having

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Hi,Are these examples alright:"My daughter was sent to attend a boarding school, staying with her grandparents in the weekends and having little parental care and love for the better part of the past four years.""My daughter was sent to attend a boarding school, staying with her grandparents in the weekends and being deprived of parental care and love for the better part of the past four years." ?Thank you.

Avangi · Accepted Answer

Using "was sent" and "for . . . . the past four years" leads me to suggest "having had" and "having been deprived."

It's an interesting exercise in tenses.

I'd also suggest "during the weekends."

"My daughter was sent to attend a boarding school, staying with her grandparents during the weekends and having had little parental care and love for the better part of the past four years."

"My daughter was sent to attend a boarding school, staying with her grandparents during the weekends and having been deprived of parental care and love for the better part of the past four years."

I know it's not exactly satisfying. you'd like to have the parallel present participles, "staying and having" and "staying and being."

A better solution would probably be to use two sentences:
". . . . during the weekends. She had little etc."
". . . . during the weekends. She was deprived etc."

Edit. I've decided the perfect participles don't work. We need the parallel structure if we're to keep the "single sentence" structure.
So if you're comfortable with it, try using the two sentence structure with the simple past:

"My daughter was sent to attend a boarding school, staying with her grandparents during the weekends. She had little parental care and love for the better part of the past four years."

"My daughter was sent to attend a boarding school, staying with her grandparents during the weekends. She was deprived of parental care and love for the better part of the past four years."

What do you think? (There is something to be said for the long sentences.)
I'm sure you'll get some other opinions on this.

SuperESL · Answer

Thank you so much for your incredibly detailed reply. I appreciate it.

I have a problem with using "having had" or "having been," as in:

"My daughter was sent to attend a boarding school, staying with her grandparents during the weekends and having had little parental care and love for the better part of the past four years."

"My daughter was sent to attend a boarding school, staying with her grandparents during the weekends and having been deprived of parental care and love for the better part of the past four years."

My feeling is that when one uses 'having' this way, one is referring to something that happened before the event described in the previous clause. So, for example, I would read the examples above as saying that after having been deprived of parental care and love for almost four years, my daughter was then sent to a boarding school. But what I am really trying to say is that my daughter spent most of the past four years in a boarding school and that during those years she went to her grandparents during the weekends and were deprived of parental care and love. My preferred sentence is:

"My daughter was sent to attend a boarding school, staying with her grandparents during the weekends and deprived of parental care and love for the better part of the past four years."

In this example both "staying" and "deprived," I believe, are participles and so form a nice parallel. But I am not completely sure.

Thank you.

CalifJim · Answer

SuperESLMy daughter was sent ...

As you have already been discussing in this thread, there are some problems with those sentences. There are three points you want to make, and there aren't enough simple relationships between them to put them neatly into one sentence: sent to boarding school, stayed with grandparents, little parental care. Keeping as much as possible of the original, I would write this:

Arrangements were made for my daughter to be sent to a boarding school, staying with her grandparents on weekends. As a result, she had little parental care and love for the better part of four years.

CJ

SuperESL · Answer

Thank you.

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