I woke up on Sunday morning and, while gathering myself, I looked at The New York Times (NYT) app, which has disappointed with its wilful one-sided reporting since October 7, 2023. Still, it is better than the desi news portals. For Indian news, I prefer to wait for the physical newspapers. The NYT magazine carried a long-form interview, and its headline made me want to bellow with rage.
It read: “Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson Thinks Compassion for Parents Can Be a Trap.” She is a psychotherapist who shot to fame with her 2015 book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. (In fact, it went viral after other therapists TikTok-ed it.) Trust the Americans—with their culture of overeating, reckless spending, and oversharing (and the daily Trump show)—to extend their infantilism to the public space and make therapy the USA’s actual first language. Maybe I am generalising a bit, but many Indians who have an Usha Vance or three immersed in Americana may agree with me.
The book’s premise is that “parental immaturity has negative ripple effects for children that can last into adulthood.” I do not disagree that parents can be immature; we are all human, after all, and no one gives you a user’s manual when the first baby arrives. But in India, immaturity is the default position—be it man or woman. A man is spoilt by his mother from the moment he is born. Part of it has probably to do with a woman trapped in a hostile home where her husband provides no intimacy (this may explain a messy divorce recently featured on social media); she transfers her intimacy to her son, and he neglects his eventual wife, who then transfers her intimacy… Well, you get the picture.
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About 30 years ago, a cousin married a doctor from the US; he was a mama’s boy despite being born and raised in the Midwest. Even after they married and moved to their own apartment, his mother would arrive unannounced at his office with tiffin comprising rice and chicken. In a corner, she would feed him—with her hand—and occasionally, while he chewed, she would comb the front of his mop with her fingers. This is a true story. They eventually divorced because he was a gambling addict and violent; I do not know if his mother still feeds him with her hand.
What about love marriages, you wonder (or “arranged love” marriages)? From the way women complain on social media, I can safely conclude that all men revert to infantilism as soon as they finish the seventh phera. Which man that you know has betrayed the patriarchy? I will wait.
The Indian advantage
But India’s advantage over America is that we are an older civilisation and have more experience in dealing with loveless marriages and infantile behaviour. We simply ignore it and carry on as usual. We do not blame our parents for their lifelong emotional immaturity because, in India, that is the default position.
There is no question that we would, as Gibson suggests in drastic cases, break off our relationship with our parents entirely—just to get out of the cycle of emotional immaturity or to get out from under the weight of that psychological monster that lurks over our shoulder: having an emotionally immature parent. It does not matter if our parents are egocentric; it does not matter if they are oblivious to empathy for their adult children, themselves burdened with life’s challenges. We simply cannot think of breaking with them entirely (though we may give ourselves some space from time to time).
In India, we see flawed parental behaviour as a bug in the programme, not something, as Gibson suggests, that exists on a spectrum that extends all the way up to emotional immaturity. We do not pathologise it; giving it such a label merely seems to reduce a whole lifetime of actions, responses, and behaviour to something unidimensional—for which there, one day, might be a quick-working antidote to feed to the emotionally immature parent.
This is not to say that in India, we do not have a problem; we do, but it is a general societal problem. We believe what our Great Leader tells us, even if he/she talks rubbish. We assign our boys and girls definitive gender-based roles, and in any case, there is no scope for self-expression because all youngsters spend years preparing for an exam so that they may burn wads of cash in their official residence.
In India, if a parent has a need, the (adult) child need not be told to be there, because they are still the parent’s kid. Americans may call this a moral obligation; we take it as a sacred duty that there is no scope for questioning.
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The strength of Gibson’s book is to suggest that these cultural stereotypes are not absolute: “that all parents love their children, that they only want the best for their children, that they put their children first, and that children can depend on their parents to be there for them when no one else is.” Yes, none of these are absolutes, and none of us match the ideals they presume.
But American psychotherapy drives some adult children to a black-and-white conclusion: that it is better to cut parents off or have zero contact. This absolutism is a prevailing trend online, only adding to its smog of negativity—a smog evidenced in the recent Netflix show, Adolescence, with a dire consequence. We in India know this is not helpful. The real path is the one we each take, stumbling and discovering, bit by bit, the emotional immaturity of our parents. If we don’t see it in shades or degrees, it may become a self-fulfilling destiny.
Last, the best way for a person to change is through self-reflection, which can only come if they have a sense of self, “an awareness of who I am”. I have no quibble with that, though in today’s world of nastiness and infantilism, I do not see much hope in most of humanity gaining that self-awareness.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.
