One thing I’ve learned from being a parent is that people don’t appreciate kindness or generosity that they can just take for granted as part of the structure and entitlement of their personal universe. It doesn’t change them either. There’s no personal element, so it conveys no personal enlightenment. They don’t receive it from someone as anything other than the nature of life and fate, and therefore they cannot truly appreciate it.
Generosity like that takes no root in your heart and germinates no life in you that you can give to another. Kindness and goodness abstracted and made into a condition of being just becomes another part of the terrain that you don’t really see and take for granted. It becomes parts of the walls and floor that you see in minimal navigatory detail.
I’m someone who really appreciates systems and collective action, and I really appreciate abstraction. I prefer to think in generalities and avoid the concrete and personal. And I wondered for a long time why my own father always insisted that there was something about personal generosity and care, both as the giver and the receiver, that was essential to what people truly needed. I spent ten years keeping his words in the back of my mind. And it wasn’t until I had had children for ten years myself that I suddenly understood. Having children gives you insights into the mind of humanity you might otherwise not get. Or at least refuse to admit.
Making Nobody Happy 