2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Author: Alina Farkash
The most progressive mothers decided that it was necessary to "be friends with children" thirty years ago, but today this epidemic has reached an unprecedented scale. Everyone wants to be friends with children! Experienced ones are already bragging about their first results: “I am my child's best friend! He tells me everything! " At these moments I am seized with bewilderment: at what point did people decide that being parents, mom and dad, is worse than a "friend"? I see three trends in this at once.
The first story is about the inability to be adults
People feel that the authoritarian parenting style inherent in many previous generations is already losing ground, it simply does not work in the modern world with today's children. And so they try to invent something new.
They have no idea how to be a parent and at the same time not put pressure on the child, not humiliate him, respect his personality, and therefore they call this - in general, normal, adequate behavior - "friendship." But in this friendship they often go too far, which carries many dangers.
If earlier moms and dads overdid it with pressure and lacked empathy and understanding - most of us can judge the results by our own childhood - now many have gone to the other extreme: they give full understanding, but they do not know how to outline the framework, to be a strong and influential adult.
Usually, such an all-understanding and all-forgiving friendship leads to the fact that mothers cry to their friends and specialists, telling how they are "tamed by yearlings", humiliated by three-year-olds and sent to hell with first-graders.
I went through this in full, I myself, brother, from these. For a long time and sincerely I did not understand why my son, growing up in an atmosphere full of love and respect, a boy who has never been slapped on a diaper, suddenly behaves like an enraged monster. According to my calculations, he should have read and broadcast further my patterns of delicacy and politeness. And he went crazy and adored his kindergarten teacher, who led the whole group in formation and forced them to fold their clothes almost according to the ruler. The child was painfully thirsty … no, not slaps on the buttocks, but authority and confident management.
Therefore, by the way, theories and trainings about alpha parenting are so popular now, where adults are taught to be adults, to make decisions in the face of a stern three-year-old, to guide, not beg, not manipulate, not sulk and not hysteria, if it doesn’t work … … You are a parent and have the right.
The second story is about desperate infantilism
The second reason partly follows from the previous one. Only in the first case, people do not know how to be adults at the same time, but at the same time not be dictators. And in the second, they deliberately do not want to grow up.
Millions of articles and studies have been written about 30-year-old (and now even 40-year-old) kidals. Jeans, sneakers and T-shirts with prints are worn by three-year-old sons, thirty-year-old fathers, and fifty-year-old grandfathers. Although, damn it, I do not dare to call them grandfathers. And, apparently, they too. Therefore, they are friends with sons and grandchildren. Equally! Fun! Democratic! Unlimited!
By the way, this rarely leads to the fact that a freedom-loving and open to the world, self-respecting person grows out of a child. Usually it turns out to be a hyper-anxious neurotic who tries to control everything around him - after all, his adoring and adored parents are clearly not capable of doing this.
I had a colleague to whom an eleven-year-old son wrote text messages: "Cutlets in a thermos in your bag, warm them up for lunch, and don't forget about parenting today !!!" He entered a serious lyceum and was worried that his mother would forget about the interview with the director. Again. Colleagues sighed desperately: how did such a dolt like our Masha manage to raise such a serious and responsible boy? But precisely because a dolt and girlfriend. The child had no faith in her parenting capabilities.
Yes, for all that, this smart, good and responsible boy had an endless allergy to everything, asthma, attacks of something incomprehensible, very similar to epilepsy, Quincke's edema and so on, he was taken to all kinds of research for years - and could not find the reasons … Then they got to an experienced neurologist - it turned out that, yes, yes, psychosomatics: the only moments when my mother behaved like a mother and a responsible adult was when her son fell ill and collapsed, panting, on the floor. It was his body that gave out what he was looking for, so that at least in this way he could get a share of decisive care from his mother.
The third story is about where the boundaries of candor are
All of the above is a history of recent times, which practically did not exist in previous generations. But the following reason for friendship with children was quite common both among our parents, and now it is quite common among us.
How do the propagandizing parents usually imagine "friendship with children"? A child comes and, as if in spirit, sincerely and from the heart, tells his mother all the secrets, and she, nobly and without condemning, begins to understand, accept and give wise advice from the height of her experience. The child, of course, listens with bated breath and pressing his ears in admiration.
But friendships are equal. They assume that you also come to the child to cry and tell him all your secrets. And ask his advice. And listen with bated breath.
And I'm not at all sure that a child needs this. That we would like our parents to know everything about us - really everything. What we want to know absolutely everything about them. (I mean my own - definitely not! My parents were progressive, they were friends with me, they were frank with me, they shared everything, everything - we still go with my mother to family therapy to a psychoanalyst.
And most importantly, what I'm not sure about: that children - both small and adults - for some reason need additional friends, but they do not need the only one in the world and irreplaceable mom and dad.
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