It’s strange to think that love—true, unconditional love—can be so invisible when you have it. It’s like gravity. You don’t notice it’s there until you see someone floating away without it.
The people who grow up with loving parents rarely recognize the enormity of the thing they’ve been given. As kids, they assume that all parents care, that all fathers come home from work and ask how the day went, that all mothers instinctively reach for their child’s forehead when they hear the slightest sniffle. They don’t stop to consider what life would be like without that quiet, unwavering presence in the background, like a safety net they never realized was beneath them until they saw someone else fall.
It’s only later—maybe in college, maybe when a friend offhandedly mentions that they’ve never been hugged by their dad, maybe after meeting someone who flinches at kindness because they don’t know what to do with it—that it starts to sink in: Oh. Not everyone had this.
And it changes the way you see everything.
Because having loving parents isn’t just about the Christmas mornings or the birthday parties or the fact that they paid for piano lessons you quit after six months. It’s about the intangibles. It’s about how you never had to wonder if you were wanted. It’s about how you could make a mistake—sometimes a colossal, cringe-inducing, life-altering mistake—and still go home and be forgiven. It’s about growing up with a baseline level of security that allows you to approach the world not as a hostile battlefield, but as a place where things, generally, will be okay.
There is a kind of existential ease that comes with this. You don’t even realize how foundational it is until you encounter people who never had it. People who spent their childhoods walking on eggshells, never sure if they’d be met with kindness or cruelty. People whose parents made love conditional, a reward for obedience, or worse, a tool of manipulation.
Loving parents don’t just raise you. They fortify you. They make the world feel less chaotic, less predatory. They instill this quiet confidence that you belong here, that you are worthy of respect, that you don’t have to prove your existence to anyone.
And that is a kind of privilege. Not the kind that gets you into Ivy League schools or guarantees you a cushy job. But a privilege nonetheless. Because when you grow up loved, you don’t have to unlearn survival mechanisms that never should have been necessary in the first place.
You don’t have to spend years in therapy figuring out why you can’t maintain relationships. You don’t have to wage an internal war against the voice that tells you you’re not good enough. You don’t have to reconstruct your self-worth from scratch because someone else spent your formative years systematically dismantling it.
People talk about privilege in terms of money, and sure, financial security makes life easier. But the real privilege? The ultimate, unshakable advantage? It’s being loved. It’s having parents who don’t see you as an inconvenience or an extension of their own unresolved baggage. It’s growing up with a built-in belief that you matter.
Loving parents don’t prevent suffering—no one can—but they absorb some of the impact. They make childhood less of a minefield and more of a proving ground. They hold the map while you wander. And, in a cosmic act of generosity, they love you so fiercely that even after they’re gone, even after they leave this world and you have to navigate it without them, the echo of their love still makes you feel safe.
That’s the paradox of good parents: they make themselves indispensable, and then, if they’ve done their job right, they make it so you don’t need them anymore. They raise you to stand on your own, but the trade-off is that you never stop missing them.
Because that’s the thing no one talks about: the better the parents, the greater the grief. The downside of being raised by people who made you feel protected and whole is that, one day, you’ll have to learn how to exist without them. That’s the cost of being loved well. That’s the price of never having to wonder.
But it’s a trade-off worth making. Because for all the ways the world is chaotic and unpredictable, for all the ways people struggle to find their place, there are some who walk through life with an invisible tether—a connection that can’t be severed by time or distance or death itself.
And that? That is what it’s like to have loving parents.