Requirements

Is it really important to be in the debt of gratitude to your parents after they had financed you from your sixteen years of education? Do you really have to give them your earnings as soon as you have your job in spite of receiving break-even pay?

My answer is no. It is their choice, more than the obligation, to educate you until you mature. In the entire course of being a student, were you given a choice by your mom and dad between studying and loitering in this crazy world for your entire life? Absolutely not, your parents decided for you, thinking that getting a degree is the best for you. Whether or not you enjoyed being educated for almost half of your life is beside the point. If you are under a corporate world, I would understand that you will be financially indebted with your superior or provider until you repay them with the same amount with the corresponding interest, in addition to currency adjustments. But on the first place, you are not. Your existence in this world started by belonging to a "family". A family that is 'ought' to be borne out of 'love' ; to underscore, 'unconditional love'. Money is not the primary factor that binds you together, but 'love'. You are not 'transacting' with them all your life like they are a banking institution or as if you are under a professional relation.

Customs will tell you that your parents have finished their mission as parents once you graduated and to the very extent, acquire a job of your choice. Therefore, they must not interfere anymore of your subsequent choices because you already know what you are doing. To note, we recognize being in 7 years of age as 'age of reason', while celebrating 18th or 21st birthday because the sibling is already an 'adult' and is by all means capable of having lives of their own.

When your parents decided to make love and create you in this world, is their reason from the outset is to raise the child with a decent education so that the child, after getting a job, will repay all their expenses to them? If they truly love their child, they will not let him exist just to pay debts to them in the end. They create the child out of love from each other, and the child must be loved in return. And unconditionally love the child, just the way he is (so that he will not be compelled to pretend to be another person) and regardless of the opposing choices he makes when he acquires his own reason. Now, whether or not the child will love them back, in my view, largely depends on how they love their child. Even the 4th Commandment in the Roman Catholic discipline spells "Honor your mother and your father". Given that each word in the 10 Commandments are well thought of by its Author, He must have the reason why He used the verb "honor" and not "love". Our parents are our first superiors, and may be the constant superiors for as long as we breathe, so honoring them for that matter is justifiable.

In this situation, I believe that love is, more than anything, a mere effect. Whether or not honoring your parents transcend into loving them is a mere effect - an effect, which is, again, largely caused or influenced by how much they love you. And if that love triggered your so-called conscience to feel the urgency of sharing your salary with them, no matter how meager it is, well then, it is completely fine. Repaying them literally must not be perceived as a norm. In addition, repaying them is not necessarily a form of love. A sibling can literally overwhelm them with money but wouldn't actually give a damn. A sibling can be greedy like hell but still care for them anyway in the end.

And parents, in return must not be offended or carry a serious grudge at their offsprings, nor curse them for being 'ingrata'. I believe that human beings are receptors of stimuli externally residing in their realm, and at the same time, execute their own force in order to be responded by another body in return. Human relationship is a cause-effect transaction. Whether the reaction is indifference or love is something that must be inevitably accepted by the affected party in the end.