Independence

Where and when does the individual become submerged by the influence of what is going on around them.
At birth we are drawn into our mothers obit by our need to feed and receive the protection a mother provides. Gradually we sense the family, the father and our older siblings as we begin to recognise the part they play in our lives. Slowly these relationships expand to include the friends of our brothers and sisters and on attending school, the children in our class. And so it goes on this ever expanding world of relationships. Eventually we have special friends and then someone very special who we decide we want to form a bond with. Children come along and new bonds are formed with our kids.
Life has been a succession of interconnections some of them rewarding some of them painful couplings but within all these interconnections the 'individual' is submerged in the social role of responsibility to society at large.
Are we happy to be the person who is always playing the part thrust upon them or do we some-times wonder what became of the 'inner you' which is there but remains out of sight, usually content to play second fiddle for convenience sake. 
As we adjusted our desires for the sake of others, and for the sake of our conscience, do we miss a great opportunity. The "old maid" who relinquished her life to look after a parent is at one extreme but there are so many people who get drawn into the social construct of doing the "right thing" that their lives are in danger of floundering before it has begun.
Socially we are told that an person who is independent and some would say self centred, is a lesser person than the time warn carer but is that just a social construct fearing the loaner because they seem self sufficient. And does that self sufficient person also have to be selfish ?
Well they could be but is being selfish a bad trait if it only means that the need to bond is weaker.
If we were all more independent would we grow to better recognise our own potential and not fail in the 'second guessing' which is a necessary part in the need to compromise as we try to get along.
Thrusting the child away into boarding school at an early age is, (by the class which takes most of the prizes and surrounds itself with most of the material benefits), an attempt to distance the child from the automatic parental backstop and make the child 'independent'. Success of a sort is bound up in separating the child from his environment and supplementing the family with a larger family of peers on which other wider relationships help foster gains in later life.
To the devotee of a close loving family this is a myth, where the bond with close and extended family is itself the bedrock for a happy secure life but as we atomise our family into wider and wider orbits I wonder if our current template isn't out of date.