It’s well known that parents can inflict lasting emotional pain on their children. Parenting is an awesome moral responsibility that both tests and reveals our character. But so is being a good child. Just as children need encouragement and approval from parents, moms and dads also want and deserve validation from their kids.

Yes, it’s natural for maturing children to become preoccupied with their own lives and with liberating themselves from the physical, psychic and financial control of their parents. And good parents support emerging needs for independence. But none of this frees children from the basic responsibilities of kindness, courtesy, respect and gratitude.

Self-absorbed youngsters — teens and young adults — often convince themselves that they are too busy or poor to be attentive to parental emotional needs. They just don’t get around to making thoughtful phone calls or getting symbolic birthday, anniversary and holiday gifts (it’s not the cost but the thought that counts to parents). And because their parents forgive them, they think what they did was okay. Well it isn’t.

Good parents — the ones who are easiest to hurt — don’t change their lives in thousands of ways when they have children to earn the gratitude of their children but such devotion makes thoughtlessness more hurtful. King Lear in a moment of despair utters an age-old truth: "How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child."