Book 14 makes a strong reciprocal claim: parents are not perfected by possessing children but by children who freely return filial piety. The child’s love unifies parental love, life, and lineage in embodied form.
That means filial piety does more than honor a hierarchy. It completes a circuit. The parent gives life downward; the child returns love upward; both sides are perfected in the exchange.
This is one reason the book treats the disappearance of filial culture as so serious. It is not only children who are diminished. Parents are left unfinished too.