Meeting one's history from the other side

Meeting one's history from the other side

The child, inheritance and the responsibility of transmitting

Introduction

We readily tell the relation between adults and children as a downward movement. The former give life, transmit a language, values, a culture, habits and ways of inhabiting the world. They protect, educate, guide and accompany. The child receives, learns and builds itself. This reading grasps an essential dimension of transmission, but it leaves in shadow all that the presence of a child transforms in return.

A child never enters a family as blank material destined to take the form given to it. It arrives with a temperament, rhythms, sensitivities, needs and ways of reacting that are its own. Its presence modifies daily organisation, redistributes attention, shifts priorities and confronts the adults with situations they had sometimes never met. Educational gestures influence its development, but its responses likewise transform the conditions under which the adults pursue their own history.

This reciprocity does not place child and adult in equivalent positions. Nor does it entrust the child with the task of repairing a family, revealing a secret or accomplishing a spiritual mission. It leads rather to thinking of transmission as a dynamic in which several temporalities meet. The child enters a history begun before it. It receives traces, narratives, habits, resources and constraints from it. Yet, because it cannot be entirely deduced from what preceded it, it introduces new conditions into that history.

Parenthood then appears in another light. It does not consist only in forming a being in the making. It also obliges the adults to meet their own inheritance from the position of those who transmit it. This displacement makes certain automatisms more visible, sometimes gives another reach to old wounds, and opens the possibility of inventing responses that were not received. What is at stake is not to free oneself entirely from the past — an ambition as illusory as it is undesirable — but to understand how it continues to act and what it becomes when another being must henceforth live with its effects.

What is transmitted, and what is not

To say that a child carries « the DNA of both parents » remains intelligible in ordinary language, but the biological reality is more precise. The child does not possess two complete genomes juxtaposed. It possesses its own genome, constituted from the chromosomes transmitted by its parents. During the formation of the reproductive cells, meiosis redistributes those chromosomes and recombination creates new associations of genetic variants. The child thus receives elements from two parents and, through them, from several family lines, but their combination takes part in the formation of a singular organisation. It is neither a copy, nor an average, nor the mere addition of those from whom it comes.

This biological singularity nevertheless contains no family narrative. A child does not receive in its DNA the memory of a bereavement, the recollection of a humiliation, the content of a secret or the meaning of a conflict lived several generations earlier. Genes do not preserve sentences that were never spoken. They do not explain why some families avoid a subject, why an emotion becomes hard to express, or why a fear continues to orient behaviour long after its initial cause has disappeared.

Biology intervenes otherwise. It takes part in the formation of dispositions, sensitivities and vulnerabilities. Stress reactivity, certain aspects of temperament, activity level, inhibition and attention have biological dimensions. None of these traits reduces, however, to the action of an isolated gene. Their development depends on multiple interactions between genetic variation, prenatal life, the maturation of the nervous system, lived experience and the responses of the environment.

The word « disposition » suits better here than « parameter ». A parameter suggests an already fixed value. A disposition designates a possible orientation, liable to be reinforced, modulated, compensated or transformed. The child does not come into the world with a psychological destiny inscribed in its chromosomes. It arrives with a set of potentialities that will meet particular conditions. From that encounter will emerge a history that none of the initial elements allowed anyone to foresee on its own.

Biology therefore opens a field of possibilities without writing the story that will unfold within it. It contributes to certain ways of being affected by experience, but it contains neither the meaning of that experience, nor the interpretations that will be given to it, nor the responses the child will learn to build. Between biological inheritance and lived trajectory lies the whole space of development, relationships and culture.

Epigenetics between biological traces and family narratives

Epigenetics today occupies an important place in discussions of intergenerational transmission. The term is sometimes invoked as though it explained how the traumas, emotions or memories of one generation would be directly inscribed in the biology of the next. Such a reading conflates several levels.

Epigenetic mechanisms take part in regulating the activity of genes. They play a fundamental role in the development and functioning of cells. Their existence shows that genetic expression depends on a dynamic organisation and that it can be influenced by many factors. It does not demonstrate that a psychological experience would be transmitted with its content, as though a cell preserved the narrative memory of an event.

Some research has observed associations between difficult experiences and differences in certain biological markers. Other work explores the possibility of intergenerational effects. In human beings, their interpretation remains delicate, since genetic, prenatal, social, economic, cultural and relational influences are intertwined. Separating what arises from a transmitted biological mechanism from what depends on living conditions, educational practices, family narratives or shared environments remains particularly difficult.

Two excesses must therefore be avoided. The first turns epigenetics into a mysterious memory of lineages, able to carry the meaning of a trauma intact. The second reduces it to a negligible phenomenon. Between these two simplifications, a more rigorous position acknowledges that experiences can leave biological traces without confusing those traces with the narratives, emotions and interpretations that circulate within families.

A family suffering can extend itself along many routes. It can influence forms of attachment, reactions to danger, educational habits, silences, expectations and material conditions. An adult who grew up in insecurity may become extremely vigilant. That vigilance may then organise the relation with the child, without any precise memory having been transmitted by the cells. The past then acts through learned responses, reconstructed environments and meanings that perpetuate themselves.

The distinction between trace and narrative becomes decisive here. A biological trace can take part in a sensitivity, a vulnerability or a physiological response. It does not contain the meaning that the experience will take on for the person living it. That meaning is formed in relationships, in words, in silences, in the available explanations and in the way a family faces or avoids its history. Human transmission arises from this interweaving. It engages biology without reducing to it, and mobilises narratives without being able to ignore the bodies that carry them.

The child as a third trajectory

The expression « third trajectory » is of interest only if it does work that the notions of inheritance or development do not suffice to produce separately. It designates here the passage from a set of transmissions to a new history, endowed with its own dynamic and able to modify the milieu from which it comes.

The child is first a singular biological organisation. It comes from two parents without constituting their sum. That singularity then becomes a developmental trajectory shaped by interactions that did not exist before it. Finally, that trajectory introduces into family life needs, rhythms, reactions and possibilities to which the others must respond. Novelty is therefore not limited to the genetic combination. It continues in development and extends into the effects this person produces around them.

To speak of a third trajectory does not amount to inventing a third lineage or detaching the child from its origins. The term rather designates the way an inherited legacy changes status when it becomes the history of a singular being. What comes from the past never reproduces itself identically. Dispositions meet new experiences, family expectations meet an unexpected temperament, and old rules are subjected to situations for which they were not designed.

The child is therefore not a passive product of transmission. Through its singularity, it introduces into the family system conditions to which the others must adapt. This influence confers on it no particular responsibility for the transformations that follow. It indicates only that its existence modifies the space of possible relations. Some habits are reinforced, others become insufficient, new ways of acting appear. The family system does not merely receive an additional member. It must reckon with a trajectory that cannot be entirely reduced to what preceded it.

This notion thus makes it possible to link three dimensions: biological novelty, the openness of development and the transformation of the relational context. It reminds us that a being can be deeply issued from its history without being condemned to reproduce it, and that it can take part in transforming its environment without becoming responsible for what the adults will do with that transformation.

Inside, yet newly arrived

The child is sometimes described as an external witness able to reveal family incoherences or unspoken things. The image has a certain force, but it blurs the place the child actually occupies. From its arrival, the child belongs to the system. Its presence modifies the relations between the adults, transforms daily organisation and contributes to the formation of new habits. It does not observe the family from outside. It grows up inside its effects.

Its position nevertheless remains singular. The child is structurally inside, but historically newly arrived. It did not take part in the events that produced certain rules. It does not know the origin of certain silences, fears or reactions. It discovers an already constituted organisation and meets the present consequences of histories it has not lived.

This offset sometimes gives it a different view, not because it is external, but because it arrives afterwards. A rule that has become obvious to the adults may seem incomprehensible to it. A tension around a subject may draw its attention precisely because it does not know the reasons for it. An emotion may seem disproportionate to the present situation, while being rooted in a past to which it has no access.

Adults have often learned to live around a bereavement, a conflict, an absence or a wound. Over time, some adaptations lose their exceptional character and become the family's normality. The child may ask a question that has become unusual, notice a mismatch between an explanation and the emotion accompanying it, or feel a tension without being able to name it.

It would nevertheless be misleading to make the child a privileged revealer. Not all children question silences. Some adapt to implicit rules, others elaborate their own interpretations, and some long carry the effects of a history they do not understand. Their newness gives them no privileged access to family truth. It explains only why they may find strange what the others have learned to regard as normal.

The child therefore holds neither the key to the past nor the responsibility of deciphering it. Its position as newcomer may render certain elements visible, but it imposes on it no task of understanding or repair.

Relational loops: what they reveal and what they produce

A linear view seeks a point of origin. An anxious adult would make the child anxious. An oppositional child would provoke the severity of its parents. A rigid upbringing would by itself explain a difficult behaviour. Such influences exist, but they become insufficient as soon as one observes interactions over time.

Family relationships are built through loops. A worried adult may become more controlling. The child then reacts with more fear, withdrawal or opposition. That reaction reinforces the adult's worry, which increases the control further. Each response becomes one of the conditions of the next. The effects produced come back to modify the initial situation and progressively orient everyone's expectations.

An unacknowledged fear may become an implicit rule. A repeated conflict may install the idea that the other is hostile or ungrateful. A repair may restore a security that the rupture had weakened. One and the same interaction, reproduced over time, sometimes ends up building the reality it seemed only to confirm. Family members no longer react solely to what is happening. They also respond to what they now expect to see happen.

The relation can bring to light what already existed, but it can also engender new realities. An old fear, an implicit expectation or a difficulty tolerating uncertainty may become visible in an unprecedented situation. In that case, the encounter reveals. But not everything that appears was already present in hidden form. The relation also creates habits, attachments, tensions and capacities that did not exist before.

An adult may discover a patience they had never had occasion to exercise. They may develop a new vigilance, learn to repair after a conflict or, on the contrary, shut themselves into a control they had never known in that form. Some elements are revealed by the relation. Others are produced over the course of its history. To confuse the two would be to suppose that every change was already there, waiting only to be discovered.

Transformation does not always begin with a conscious decision. It may settle in through the accumulation of daily gestures. Altering one's rhythms, responding each day to new needs, repeating gestures of care, gradually giving up a reaction that has become ineffective, or learning to come back after an argument sometimes transforms habits before the adult can name what is happening to them.

Consciousness is therefore not necessarily the starting point. It may come later, when the adult notices that they no longer react in the same way, that an old rule has lost its obviousness, or that a new gesture has become natural. Reflexivity then makes it possible to give meaning to the change, to recognise its limits and to choose what deserves to be continued. Becoming other may be a consequence of the relation before becoming an assumed orientation.

Not all loops, however, have the same possibilities of evolution. The capacity to recognise one's own emotions, to distinguish the child's behaviour from the intentions attributed to it, to bear a share of uncertainty, to come back after a rupture and to ask for support can favour more supple responses. Chronic exhaustion, isolation, material insecurity, accumulated stress and rigid interpretations often reduce the margin available for modifying one's habits.

These conditions impose no outcome. They merely remind us that relational transformations do not rest on will alone. Families live in concrete environments, have unequal resources and bear constraints that alter their possibilities of adaptation. Understanding a loop does not amount to looking for a culprit. It makes it possible to identify how responses reinforce one another and where another dynamic might become accessible.

Meeting one's history from the other side

Before caring for a child, adults are already the heirs of a history. They have received ways of loving, protecting, correcting, reassuring and interpreting the world. They have known certain presences and certain absences. They have learned what could be said, what had to remain discreet and what was better never shown. Part of this learning has become so familiar that it no longer appears as an inheritance.

As long as they occupy mainly the place of those who received, this history can remain interior. It belongs to their memory, their wounds and their ways of building themselves. The arrival of a child displaces that position. The adults remain the heirs of their past, but they also become the possible relays of that past. What they lived through may henceforth organise, sometimes without their knowing, the relational world of another being.

An old fear may take the form of excessive protection. A humiliation may influence the way of correcting. An absence may produce a difficulty in attaching or, on the contrary, a constant need for presence. A control once undergone may be reproduced almost identically. It may also provoke a reaction so strongly opposite that it engenders another form of constraint.

Adults do not cease to be the children of their own history when they become parents or figures of care. They meet it from a new position. What was transmitted to them becomes one of the materials from which they respond to another's needs. Their past then changes in reach. It no longer concerns only the way they learned to live. It takes part in the conditions under which a child builds its own security, its expectations and its ways of entering into relation.

An intimate suffering does not become a fault because it produces effects. It nevertheless acquires a relational dimension. A wound may influence a rule, a fear may orient a decision, and a defensive habit may become a child's daily climate. Recognising this continuity does not amount to condemning the adult. It makes it possible to understand that a personal history never remains entirely private when it durably organises the relation with a dependent being.

Meeting one's history from the other side then consists in perceiving what certain responses become when they no longer protect only the person who learned them, but also shape another's environment. This displacement can be painful. It sometimes obliges one to look with new lucidity at behaviours that had long seemed natural, necessary or inevitable.

From the imagined child to the real child

Even before its birth, the child often exists in the adults' imagination. It will share certain passions, possess certain qualities, receive what its parents did not receive, or avoid the difficulties they went through. It will sometimes realise possibilities that remained inaccessible to those who await it. These projections may be tender, generous and protective. They become constraining when they enclose the child in a role conceived before it can manifest its own way of being.

Then a singular person arrives. It has its own rhythm, preferences, needs, fears, capacities and limits. The real child never corresponds entirely to the one who had been imagined. The gap between the two may then reveal certain expectations. It sometimes shows that a form of help also contained a desire for control, that a worry expressed a difficulty in trusting, or that a project presented as generous also answered an unfinished aspiration of the adult.

This gap obliges us to distinguish gestures that ordinary language readily confuses: transmitting and reproducing, guiding and moulding, protecting and preventing, accompanying and possessing, recognising the child and seeking to recognise oneself in it. Learning does not necessarily come from a lesson the child would deliver. It often arises from the difficulty of welcoming a person who does not exist to confirm our own history.

Loving the real child sometimes presupposes giving up part of the imagined child. That renunciation represents neither a failure nor a loss of interest. It opens a space in which the child can progressively become something other than the extension of a parental project. The adult retains educational responsibilities, transmits landmarks and formulates hopes, but accepts that the other cannot be entirely contained within the expectations that preceded its existence.

Sorting an inheritance is also a work of mourning

The arrival of a child obliges no one to examine their past. Some adults question what they received. Others repeat, avoid, minimise or become rigid. Some seek to do exactly the opposite of their own parents and discover that opposition does not always suffice to change the logic.

Inheritances are not reproduced only by imitation. They can persist in inverted form. A person who grew up under excessive control may refuse every limit for fear of reproducing what they underwent. Yet absolute control and the complete absence of a framework may arise from the same difficulty in building a supple relation with authority. The content changes, while the structure remains.

Sorting one's inheritance therefore does not amount to keeping what was pleasant and eliminating what caused suffering. One must also understand the functions certain habits fulfilled, the constraints they answered and the consequences they produce in a different context. A rigid rule may have maintained a form of stability in an unpredictable environment. An emotional distance may have protected someone who had no space to express their vulnerability. A very high demand was sometimes perceived as the only protection against failure or exclusion.

Understanding the function of a response does not amount to justifying all its consequences. That understanding rather makes it possible to recognise that an adaptation may have been useful at one time and become constraining later. A strategy that helped a child survive its environment does not necessarily constitute an adequate way of accompanying the child that adult cares for today.

Sorting therefore carries a dimension of mourning. Even rigidities, wounds and defence mechanisms sometimes belong to the adult's familiar landscape. They took part in their construction. Some preserved a sense of belonging. Others provided coherence in a world that lacked it. A way of reacting may continue to offer the security of the known even as it now produces suffering.

Giving up reproduction sometimes demands abandoning the idea that an inherited way of loving, protecting or educating would be the only legitimate one. This displacement can arouse a feeling of disloyalty. Choosing more gentleness may give the impression of condemning those who were harsher. Apologising to a child may seem incompatible with authority when no adult ever apologised to us. Authorising speech may seem dangerous in a family that built its stability around silence.

The adult may thus remain faithful to habits that hurt them, not because they entirely approve of them, but because they maintain a link with their history. Modifying them may give the impression of betraying those who transmitted them or of denying the person one has become thanks to, despite or through them.

Mourning does not, however, demand erasing these parts of oneself. Not transmitting a wound does not amount to denying what it helped to build. An old protection can be recognised without continuing to govern. A rule can become a memory rather than an obligation. An automatism can lose its exclusive character and join a wider repertoire of possible responses.

Sorting an inheritance then transforms the function of the past. What imposed a conduct can become an understood history. What silently organised the relation can be named. What seemed inevitable recovers the status of a situated response, born in certain circumstances and open to revision.

New ways of acting often remain uncomfortable. A person raised in harshness may feel weak when choosing gentleness. A person used to control may confuse trust with abandonment. Someone who could never show their vulnerability may feel profoundly clumsy when trying to welcome a child's.

Not repeating therefore implies bearing a period in which the old rules no longer suit while the new ones are not yet familiar. The adult leaves a game whose reflexes they know before mastering those they are trying to invent. Transformation rarely advances in the form of a sudden revelation. It is built in ordinary gestures: interrupting an automatic reaction, recognising the influence of an old fear, distinguishing the observed behaviour from the supposed intention, asking for help, coming back after a rupture, apologising and repairing what can be repaired.

From mourning to the creation of a new inheritance

Sorting an inheritance is not limited to interrupting certain repetitions. It carries a creative dimension. When a rule ceases to appear as the only possible response, other ways of protecting, listening, accompanying or setting limits can be tried.

This new space produces nothing automatically. Abandoning an automatism may bring more freedom, but also uncertainty, guilt or a sense of emptiness. The old at least had the advantage of being known. What remains to be built does not yet have sure gestures, familiar language or proof that the hoped-for effects will appear.

The creation of a new inheritance never starts from nothing. Adults are not only the heirs of their family. They have also been shaped by an era, a culture, social conditions, institutions and collective representations. They have received conceptions of authority, work, success, vulnerability, education, solidarity and the future. These inheritances may complement one another, contradict one another, or lose part of their relevance as the world changes.

Transmitting therefore obliges one to reckon with several temporalities. Adults carry the world that built them, accompany a child in the present world, and try to anticipate the one in which it will have to live. They transmit not only what they received or understood. They also try to make possible capacities they judge important for a future they nevertheless cannot know: autonomy, critical thinking, cooperation, suppleness, the capacity to bear uncertainty, to ask for help or to revise their own certainties.

These choices are always partly fragile. They rest on wagers about what might help another being preserve its capacity for adaptation. The adult acts without being able to verify immediately whether the landmarks transmitted will remain relevant several decades later. They must accept that some convictions will become insufficient, that some responses will age, and that the child will one day understand the world differently from them.

Creating a new inheritance therefore does not consist in writing the next generation's trajectory in advance. It is rather a matter of transmitting resources without enclosing the future in a single model. A break with the past can, moreover, produce a rigidity of its own. A family may abandon an authoritarian tradition while instituting an obligation of success, autonomy, openness or happiness. The content changes, but the logic of control remains.

A deeper transformation becomes possible when transmission ceases to replace one norm with another and seeks instead to preserve the capacity for revision. The breach does not lie in the child. It appears when transmission ceases to believe itself obliged to reproduce itself identically and becomes able to question its own rules.

The child can then inhabit that space in its own way, develop possibilities the adults had not anticipated, and produce responses that were neither foreseen nor intentionally prepared. The next generation never receives a future free of all influence. It receives an already organised space of possibilities, whose limits may be more or less open to transformation.

No new inheritance becomes definitively right. The responses invented today will produce their own effects, their own limits and perhaps new rigidities. Those who receive them will in turn have the right to examine them, keep them, modify them or abandon them. A living transmission does not seek to prevent that taking-up again. It leaves those who come after the possibility of continuing the work.

An asymmetric responsibility within a collective transmission

The relation between adults and children is reciprocal, but responsibility is not equally distributed. The child influences the adults. Its temperament, its reactions and its needs take part in family dynamics. It does not, however, occupy the same position, the same degree of power or the same protective function.

This asymmetry does not rest solely on a greater capacity for understanding or regulation. An adult's capacities may be diminished by illness, trauma, exhaustion, precarity or certain limitations. The relational position provides a more robust foundation. The adult who assumes a function of care and decision acts toward a dependent being who did not choose the conditions in which it grows up.

The adult's real possibilities modify what it is reasonable to expect of them and the support they need. They do not remove the child's needs for protection. When those capacities are strongly diminished, practical responsibility must sometimes be shared or taken over by other adults, relatives, professionals or institutions. The responsibility of protection and moral guilt are not the same thing. The first answers a position and a need. The second depends more on the constraints lived, the means available and the real possibilities of acting otherwise.

Transmission is never played out exclusively in a face-to-face between a parent and a child. It takes shape within a network of relationships, supports, norms and institutions that reinforce, qualify or compensate what is lived within the family. Grandparents, siblings, blended families, foster families, relatives, teachers, professionals and communities also take part in the conditions under which the child grows up.

Some families have a stable circle around them. Others build their supports outside classical parental models. Still others experience an isolation that concentrates on a few people a relational burden no family should have to carry alone. The possibilities of transformation therefore do not depend solely on individual will. They vary with material resources, accessible supports, the stability of relationships and the quality of institutions.

A society also transmits. It transmits through the living conditions it creates, the norms it imposes, the supports it makes available and the vulnerabilities it allows to accumulate. To speak of parental responsibility without considering that environment would risk turning a collective problem into a strictly private ordeal.

The circularity of relationships in no way reduces this asymmetry. A child may involuntarily modify an adult's emotional state. It does not thereby become responsible for the way that adult acts on the basis of what they feel. Recognising everyone's influence does not amount to distributing responsibilities in equal shares.

The responsibility of adults does not demand perfection. It includes the capacity to repair. An adult may be wrong, lose patience or repeat a behaviour they had promised themselves to avoid. The break with the past is not measured solely by the number of errors avoided. It also appears in the capacity to recognise what happened, to come back to the child, to restore the bond and to modify what can be modified. A more conscious transmission is not a transmission without failings. It simply refuses to turn its failings into indisputable rules.

Freeing the child from any mission of repair

To say that a child transforms the adults around it becomes dangerous when that idea assigns it a mission. The child was not born to heal a family wound, save a couple, give meaning to its parents' existence or repair their failures. It must not become the guardian of their emotional balance.

When a child implicitly receives the responsibility of reassuring, consoling or maintaining the adults' stability, the relation risks being inverted. It may learn that its needs come after those of others, become excessively attentive to the emotions of those around it, and believe that family peace depends on its behaviour.

Recognising that its presence transforms the environment does not require it to carry that transformation. It can make a tension visible without having to resolve it. It can contribute to the appearance of new dynamics without being charged with guaranteeing their outcome. A relation often transforms those who take part in it, without any person having been created to fulfil that function.

The child may reveal certain elements already present and take part in the emergence of new realities. It does not thereby become the official interpreter of the family past, nor the person responsible for repairing it. The meaning adults give to their own transformation belongs to them. It must never become a debt imposed on the child.

A note on the word « soul »

The reasoning developed so far does not need the word « soul » in order to hold. Biology, developmental psychology and systemic approaches already describe a large part of the phenomena evoked. Keeping this term therefore requires acknowledging that it fulfils no scientific function here.

The word belongs rather to the language of lived experience. Some people use it to designate what engages their deepest relation to themselves, to others, to their history and to what they choose to transmit. In that register, speaking of a transformation of the soul does not imply that a child would have been sent to deliver a lesson or accomplish an invisible project.

The term adds no explanation to the mechanisms described. It can offer a language to the experience of an adult who discovers that an encounter displaces them, modifies their way of understanding their past and transforms their way of responding to the presence of another being.

The soul might then designate the capacity to let oneself be transformed by an otherness without reducing that otherness to an instrument of one's own repair. It is not a matter here of defining a substance or resolving a metaphysical question. The word names an ethical requirement: to let the encounter modify us without imposing on the other the mission of saving us.

Conclusion

The child receives a history that began before it. It inherits biological dispositions, a relational environment, narratives, rules, silences and ways of interpreting the world. None of this, however, suffices to determine what it will become. Its development builds a singular trajectory and introduces into relationships new conditions to which the others must respond.

Adults remain the heirs of their own history while becoming the possible relays of what it contains. Their past does not disappear when they care for a child. It changes in reach. Once protective habits may become constraining. Familiar rules may lose their function. Certain loyalties must be understood before they can be transformed.

This work sometimes involves mourning, not because one would have to erase what one has been, but because a history can keep its value without having to go on reproducing itself in the same way. Understanding the past does not annul it. It makes it possible to alter the place it occupies in the present and the form in which it will continue to act.

Transmission reduces neither to the faithful repetition of the past nor to the claim of freeing oneself entirely from it. It consists in recognising what deserves to be preserved, what must be re-examined and what remains to be invented. That invention promises no perfection. It advances through ordinary gestures, hesitations, acknowledged errors, repairs, and the acceptance that the next generation will in turn transform what it has received.

The child is neither the origin of a breach nor the trustee of an already written future. It is a person who enters a history without being reducible to it. The responsibility of adults consists less in fabricating what it will become than in creating conditions sufficiently protective, sufficiently open and sufficiently aware of their own limits for a new trajectory to develop.

A fruitful transmission does not claim to have found definitive rules. It preserves the possibility of questioning them, leaves errors the possibility of being repaired, and grants those who come after the right to transform what they will have received.