Which love is stronger and more unconditional: A parent's love for their child, or a child's love for their parent?

Generally, given natural bonding post-partum, a parent’s. Parental love sees beyond child separation, while much of childhood beyond age four and through adolescence is about establishment of a separate personality.

From what I have seen and experienced….A parent’s love for their child.

A parents love for their child is far stronger and more unconditional. Children develop a “mind of their own” growing up, and that doesn’t necessarily include love for their parents.

Neither.

Rather, I should say, there is no baseline that indicates one is stronger than another or even that the love between the two has to exist.

The love of my parents is extraordinarily conditional and I am so beyond the point of putting forth any effort whatsoever. In short, there is no love here!

I would say a parent’s love for their child but then a parent only knows a child for part of their life a child knows the parent all its life.

Seems like it depends on the people more than the role. I certainly can easily think of many examples of it being present or not in both roles, and also of course it’d vary by what you define as a measurement of the unconditionality of love.

@flutherother They each know the other for only part of their life as the parents have lived before they had children and generally die before their children.

I would say for the most part that parents love more unconditionally. of course, there are always exceptions.

@janbb That’s true, but we know and remember our parents even after they have died. In her last moments my grandmother called out for her mother who had been dead for forty years.

@flutherother Aha, I understand your point better now. (BTW, I’‘m in Wales now, want to drop by?)

I do and I would but I’m a long way from Wales at the moment.

I’ll drop by!!

Another way to ask this would be: Can you imagine a circumstance under which you would stop loving your parent?
Can you imagine a circumstance under which you could stop loving your child or children?

@Dutchess_III I have been estranged from my mother for two years. Yes, I can imagine not loving her, I haven’t for a long time. There have been many many stories on Fluther from people who don’t love their parents.

I can imagine it. Glad I never had to live it.

I can imagine both those circumstances, but I am pretty sure they aren’t going to happen, due to the nature of the people in question and our relationships.

I have been close to people with really hard relationships with their parents and children, rarely with a complete lack of love. I often have thought that with some of the things that family members (especially parents) have done, I’d probably be very hostile and/or avoiding if I had parents that did that. They often haven’t, though, even when I’d say they had reason and it’d be a better choice at least until the parent gets healing and changes.

I think though that love is sort of (or can be) a separate thing from horrible behavior and what one does about it. Even with other people’s atrocious parents or twisted children, I get that there is a human inside who ideally would not do what they do, and so I can hold a bit of theoretical love or at least sympathy for them as people who are messed up, even if I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them in the state they’re in, think they’d best be imprisoned, or everyone might be better off if they fell into a volcano full of molten lava and incinerated.