These interlocking narratives address a number of King's recurring themes: families in crisis, imperiled children, the burdens of guilt and grief and the possibility of forgiveness.
Well, you could blame yourself, although researchers haven't been able to link any particular pattern of parenting to children's levels of guilt, says June Tangney, a psychologist at George Mason University.
And why do they saddle their kids with outdated social mores that sentence children to feelings of guilt and failure when they themselves grow up?
This can lead to these children developing feelings of guilt, shame, loneliness, and social isolation.
Another direction for future research would be to investigate why some internalizing symptoms (depressed mood and suicidality) occur more often in children, whereas feelings of guilt and worthlessness/hopelessness are less frequent, even in adolescence.
But neither child — David out of guilt, Lynn "out of a desire to avert the terrible punishment she knew I would receive" — would fess up to Lee about what had happened.
At this moment, any real child's feelings of guilt would be extraordinary.
Sometimes children of alcoholics experience guilt, anxiety, anger, depression, or embarrassment about a parent's drinking.
They opened up about the pain of missing their children, the guilt of missing milestones like birthdays, toddlers' first steps or first days at school.
Some Holocaust survivors shared intimate details of their experience with their children, sometimes with a layer of guilt when there should be none, like when their children misbehaved as all kids do -- "I survived for this?" -- or expressed their own pain -- "You don't know what suffering is".
