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polymathwannabe comments on Where is the line between being a good child and taking care of oneself? - Less Wrong
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You don't seem to have done anything wrong to them. Keeping your distance to protect yourself may appear selfish from their perspective, but that's their opinion. In my experience, parents cannot be changed. They will always believe that they did the right thing.
It's a very Catholic thing to regard children in debt to their parents for the noble abnegation of raising you and feeding you (which is their legal obligation anyway, so nobody should get extra points for doing it); also, it's typical of parents to interpret disagreement as defiance. It's an irrational stance that does not respond well to attempts at argumentation.
Now that you're an adult with your own children, you can find the support and approval you need in the friends you choose to have. At least, that's what worked for me. Make your own life and your own meaning, apart from them. You don't owe them obedience anymore.
In many countries it is legal to give one's kids up for adoption, so this is not true.
Just because we have penalties for non-compliance does not mean there cannot also be rewards for compliance.
If you choose to keep your child, it is your legal obligation to raise and feed (and cloth, etc.) your child.
Right, but you could have given up the child. The child would then either be raised as a ward of the state or adopted by another couple. Children raised by the state generally have inferior life outcomes,* so by raising them yourself you save them from this negative-expectation fate.
Conditional on not giving them up, you have this legal obligation, but you do not have this obligation unconditionally. If praise is warranted for good acts that are legally optional, you deserve praise for not giving up your child.
*though people might reasonably argue that is more because of genetics than anything else
edit: formatting
Now this is part is surprisingly relevant to me.
One version of family history says I was an accident (so there was a choice: should they bother with abortion or keep the baby and marry). The other version (never spoken aloud) says she used me to marry my father. I always wanted to believe the first one (and so oblige her to love me since she chose me), but the other made somehow deeper sense.