own attitudes and
values. We must try to make the distinction between anger that is not
well- grounded because the values involved are bad, and anger that is
problematic simply because it is anger. But we know in advance that our
distinction is fallible.
One ubiquitous source of cultural error involves hierarchy and
status. Parents all too often think of children as disorderly beings who
ought to learn their place— which is way below the parent! Many defec-
tive social norms in marriage involve something similar: a husband is
angry because his wife has a job, or earns a good income, or wants him
to share the housework. Such social norms frequently use the fear of
the “superior” party’s anger as an enforcement mechanism, and ritu-
als of forgiveness and atonement are very often used to establish status
asymmetry.
Status- obsession is only partly a cultural construct; narcissism and
anxiety are endemic to human life, and intimate relationships are one
place they are especially likely to surface, because of the great vulnera-
bility they involve. When people establish hierarchies and try to control
others, they are often enacting universal human tendencies in a world
of helplessness. Thus even in the most enlightened of cultures the “road
of status” is a constant temptation. Although such cases of anger are
not well- grounded, they are so ubiquitous and so often endorsed by the
authority of culture that we should not simply brush them aside, but
be on the lookout for them as we analyze cases of anger that initially
seem to be well- grounded. Often, when we look more closely we will
find that what makes anger persist and fester is a hidden thought about
status.
Norms pertaining to intimate relationships are among the most
controversial and uncertain in human life. It does seem clear, however,
that there are some instances of anger in intimate relationships that are
well- grounded, because a genuinely wrongful act has occurred. Getting
angry at abuse, violence, betrayal— but also incivility, or failure of con-
cern and support— is often well- grounded. Although the Stoics hold
that no human relationship is worth getting upset about, and although
I shall agree with them concerning the more casual interactions that char-
acterize the “Middle Realm,” I do not agree here. Friendship, love, and
family relationships are all genuinely important goods, and worth car-
ing about deeply. So wrongful acts that take place in the context of these
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relationships of intimacy and trust are worth serious concern. Often they
will be appropriate occasions for fear, hope, joy, and grief, and anger is at least well- grounded. I shall focus on such cases.
IV. Parents’ Anger at Children: The Prodigal Daughter?
Children make their parents angry. They are rude, unwashed, disobedi-
ent, lazy. They don’t do their homework. They don’t help around the
house. They also do some things that are seriously wrong: telling lies,
stealing, breaking promises, bullying other children. Sometimes they
damage their own future, for example by drug abuse. And sometimes,
albeit more rarely, they commit very serious crimes. So anger is likely to
play a significant part in even the best parent- child relationships.
In addition to the status error I have already mentioned (focusing
unduly on hierarchy), parent- child relationships also involve a signifi-
cant cultural danger in the area of payback. For long stretches of time, in
many domains of Euro- American culture, the relationship between par-
ent and child, at least in some quarters, was modeled on the imagined
relationship between an angry God and the young sinner, often against a
background of a belief in innate sinfulness. Thus Mr. Murdstone, David
Copperfield’s stepfather, regards a boy as exactly like “an obstinate
horse or dog,” who must be made to obey through pain.13 David’s entire
life soon becomes a series of episodes of anger, punishment, and (failed)
atonement. Mr. Murdstone may be fiction, but his attitudes were common
enough during the Victorian era— and for a long time after it, particularly
in the world of the English public school. George Orwell’s essay “Such,
Such Were the Joys” describes as typical his experience as an eight- year-
old child boarding at St. Cyprian’s School, where parental surrogates
made him feel that he had to atone for sin more or less constantly. He wet
the bed, and that was said to be evil, so the young Orwell grew up feeling
that he had a propensity to evil that could not be checked or controlled,
even by the frequent beatings, since he had no idea how to stop wetting
the bed. Thus, he learned that he was constantly the object of (allegedly)
justified anger, and he constantly had to do penance.14
Such attitudes were evidently so common that Anthony Trollope can
depict as idiosyncratic Dr. Thorne’s ideas about children, showing us the
rule through the rarity of the attractive exception:
Among the doctor’
s attributes, not hitherto mentioned, was an
aptitude for the society of children. He delighted to talk to chil-
dren, and to play with them. He would carry them on his back,
three or four at a time, roll with them on the ground, race with
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them in the gardens, invent games for them, contrive amuse-
ments in circumstances which seemed quite adverse to all man-
ner of delight. … He had a great theory as to the happiness of
children. … [H] e argued that the principal duty which a parent
owed to a child was to make him happy. Not only was the man to
be made happy— the future man, if that might be possible— but
the existing boy was to be treated with equal favour.15
Where Dr. Thorne’s heretical views did not prevail, anger was ubiquitous
in parenting, a repressive and controlling anger that took any indepen-
dent movement to be a wrongful act.16
Modeled on a problematic conception of divine anger, this conception
of parental anger involves both anger and forgiveness/ penance based on
misplaced cultural values. Nor did it have the instrumental value often
claimed for it. Control through fear of anger and even violence turns out
to be a very ineffective method of deterrence (Orwell wets the bed all the
more, David Copperfield can’t remember his lessons when Murdstone
is glaring at him), and it is certainly, as Annette Baier says, the sign of a diseased relationship of trust, if we can even speak of trust. We should
therefore put such misplaced- values cases to one side when investigating
more plausible instances of parental anger. But we must bear in mind, as
we do so, that such ideas, in a more subtle form, infect many good cases
of parental anger.
The relationship between parent and child, when they know each
other and live to at least some extent together,17 has huge significance
for the well- being of both. For parents, children are commonly deeply
wanted and loved. They are also a parent’s surrogate future, a way of
being immortal and contributing to the world. They can, however, also
impede parents from attaining well- being in other areas (work, friend-
ship), draining energy and resources, and thus constraining their pur-
suits of other goals— a likely occasion for anger, particularly when
children prove ungrateful. For children, meanwhile, parents are sources
of life, nourishment, health, and security, of education, values, and sup-
port, financial and emotional. Since matters of such great importance for
well- being are involved, the relationship is, on both sides, one of enor-
mous vulnerability.
Trust between parents and children is multiform, and constantly
evolving. When infants are born they have no say in the matter of trust;
they depend utterly on parents,18 and have to entrust them with their
well- being, whether parents are trustworthy or not. Children seem, as
well, to have a kind of natural trustingness, which leads them to bond
with parents unless there is very serious abuse or neglect.19 These atti-
tudes evolve over time, as do the expectations they ground.20 On the one
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hand, children become progressively more aware of what they can and
can’t expect from their parents, and typically see reasons for confidence
and gratitude that had been taken for granted before. But at the same
time, children become more skeptical and withholding, no longer willing
to entrust everything about themselves to parents. This gradual with-
drawal of naïve trust is a part of growing up, but it can be painful to the
parent, who feels increasingly helpless.
The parent-
child relationship is inherently directed toward the
child’s future, and this future- directed focus is auspicious, where anger
is concerned, suggesting ways in which rational parents might move
quickly to the Transition, or experience from the start only Transition-
Anger. But a focus on the future also has its pitfalls, since supporting a
future is sometimes difficult to distinguish from trying to control that
future, particularly in the context of a parental fear of helplessness, as
children move beyond their control. Many sources of parent- child anger
lie here, as children choose a future that is different from the one the par-
ents imagine for them— and one that may not include the parent as a cen-
tral figure. At the same time, despite these pitfalls, one of the best things about the parent- child relationship, where anger is concerned, is that
both parties know the relationship is going to change. Spouses often do
not know or expect this. Parents, by contrast, are prepared for upheavals,
and children are positively eager for them.
Many stages in parent- child relationships interest me, but some
involve complicated worries about the extent to which children are full
moral agents at different stages of their lives. So I shall focus, instead, on children who are indubitably full moral agents if anyone is, that is, young
adults living apart from their parent or parents.
The more independent adult children become— and of course this is
desired, in a sense— the more complete the parent’s helplessness becomes,
since no amount of advice or persuasion can really control the outcome,
even in ways that are highly desirable. If, as I’ve suggested, anger is often a mask for and deflection of helplessness, a way (not a very smart way)
of reasserting control, we can expect anger to be particularly common
when children move out. The combination of intense love and complete
helplessness is greater by far than in spousal relations, where people usu-
ally share deliberations. Indeed, a spousal relationship is unlikely even
to be formed at all if people don’t like thinking about the future together.
On the other hand, there are aspects of the parent- child relationship,
at this stage of life, that augur well for an anger- free future. Although the parent- child relationship is not like a love marriage, and in a way is more
like an arranged marriage, in that neither has really chosen the other,
early symbiosis and long sharing of habits and experiences create both
many similarities of outlook and many deep bonds— as both remember
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trips, jokes, conversations, birthdays, other holidays, all sorts of shared
formative experiences, and the sheer physical intimacy itself of hugging
and close physical proximity, and, often, the memory of early nursing
and holding. Such shared experiences sometimes give anger new fuel—
how could you do this to me when we’ve shared this and this? But they
also create a basis for movement beyond anger to a reinvented future.
One further distinction remains to be made. When parents deeply
love their children, wish them well, and are not in the grip of a distorted
conception of the parent- child relationship, there are two distinct ways in
which they get angry. Hard though it is in practice to distinguish these,
we must try. One involves vicarious ego- investment: the child is seen
as an extension or continuant of the parent, a way of fulfilling pa
rental
aims. The other involves concern for the child’s well- being, present and/
or future. The two overlap, since a central parental aim is often to have a
successful and happy child.
Ego- investment need not be malign, and it can lead to intense atten-
tion and concern, as awareness of mortality makes people grasp at what-
ever seems to give them a hope of defeating death.21 Still, it can easily
become infected by a concern for control, since not all possible futures
for a child are futures that parents will endorse as continuations of them-
selves. From ego- investment comes much anger about choices of careers,
religions, partners. It takes a lot of maturity and inner calm to think that
the best continuant one might have might be a free person who forges
his or her own way. Moreover, investment in an ego- ideal, though not
necessarily competitive, is all too likely to be infected by status- concerns: parents want a child who gets into a college at least as good as those
that accept other people’s kids, a child who looks at least as attractive as
other people’s children— a child who is a source of pride to the parent,
rather than shame. Such anger is not well- grounded. Even though some
cases of ego- investment are benign, involving good values, we would do
well, then, to focus on cases in which the parent is clearly focused on the
child’s flourishing.
Young adult children do things that involve harm to either self or
others. Parents who are not unduly preoccupied with status and control
will find anger well- grounded in many such cases. This type of anger
frequently fits the model of chapter 2: the parent gets angry, thinks briefly that the offending child should suffer, or atone— and then, seeing that
this does not quite make sense in the situation, shifts his or her thoughts
toward the future, asking what type of constructive project might improve
the situation. Often, too, the parent is one step ahead, having Transition-
Anger rather than the garden- variety emotion.
In making this Transition, both of Aristotle’s insights prove helpful.
Empathy with one’s child, which parents often attain to a high degree,
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