The celebrated Filipino children’s author René O. Villanueva once wrote a legend on parenting.
In a preface to his collection of stories and plays, Tiktipaklong (1987), he composed a brief account of how children used to reside on the summit of the highest mountain, behind the firmament, as fully realized humans annulled from the Piagetian concept of development. They were never carried in the womb. They were never trained to participate in the world. They are always and already social beings, according to this tale.
Unlike the modernist invention of childhood, all children have been “released” by the Great Light (Dakilang Liwanag) into the world. Offspring of a universe, sentient gifts with autonomy and agency: “Bawat isang batang iniluwal ng Dakilang Liwanag sa tuktok ng pinakamataas na bundok ay may sariling paraan ng pag-unawa sa mga tao, bagay, at pangyayaring darating sa kanyang buhay.” Villanueva made no differentiation between children and adults in terms of their capacity to relate to one another, to things, or to events that engage them. A double paradox was enshrined by the author in a preface to a publication, indebted to traditions of schooling.
The effective fiction that binds the child and the parent is the thrust of obligation. In Villanueva’s myth, he practically exposed parental responsibility as an invention that emerged from the actions of adults per se, never of the child’s existence. Children need no parents, he implied. Labor materializes the desire for parenthood. Parents must weave four threads to cast them high and sturdy enough to reach their child. Each thread is colored, representing the necessary skill, value, material, or support that would secure the child’s safe journey to earth: white for the body; yellow for relationships with others; red for feelings; and green for awareness.
As if they were angels, children abandon peace and abundance to be with mature people who want to care for them. Through their labor, adults invite children to take the risk of being cared for.
Villanueva is most illuminating in his analogy of parent–child relations through the task of stitching, a craft of weaving bonds and links, both affective and sociological. These visuals refuse gender and genetics; instead, texture: threads are fibrous and organic, and can be corrupted by time and negligence.
In my most naive reading, parenthood is ontologically artistic. He hints at the parent-as-artist role, who studies, selects, and maintains forms, materials, and content, as well as partnership: “Bawat bigkis ay hinahabi ng ama at ina sa pamamagitan ng matibay na sinulid ng pagmamahal. Buong ingat nilang pinipili ang bawat sinulid sapagkat dito manunulay ang kanilang anak upang makarating sa kanila. Magkatuwang nilang ginagawa ang paghabi hanggang mabuo ang apat na bigkis.”
The British literary critic and psychoanalyst Jacqueline Rose would concur with Villanueva’s theory on parenthood through her critique of his desire. Rose, who wrote about the impossibility of children’s fiction, reminds us that “[t]here’s no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction,’ other than the one which the category itself sets in place…” Essentially, this literature is “dishonest” by design, meaning as necessitated by its history, institutions, and language, as well as the state that promotes it and the industry that maintains it. When Villanueva tests the form of children’s literature as being for parents and teachers, he suggests that the child could also be a site of panic. Like tantrums, stutters, and outbursts, the terror of childhood is denied to them. Rose notes that we have “rendered the child innocent of all contradictions which flaw our interaction with the world.” Hence, a pedagogy for adult and child, between them and the world, could only emerge from the difficult reality that a child could never be parented in the same sense that the world could never be grasped by rational understanding alone.
I have seen this parenting more and more within accessibility protocols in art institutions. In perverse cases of heteronormative instrumentalization, this obligation collapses into one question: How about the children?
Many years ago, I encountered the absurd intervention of the director of the Prague City Gallery, when she was terrorized into thinking that a shorter version of the classic avant-garde film Emperor’s Tomato Ketchup would be shown in a biennial exhibition. She claimed that the public space, visited by elementary-school pupils, must not be exposed to the “pornographic” content of the post-World War II film that depicts the domination of an all-children, child-led society acting out humanity’s crimes. She must have been rehearsing Villanueva’s parting lines of saving the children: “Iligtas natin ang mga bata! Iligtas natin sila. Ngayon.” Hers, in a purpose of salvation, covering the eyes of the child; Villanueva, in his dry wit and humor, punctuating the call differently—with a declaration of calmness, repeating the slogan as if drawing our attention to a hole in the thread, in the fabric of moral parenting.
Because I will never be a parent and am no longer a child—identities easily charged against me—I take Villanueva’s implicit suggestion that demystifies both the heroism of parenting and the perpetual innocence of childhood. Rereading the preface, I recover his clear and unadorned motif in the story of children and their parents. It is a tale of luck and wonder.
Luck is an unsystematic thought. It remains inhospitable to any origination of disciplinary knowledge, while it receives the accidents of fate in daily life as well as in professional endeavors. We inveigh against the bad luck of artists, and the gambler’s luck of the parents who support them. Luck has since gained a positivist dimension that legitimizes paternal and parental accompaniment to artistic life. It is not surprising that modern art institutions, especially museums and art schools, induct artists as their children. They police childish transgressions and child-like wishes. Institutions must not parent error.
In Villanueva’s legend of parenthood, which I invert from its familiar association as a myth of childbirth and guardianship, the liminality of falling and flying can be imagined when parents and children interact. These two possibilities of adventure outside our traditional expectations are worth a review in a narrative that centers the (re)education of adults. Suggestive of another freedom, following and reframing Svetlana Boym’s proposal, what could be co-created out of human fallibility, parental error, or a child’s violence? When threads falter, or—God forbid—are remade as barbed wire? I recall this when censorship is strategically utilized by curatorial authority to “protect” the mind of the child.
Toward the end of Villanueva’s text, he revealed the negligence of parents in making the threads that endanger children. As a consequence, children no longer take the long journey to their parents. Men and women must conceive them, and care for them until they become independent. In this shift, luck turns into an occasion for greater attentiveness. Luck becomes a propitious moment for action. Parenting an art of attunement. This renders parents and parenthood as well as institutions lucky to raise artists. CS
The author dedicates this essay on parenthood and children in art to his late father, Reynaldo Laru-an (Dec. 5, 1950—Mar. 4, 2026).
