Children Who Don't Want Anything

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Recently, in my practice, cases have become more frequent when a request for family counseling sounds something like this: “What should we do to make him study well?”, “He doesn't want anything! How to fix it?" or so: "How can we help a child to stop being lazy?" Parents are upset, worried, they do not understand what to do with a teenager who wants nothing. They list their services to him: they did it, they bought it, and they took it there … But he doesn't care … if only the fashionable gadget was not taken away and left alone.

What is happening now with modern children? Why are they like this? Another question that torments most parents is "what did we do wrong, where did we go wrong?"

Let's try to figure out what's going on. Are the parents to blame for this, and could they have acted differently …

Lyudmila Petranovskaya in her article "Traumas of Generations" writes about how the life attitudes of each next generation change as a result of events that took place in the life of the previous one. The Great War, famine and repression that happened in the middle of the 20th century left their traumatic mark on every family in our country. Every family has lost at least one man, many children grew up never seeing their fathers, or ashamed of their memory.

Mothers of the war and post-war times had to survive at any cost: they worked from morning till night, squeezed pain and sting in themselves, learned to be persistent and unbending. And they learned! Their children practically did not see affection, they went to kindergarten for five days, tried to help in everything, to be diligent and obedient. From childhood, they knew that they had to work, knew the price of a piece of bread, but at the same time had a vague idea of unconditional parental love. Their own experience told them that love must be earned, and love is possible if the child is a good student, goes in for sports, helps elders, takes care of younger brothers and sisters, etc.

Do you recognize? Most grandparents of the millennium generation fit this description. They still cannot sit around, they are ready to take care of both children and grandchildren, to help them both morally and financially. And for them until now, the main thing is that there is no war, and that the children are fed.

Now let's talk about the parents of modern teenagers. What attitudes are driving them? They are the children of the children of war. And they, too, knew from early childhood that they had to work hard. Growing up in an era of total scarcity, they strive to ensure that their children have everything. Remembering how painful and offensive it was when you wanted to have a bicycle, but there was no money (or bicycles), yesterday's children try to give today's children everything that they once needed themselves. Mom all her childhood dreamed of being a ballerina - and now the girl is taken to a dance, not thinking how much she likes it and whether she wants to dance. Dad wanted to become a champion, so his son must definitely go in for sports. And it doesn't matter at all that the son would like to play the violin or make robots. Most parents now have a college degree, and some have more than one. It is almost impossible for them to imagine how their son or daughter will not enter the university. And now a whole army of tutors is engaged with a boy or a girl in mathematics, English or physics, not paying any attention to what the child's heart is. Modern children are accustomed to the fact that everything will be decided for them: and who to be, and where to live, and what car to drive in the future. They don't know what they really want, because their parents have always wanted for them. The needs of parents and children are no longer different. And when I ask a child what he would like to achieve in life, he obediently retells me a picture invented for him by his parents. True, sometimes adolescents and young people begin to resist the picture of the world imposed on them, and then their parents take them to psychologists and ask them to “fix a broken toy”.

Once a mother came to me with her daughter. Making an appointment by phone, she said that she was very worried that the child did not know what he wanted. Talking about her daughter, she used the phrase "we" all the time: "we studied, we visited the doctor, we went to a consultation," and so on. When they came to the office, it turned out that the "child" was 20 years old. The mother did not say anything about the girl's father, only that they divorced more than 15 years ago. Until recently, the girl was obedient, did what her mother wanted, studied diligently, did not go to clubs, spent the night at home. And then she began to "rebel" and began to defend her right to personal territory (to close the door to her room), to personal pastime (to spend weekends without my mother), to personal feelings (to meet with her own father, despite the protests of my mother). And mom sounded the alarm! How so? The daughter no longer loves her mother, does not obey, does not respect, does everything to spite, etc. She began to drive around specialists, clinics, and in the end she brought me to see me.

I invited them to build a picture of their relationship using kinetic sand and a collection of small figurines. They approached the sandbox from opposite sides. At first they sat in silence, not knowing where to start, the girl, out of habit, waited for instructions from her mother. Then she hesitantly walked over to the cupboards with the figurines. The first thing she took was a fence, with which she marked the boundary in the sand between herself and her mother. Then another one, then two hedges and several fir trees. Mom felt uneasy. She also went to the figures, took several wild animals, put them among the trees, explaining that wild animals live in the forest. Further, so as not to put the daughter in the tray, the mother found a way to supplement, improve or change the situation. As a result, an hour later, each figurine put by the daughter was surrounded by those set by the mother. When they finished, I invited them to swap places and look at the resulting picture from the other side. And only at that moment the mother saw how cramped her daughter was, how little free space she had and how much she was strangling her with her care. For the first time she realized that, in fact, the thought that her daughter would leave her was unbearable for her, and she would be left alone again and no one would love her as much as before. And she began to talk about how her parents did not love her, and when her daughter was born, she decided that, finally, she had her own source of love, which she would hide from everyone, would cherish and take care of it. She always knew what would be best for her daughter, she chose the best kindergarten, the best school for her, took her to different circles, in general, “put her life on her,” and as a result, it turned out that her daughter does not have her own life, her own desires, there is only mom and her hopes. And she doesn't know how to want something herself.

I started working with my daughter, and recommended another specialist to my mother. After a few weeks, the girl was able to say out loud the words “I want to go to my dad’s wedding”, “I want to transfer to another university, because I want to be a designer, not a sales manager”.

This story has a happy ending. And how many parents are not yet ready to realize how they themselves deprive their children of desires, aspirations and hopes. Many are not ready to admit that their children will be able to cope on their own, they will be able to decide on the choice of a profession. And each time, depriving the child of the right to his own opinion, personal territory, they thereby turn him into a person who “wants nothing”. But they wanted something better …