@hjbau wrote:
I don’t think that Regina is a good mother. Just because she won’t physically harm him is not enough for me. I think that she thinks she loves him, but i am not sure that she really does. She is perfectly willing to hurt him to get what she wants and she at the very least is pretty neglectful having no clue where he is most of the time. She is the Evil Queen though and a murdering crazy sociopath so it works.
And honestly i don’t think she gets points because he turned out alright. Henry can still choose to turn out alright even if his upbringing was not good.
You basically wrote what I was going to, but I just wanted to write that I agree. I think it’s definitely possible for a person to turn out good even if his/her childhood was awful or in Henry’s case, his parent wasn’t a good parent. Likewise, a person can turn out pure evil even when he/she comes from the best home and has great parents. Sometimes it’s just a roll of the dice. I think in Henry’s case, luckily nature was more of a factor than nurture, so in that way I think he’s very much like Emma since she had an awful childhood but still turned out to be a good person.
I also don’t agree that Regina is a good mother. Just because she took care of his physical needs doesn’t mean anything to me since she obviously wasn’t taking care of his emotional needs, and I think that was even before he found the book because of the very thick file that Archie had on him. He’s only a 10 year old boy, so I don’t think things were going right between them for quite awhile to amass such a thick folder.
I think Regina really wants to love Henry, and I guess she does in her own way, but it’s not truly love because I don’t believe she can actually love anyone once she made the choice of killing her own father. This is why until the finale I was very fearful about what she might do one day to Henry if he continued to live with her. After the finale, it did seem like the writers were making sure to show that Regina would never actually physically hurt Henry, but this is a woman that killed her own father and was willing to use her true love’s ring, the last reminder of him, to get rid of her son’s biological mother, so I’m still fearful that if Regina were desperate enough to get something, she’d go through with hurting Henry physically. So I am a very happy that the writers didn’t have Emma going through a long drawn out custody case over Henry which she probably would have lost anyways, and just had everyone get their memories back to solve the problem of Henry having to live with Regina. Also, in Henry’s case, even if Regina would never hurt him physically, she certainly has no problems hurting him psychologically, and I’m sure won’t have any problems continuing to hurt people that he cares for. So that’s another excellent reason that he shouldn’t have to stay with her.