I hope this doesn't die in new 🙁 I originally wrote this as a comment of support to someone being downvoted for stating that absent parents are a serious issue, but I feel so strongly about this I wanted to share my story.
I had absent parents growing up because they had to work or we'd starve. They were “uneducated” so were forced into factory jobs. My main provider of care until the age of 9 was my alcoholic grandfather; a man so inept he picked the wrong child up from nursery when I was 3 and got all the way home with this other kid before he realised it wasn't me. There is way more, and this is one of the tame examples. From age 9 onwards I was my own main care-giver.
I woke up alone, I had breakfast and got myself ready for school alone, I walked to school alone. When I got home I let myself into the house with my own keys (at NINE YEARS OLD), I cooked my own tea, put myself in the bath and put myself to bed by 8pm. All without seeing my parents.
Then on the weekends when I could actually see my parents they were so exhausted they couldn't really be bothered to spend time with me, so I had to play alone and work out how to socialise alone.
This led to me being very vulnerable and landed me on a really dark path that involved me being a victim of child sex trafficking and rape. It has ruined my life. I'm not going too deep into specifics, but I had a complete mental breakdown at age 16, complete with psychotic episodes.
I'm 28 and my life is still a shambles. The PTSD and anxiety make university education very difficult for me to obtain without my feeble mental health collapsing. I've tried entering the workplace about a dozen times now, and the stress and PTSD/anxiety triggers fold me like a house of cards. I'm out of work and have very little future ahead. I'm mentally crippled.
I've been over this with psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists; we have all concluded that the root cause was absent parents. It warped me in so many ways, both obvious and hidden, that it produced an exceptionally vulnerable teenager and young adult.
I think it's important to recognise how damaging absenteeism is for children, and this capitalist system forces both parents to be absent, or for the whole family to go without in a world where there is enough for everyone.
And just for clarification, I love my parents. I wouldn't have survived the dark years without them. They now know how damaging being absent was and they have changed in that regard. But the boat has sailed, as they say, on repairing the damage that has been done.
Please give it some thought, and feel free to share them with me