Have you ever wondered why some kids can just breeze through life while others seem to have the weight of the world on their shoulders? Come to think of it while some parents seem to have harmonious family lives, the rest of us endure a daily battle of wits with our offspring.
As a parent myself, I know how difficult it is to live with children. When we first have them, they start out as eating, sleeping and …er, messing machines. It’s hard but we can deal with the anxiety. As they grow, we enter what I believe to be the purple patch of parenting. Our child develops a personality; everyone we meet prides us on our beautiful baby. Our little treasure provides us endless days of enjoyment and satisfaction and they grow through the cute stages of being a gorgeous little girl or our little man.
And then suddenly it all changes. Sometime around the 18 month mark, they learn the word “No”. They become disobedient. Our little angel now becomes a little devil. He or she takes every opportunity to throw a strop or to show us up in public. They become impossible to control. Starting school only seems to make matters worse. They become noisy, untidy, rude, they learn how to lie and use their new skill frequently, disobedience develops into full blown defiance, mutiny, even ignorance.
We all know it must be the school or the friends they make, other people’s children, Television or the Internet. From about the age of 11 or 12 we never see them. They are either out doing something they shouldn’t or they are in their room on the computer, watching television, or whatever else it is they do in there.
By the time they are teenagers, they barely register our presence, and often when they do it is to be rude to us, or because they want something. In extreme cases the balance of power moves towards the child and the situation becomes very dangerous, even violent. There are explosions of anger and stress about nothing in particular.
We have done our best to bring our children up in what we believe is the right way. There are no training courses for parents, after all. We just get on with the job in hand as best as we can. Much of what we do and say comes directly from our parents. Many of the values we hold dear they also held dear and we would want our children to hold them dear also. A great deal of this is important to us and we want our children to follow in our footsteps, to carry our values forward and be perfect citizens and in time good parents to our grandchildren.
I personally struggled with this dilemma for a long time. Two teenage children later, I think I am beginning to understand. Whilst I was great at acting the kid, playing with them like a kid, whilst they made me young at heart, the one thing I didn’t do was try to think like a kid.
So let’s try and decipher this from the child’s point of view. We know how we see the situation. How do they see it?
I know you, my parents, want what’s best for me, but hey, I’m me. I know what’s going on in my life right now. There’s a whole load of people telling what to do and, guess what? They’re all older and I’ve heard it all before, several times. Maybe I just need some space to work it out for myself rather than be told all the time. I’m a clever guy; I don’t always need to be taught stuff. I get enough of that at school from the teachers.
The other thing that you don’t appreciate is that it’s a war zone out there. On the street, at the bus stop, hanging out in the park, at school there are standards I have to abide by. Respect for the right people, the right number of buttons done up on my shirt, the knot on my school tie must be right. The right trainers, the right mobile phone, the right friends. Step out of line and someone will notice, and embarrassment like that is hard to deal with. Some kids are picked on unmercifully just for the way their mom and dad made them have their hair cut.
Then there’s home. I come home and I go to my room. That’s my space. I’m under orders to keep it tidy but I like it how it is. Does it matter if my room is untidy if, when we have visitors I shut the door? Yes, I know you pay the bills and I am lucky, but I’ve got nowhere else that is really mine. It’s the only place where I can decide what I want to do and how I want to do it. So if I spend a lot of time there it’s because it’s my space.
So I live on Facebook and Twitter and I play on the computer all the time but that’s how it is these days. We’re a different generation. Just because I don’t sit round the dinner table and tell you everything I do in a day doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I’m going through adolescence, right, and that means there’s a lot of things to process and I’m tired and stressed…and anyway most of the time I don’t think you are really listening. Sometimes I think you are embarrassed about me because I am not turning out the way you hoped. I struggle with spots, relationships, self esteem.
Exams are another particularly stressful time for me. I’m all too aware of letting you down, being seen to fail in front of my peers, or even worse moved to a lower set for a subject. I know that you see me as some kind of reflection of you and I don’t want to be a disappointment. I want that university place, that good job not just for myself but so I can prove myself worthy to you as well.
Society has changed greatly in the last fifteen to twenty years. The things that were expected of us when we were children and young adults were different to the things that we expect of our children. More than ever we live our lives and our successes through our children. We do see them as a reflection of ourselves. If they do well, by reflection so do we. Stargely, however, when my daughter said these things to me, I could not help but reflect on my teenage years and Lo! It could have been me speaking. As a teenager and young adult I was at odds with my parents too. So really nothing has changed. I am reminded of the passage from the Bible.
“When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.”
Reading between the lines, this means, as I grew up I forgot what it was like to be a child and became a clone of my parents, ending up doing and saying all those things I despised in my parents.
Here are some pieces of advice that I continually give myself:
- Don’t always expect your kids to do what you want or act like you expect. They are whole new individual human beings.
- Don’t tell them what you think they ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ do without first checking whether it is really important. The words ‘should’ and ‘ought’ are loaded with pressure to comply or feel guilty about it.
- Don’t have too many fixed expectations of your kids. They are doing fine and for most it will work out OK in the end, however much you stress.
- Be open to their ideas and their enthusiasm, even if it all seems a bit wayward. The world is changing all the time and they are the ones adapting to it.
- Talk to them – not at them. Show you’re interested. Listen actively to what they have to say. They may surprise you.
But as a final thought, think on this. Your kids are part of the upcoming generation who will shape the world. They way we think and act, what we believe belongs to the outgoing generation. We all remark how young policemen are getting; they are not getting any younger, they stay the same age, it is us who are getting older. It is us that need to understand our children’s world not them understand ours.
