What "The Giving Tree" Gets Wrong About Love and Happiness

There are few children’s books as beloved as Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. According to YouGov.com, it is the 35th most popular children's and young adult fiction book in America, and it has sold more than 14.5 million copies worldwide. Though, you don’t need statistics to know this. For most of us, you can just re-read the book to know it is a classic.

The tree gives everything it has to the boy – its apples, branches, even its trunk. After each act of giving, we are told, "the tree was happy.” Such is the effect of unconditional love…

When I was young, I thought the tree was the hero of the story. I thought it taught me good parenting, and it became the standard by which I judged my own parents. As a parent now myself, I’m no longer so sure I understood the book correctly.

In fact, each time I re-read the book, I become increasingly convinced that The Giving Tree is not a model of healthy love. I believe it is a cautionary tale about what happens when we confuse love with self-erasure. Moreover, the warning is not only for those of us who are the tree. It is also for the little boys who grow into men.

“And the boy loved the tree…very much,” says the book, but the story does not show that the boy actually loved the tree. It shows that the boy liked what he got from the tree. Starting with the boy’s teenage years, the only time he comes to see the tree is when he needs something.

The boy has a consumption view of love. His focus is on the benefits the tree brings to his life, not on the tree’s well-being or what he can give to the tree. When those benefits disappear, the relationship becomes vulnerable. Think about how often he leaves for a long stretch of time. Even as the story comes to an end, the boy-turned-old-man visits the tree, not to give it company but to use it as “a quiet place to sit and rest.” This is because the basis of attachment is always consumption rather than genuine concern for the other.

The tree, on the other hand, has a self-sacrificial view of love, because, as my daughter would say, the tree “gives and gives until there’s nothing left.”

This continual give and take – where one side gives and the other side takes – establishes a pattern where there are no boundaries or opportunities to develop one’s personal identity outside the relationship. The tree’s happiness and sense of purpose depend entirely on the boy’s presence and approval, and the boy’s happiness and vision of a good life depend on what he can take from the tree for his own well-being.

Psychologically speaking, the dynamic between the tree and the boy looks much closer to what is popularly referred to as "codependency" than to love and happiness. Codependency occurs when a relationship becomes structured around one person’s continual giving and the other’s continual receiving, creating what many believe to be an unhealthy imbalance of care and responsibility (though there is some controversy on the topic). Codependent parent-child relationships can stunt a child’s emotional development, since children see their parents’ behavior as templates for how they should build connections and engage in relationships later in life. This means that codependency can become a learned behavior passed from one generation to the next.

What makes codependency difficult to recognize is that it can often look virtuous. The codependent person appears generous, caring, and selfless. Their behavior is sometimes even celebrated by others. Just think about how many of us have read The Giving Tree with admiration for the tree! Yet, we must recognize the line between selflessness and self-sacrifice and between caring and controlling. Even if each individual act seems generous, the tree’s pattern of behavior does not allow the boy to develop his own autonomy and concern for others.

This does not mean that parents should hold back their love for the sake of their children’s development. You cannot care too much about another person’s well-being, but you can become so consumed by your children’s needs that you neglect your own, as well as their needs to develop and grow. When that happens, love becomes unhealthy self-erasure and troublesome parenting.

Healthy relationships do not require equal exchanges in every moment. Parents obviously give more to relationships than infants and small children. Yet, over time, children grow up, and healthy relationships must begin to include mutual recognition and care. For the sake of their own future relationships, children need to learn to see each person (including their parents) as more than just providers. They need to see others as people whose well-being matters as much as their own.

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The boy never develops that recognition. In the end, the boy ends up alone and tired, sitting on a tree stump.

The reason that I, and many readers, find The Giving Tree so moving is that we recognize something noble in the tree’s devotion. We admire its willingness to give. We want to be loving, generous, and selfless people. Yet perhaps the most important lesson in The Giving Tree is not that love means giving everything away. Maybe when we read the book to our children, we shouldn’t end with the last line, “And the tree was happy...” and then turn off the lights. Maybe when we finish the book, we should ask them if they would be happy if they were the tree…or if they were the boy.

We could then start to teach them that healthy love does not leave one person depleted and the other dependent, but rather leaves both people more fully themselves.