Overfed Needs

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

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Nowadays, much attention is paid to overfed children. And rightly so: over the past couple of decades, childhood obesity in the world has grown by 5-10%, and sometimes by 20-25%. It is dangerous for health

Strange, for some reason, no less dangerous, albeit not so obvious oversaturation of needs does not arouse interest at all. It seems that many do not even think that it is possible to consistently overfeed not only stomachs. In fact, needs do not care what they demand. After all, they are not living beings - they simply provide the vital activity of the organism. They show a lack of something, can be misinterpreted or satisfied too early, even before they arise, can be confused with something else. When oversaturated, any needs grow equally and ask for more. Parents who know any type of hunger or are simply anxious can proactively protect their child from this hunger, especially if public opinion is in favor.

The current grandparents and older parental generations were terribly lacking in attention. "Do not overpraise, so as not to be arrogant", "A child should not interfere with parents", "Grow up independent" and "He must understand" - this was the trend of the 60s and 80s. Before that, the post-war generation was growing up, and there was no way to pay special attention to it. After - the 90s came, in which either there was no opportunity again, or there was an opportunity, but the nannies: some parents survived as best they could, others - measured the pipis of suddenly opened up opportunities. Not all, of course, but most. Childhood loneliness dragged on for a long time, more than half a century.

And now the situation has changed radically. It became possible and even reasonable to talk about the needs of the child as an individual. And the unkind, knowing how badly and irreparably cold it is to grow up for an abandoned soul, parents rushed to correct the situation honestly and responsibly, but on their children. Sometimes people who are deprived of some benefit begin to persistently offer it to those around them. This is easy to see in the example of all the same fat men and women fighting for harmony with the help of a diet: some of them kindly and somewhat annoyingly feed everyone they can reach, not in the least interested in whether the subjects of feeding are hungry. Something similar happened to many parents.

With material benefits, everything was settled quite easily, here the parents are great, you will not say anything. The generation that grew up in Swarovski crystals, among three-meter toy houses and puzzling gadgets, has almost matured and abandoned the role of living dolls, and then this itch calmed down. Clothing has become more democratic, food is healthier and everything in general is less pretentious. Ponty almost - almost! - occupied their own specific niche, and in it - why not? Everyone has their hobbies, right? Especially in the presence of a healthy alternative.

With the need for love and attention, things turned out to be not so simple. Those who knew how to give them died of old age. The tradition was broken. But the hunger remained. And since it turned out to be quite difficult to satisfy him in himself, as an adult, the parents began a personal and public campaign to provide children with attention. To begin with, they confused attention with control. Since inability increases anxiety, and anxiety interferes with thinking, this was not difficult. He asked fifty times how things were at school, gave away fifteen developmental games, allowed clean and well-dressed children to play quietly once a week in the living room, encouraged an acceptable amount of rebelliousness at school - and order. It turned out not. The children went sullenly polite and reserved. Of the desires, many parents single out two: to lie down and play on the computer. It’s even interesting what other desires can be expressed by children tired of constant supervision, whose needs are foreseen before they appear, even if they would never have appeared by themselves.

Okay, corrected the course. Attention is not control. Attention requires attention. And it began - right now - attention. The child is being questioned. The child is listened to. If the child is lying or confused, he is again patiently and kindly questioned. Agree with the child. The child is presented with options for new opportunities, much better than he himself would have guessed with his immature mind. A completely voluntary consent is expected from the child. Reasonable and good wishes of the child are fulfilled before he clearly describes them. The unreasonable and unkind are transformed into good and reasonable. After all, mom and dad have already filled their bitter cones. Now they are building a warm, cozy nest, protecting the child from the blows of fate and bitter resentments. Parental blindness is sometimes striking, because the child with whom all these caring manipulations are performed does not remain silent. He is capricious and crying, his soul is trying to wriggle out of the stifling embrace and finally get the right to his existential pain, a portion of loneliness and development with all his mistakes and victories. And this is probably the only need that parents do not notice or interpret very freely, promising new delicacies, entertainment and sincere conversations. Over time, she drowns in substitutions just as a healthy body gets bogged down in warm, soft layers of excess fat.

What will happen to such children, I do not know. It seems that never before has an experiment been set up on such a scale. What happened to the units is known. They most often grew up and ran into a lack of understanding of the outside world, its unwillingness to obey, to give as much time as necessary, to listen patiently and cooperate. That life isn't fair. The enlightened ones sought help from therapists and eventually made their own way. True, it was given to them more difficult and painful than it would have been in childhood, when the body itself is open for growth and integration. Less courageous ones rolled their souls into a ball and hid them in a corner. Nothing really terrible happened to the majority - just the boundless melancholy and inability to start a family and make a career, to take what is due to them by right.

What will happen now is not entirely clear. The obesity talk doesn't seem to be very effective. More and more children who receive readily available fats and tasty carbohydrates without any difficulty and restrictions, lose mobility and become overgrown with complexes. Will souls fed easily accessible happiness be more flexible? Will they be able to resist?..