The women of Knots Landing may have had some admirable qualities but most of them were very poor mothers. Lilimae: abandoned Valene and Joshua to become a star in Nashville (which never happened) and didn't bother to connect with her children again until they were adults. By that point Valene had become a co-dependent mess and Joshua was an abuser. Valene: you'd think Val would be sure not to repeat her mother's mistakes but you would be wrong. Val ends up abandoning Lucy, leaving her with to grow up to be a spoiled brat. Sure, Val was an unwed teenage mother going up against the powerful Ewings but couldn't she have arranged some sort of visitation? She couldn't even see her daughter on her birthday or Christmas? When she gets another chance at motherhood with Bobby and Betsy she let's them think their father is their "Uncle Gary" leaving it to her third husband - a rapist and murderer - to reveal the truth. Karen: first she kicks her step-daughter Annie out of the house. Then her overprotective and overbearing nature drive her daughter Diana into the arms of sociopathic killer Chip. Both her sons grow up to have "mommy issues" resulting in Eric marrying a carbon copy of his mother. Michael appears to have no conscious when he has an affair with his brother's wife. Karen instigated a high speed chase with her foster son Jason which nearly cost him his life. I wonder how Meg turned out?
There is a lot more...only some of them were evil partly because of the way they treated their children: - Anne Matheson used Paige (and her belongings) in every possible way, and didn´t hire a detective when her daughter was presumed drowned. "And I´m the Queen of England". That too. - Ginger Ward wanted a baby so much that, a few months after giving birth to her, became obsessed with having a singing career that seemed out of the blue. Wasn´t she a kindergarten teacher (or something like that?)? - Ruth Sumner Galveston was the perfect "mother" figure of the lot: she lied to her son about who his dad was, then she presumably allowed Paul to abuse (and impregnate) her daughter Claudia (I can´t remember exactly), spent her life from one African safari to another, and eventually, she treated daughter-in-law Laura as pure trash. You used to be a gem, Ruthy darling!
Val did not abandon Lucy at all, quite the opposite. She had baby Lucy ripped out of her hands by mercenaries sent by J.R. Ewing, and received a threat from J.R. that he'd kill her if she ever returned to the state of Texas when she tried to take legal action to get Lucy back. Regarding Karen's sons, what Linda was for Eric, Paige had been for Michael. Michael was already a bit wiser to Linda when he had an affair with her, I think, although his attraction to Linda was definitely motivated by her having a similar bossy personality to his mother.
You can see how that damaged Greg, learning that his beloved father Jeff Sumner, who then died in the Korean War, wasn't his biological dad at all, but the vile man Paul Galveston that his mother had been cheating on Jeff with. I can see how Greg coped by becoming a strong idealist in his youth in wanting to right all the world's wrongs (like his then best friend, Mack), before eventually going the other way and becoming an arch-pragmatist interested in power. Greg chose the shortcut to power. while Mack remained the incorruptible crusader.
All the teenagers in the primetime soaps were stupid. Period. Except for Lucy, who always was something else...
