79 yo Robert De Niro is "good with" likely leaving his new child fatherless at a young age
Because having a baby > the life of the baby
People magazine recently reported that Robert De Niro, almost 80, said, "I'm ok with it. I'm good with it," when asked about his latest child being born.
Considering the average lifespan of an American male is 77 years, that doesn’t give De Niro much time with the new baby. And, were De Niro the only one who would be affected by his absence from the relationship with his child, that would be one thing. That would be totally fine - your life, your choice.
But the parent isn’t the only one involved.
There’s the child they leave behind, and the death of a parent when a child is young has long-lasting impacts.
The University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry conducted a 7-year study on the role parental-loss grief plays in a child’s life and found that
the loss of a parent had an early and persistent negative impact on the academic and social functioning of the child that was in part due to the onset of depression within the first two years after the parent’s death.
Additionally,
Children who were less than 12 years old when their parent died were more likely to have depression than those who lost a parent in adolescence. Grieving children also had higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than nonbereaved children at all time points.
Multiple studies link losing a parent in childhood to “suicide attempts in adult life,” with one study finding “that twice as many depressed suicide attempters were parentally bereaved compared with nonsuicidal depressives (66.7 percent versus 33.3 percent).”
Studies aside, here are what some Reddit users said about losing their parents when they were young:
My mom died before I could remember her. I think there's a piece of your identity and development that is missing when a parent dies during childhood.
Losing a parent at any age can be devastating, but there's an additional loss where they are not there for your milestones.
Cancer killed my mother when I was 7 years old. …[T]here's no doubt it is negatively affected me much more than positively.
I'm just a couple birthdays shy of 60 years old. I don't believe a day has passed in my life since the death of my parents when I have not wished to speak to one or the other of them.
I wish my children had been able to meet my parents.
Cancer killed my father when I was 7. It’s hard to say how it’s affected my life, as my memories of my dad are sketchy, so it’s kind of like he’s always been gone. I do feel like I missed out on knowing who he was as an adult, rather than having a child’s perspective of her daddy. I learned not to ask my mom about him too much because it made her so sad.
My dad died of pancreatic cancer when I was 7, creating an unfillable hole in my life. It was the single most tragic and damaging event in my life. I guess I've really never recovered. I was left angry, feeling that life is unfair, overly sensitive to perceived slights, fearful, paranoid, uncomfortable socially, and as you can probably tell, burdened with lots of self-loathing.
Etcetera.
It would be unsurprising if I were called ageist for writing this, or if someone were to tell me it was cruel or judgmental to say such things about a man who just had a baby, because that’s how we view having children in this country - having them is always good, always right, no matter what the circumstances (black plague? plague babies!). It’s how we are.
And that we are that way should seem, to anyone with empathy for children, unusually cruel, considering it is the children who will suffer the conditions we selfishly bring them into.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy my novel The Age of the Child.
“Something interesting and endlessly thought-provoking that The Age of the Child captures are the multiple sides of pregnancy — wanting to be pregnant, not wanting to be pregnant, and what right the government has in controlling pregnancy. This isn’t the first piece of dystopian fiction to consider these questions. The Handmaid’s Tale and The Farm, to name a couple, have opened the dystopian genre to questions about reproduction; however, The Age of the Child is one of the first I’ve read to really consider the issue of reproductive rights and attitudes so deeply.” — Goodreads Review
“Scathing social commentary.” — Goodreads Review
Spot on, as always.
I wonder if he wasn't rich and famous, would she still have a baby with him...