The Free Press · https://www.thefp.com/p/the-future-of-the-free-press
A viral column says caring for aging parents runs on reciprocity, not duty. The oldest commandment about family asks a debt you can never repay.
Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land.
Exodus 20:12
The loudest argument about family this fall is really an argument about a ledger. On September 27, Arthur Brooks asked in The Free Press what grown children owe the parents who raised them. His answer was honest and a little cold. Whether adult children care for aging parents, he wrote, is "generally based on reciprocity, not duty."
Nearly one in eight adults now cares for an aging parent, and only about a third of families can afford paid help. The work falls to somebody, usually a daughter, often for years. Brooks is not heartless about it. He thinks caregiving can be "one of life's deepest sources of meaning," and he moved to be near his grown children for his own old age. One of his sons joked about the day his father can no longer take care of himself: "We'll make it look like an accident."
The command to honor your father and mother was never mainly a rule for small children. In its own world it landed hardest on grown adults deciding what to do with parents who had become dependent. The word behind "honor" means weight. You treat the old as still mattering, at the very age the world starts to treat them as weightless. It is a debt you did not choose and cannot repay. The sharper danger is not the child who refuses. In Mark 7, Jesus goes after religious people who had found a respectable way around their own parents.
Mark 7:9-139He said to them, "Full well do you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition.10For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother;' and, 'He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him be put to death.'11But you say, 'If a man tells his father or his mother, "Whatever profit you might have received from me is Corban, that is to say, given to God;"'12then you no longer allow him to do anything for his father or his mother,13making void the word of God by your tradition, which you have handed down. You do many things like this."
The loophole was one word. You could declare your money "Corban," pledged to God, and once it wore that holy label it could not be spent on a parent in need. Duty got dressed up as devotion. The modern version rarely sounds religious. It sounds like a demanding job, a full calendar, a move across the country for better schools. All good things. All able to become the higher reason the visit keeps not happening.
So the command has teeth, and it is still no whip for the exhausted. Honoring a parent does not mean doing everything alone until you break. Its clearest picture comes at the worst imaginable moment. As Jesus was dying, he had nothing left to give and nothing to gain. He still made sure his mother would be taken in, handing her to the friend beside him (John 19:26-27). He honored her when no ledger was left to balance. That is what you owe the people who raised you, whether or not they earned it. And the mercy in it runs two ways: to the parent losing everything but their dignity, and to the worn-out child who was never asked to do it all.