In every age, in every era, any parent that ever lived to raise its offspring must have thought, “This is not how it used to be when I was younger.”
Growing up in a fairly conservative household, I can’t once remember talking back to my mother or trying to level with her when she unreasonably demanded me to be a certain way. I recall being trained to just ‘suck it up’ and take it in my stride.
Undoubtedly this must have generously contributed to the many ‘anger’ issues I developed as a teenager, which have now taken years of yoga & meditation to heal from. Nonetheless, I am thankful for my mother being the way she was.
We were raised to know our boundaries at a young age. We were raised to respect our elders, and not get involved in arguments that disrespected them in any way. This is one of the reasons why, seven years after my divorce, when my ex mother-in-law says something hurtful to me, such as divorcing my ex-husband and rendering my daughter a product of a broken home, I sit there biting my tongue because where I come from, we don’t answer back. We just take it in our stride.
Needless to say, there is some wisdom in that. After all, engaging in, what would inevitably sound like an argument with an older person, who is now fairly set in their mode of thinking and perceiving the world, is largely a futile exercise. So I respectfully stay shut and make some excuse to leave.
Psychologists today would tell you not to repress feelings or contain yourself like a pressure cooker, but sometimes that is the only thing that will ensure peace of any kind. And so it’s something worth paying a little heed to.
However, this era is all too different even from my youth, and I am only thirty-seven years old. In raising my eight year old daughter, I have found that leveling, arguing, reasoning and coming up with all sorts of excuses and statements is much the modus operandi. And that it matters not whether you have ‘ordained’ something to be or not, these days kids find a way to probe, question and eventually make you relent in some form or another.
I would imagine, some parents think it’s a question of discipline. And that inculcating strict discipline and drawing sharp lines would keep the children from getting into word games with the parent. But I am finding that to be a challenge as I raise my daughter.
In schools they maintain a relationship at par with their teachers. Meanwhile, growing up in South Asia, we spent most of our schooling years being frightened of the teachers, never speaking until called upon and certainly never arguing with the teacher if we failed to understand something. I don’t think that was the correct way, I do believe that academically kids today have it better. Professors understand that children are smarter than ever before in the evolution of mankind. The gadgets and information at their disposal is far superior to anything they have ever seen. But when it comes to parenting, it’s a whole other ball game.
So, I call upon my meditative practices, take a deep breath, and very softly explain to my daughter why she’s not allowed to eat desserts for dinner or skip camp, and silently pray that a long tirade of responses doesn’t ensue. Needless to say, it does. And we go back and forth talking and discussing why certain things are just the way they are, and there are no ways to bend the rules. I am sure my mother felt that it was just as hard to raise my siblings and I, even though we never engaged in any argument or asked questions when we were asked to do things that we didn’t much care for.
The upside to this parenting dilemma may be that my daughter does not end up having the ‘anger’ issues that I had, as a result of holding and suppressing so much within me, as I was growing up. That said, I heave a deep tormented sigh as I suspect somehow kids always find a way to be angry with parents regardless of how they are raised.
see, i was brought up in a home in which respect for our elders was taught as a function of our elders' example, and not as a function of unquestioning obedience. we learned to respect our parents because they set respectable examples. we felt their love, and therefore we also, because of their respectable example, accepted their authority over us as a guiding principle, and in retrospect, i'm immeasurably grateful for the discipline with which the lessons of good and right living were imparted on me.
i believe that today, popular culture aggressively targets children and teens, and adults in a two-pronged assault whose ultimate effect is the destruction of the child/parent bond. on the one hand, it deliberately conditions parents that the most terrible calamity they can suffer is to be seen as "uncool" by their kids. this causes parents to be excessively permissive, to give their children whatever they want, whenever they want it, just because they want it, and to let them think, feel and act however they want, whenever they want, just because they want to. it causes parents to abandon their role as "authority" in their children's lives, for the pursuit of being perceived as "cool." and to discipline your children? both children and adults have been conditioned, by both popular culture and social science, to believe that any form of discipline is a form of abuse. that same popular culture then targets children with the promotion of values that condition them to grow up formulating the psychology that they are entitled to anything they want, whenever they want it, just because they want it, and if they don't have it handed to them, they have the right throw a violent hissy fit and don't you dare try to tell me what to do or even raise your voice to me or i'm calling a lawyer and then TMZ and selling my story to the tabloids.
i also don't agree that the education system is serving children and teens better today than in the past. i believe that the teaching profession has suffered from the same ultimately harmful disservice to children by having been conditioned, through an appeal to the egotistical desire to be seen as "cool" by kids, to abandon its role in presenting an authority over children and exercising any discipline when required, again, because authority and discipline have been popularized as "abusive." i don't believe that teachers understand children any better today than they did in the past, because if they did, the compassionate and right approach would be to express and exercise the authority role that children need from which to take example in order to learn how to become authorities over themselves. the main function of discipline is to teach children the lesson that wrong choices have harmful consequences, as a way of conditioning them to learn to make more right choices than wrong ones. but again, popular culture, with aid of junk science, has conditioned both parents and children to automatically equate "discipline" of any kind with "abuse" of the worst kind.
i can go on at great length about all of this, as both a former child and as a parent of a teen child, and the pros and cons of our "progress" in this respect can be debated as genuinely or sophistically as desired. by what i know, what i see is that we as a society are failing our children miserably. only in individual families (or in individual cases of people who act in children's good interest), where the traditions of authority and discipline, combined with unrestrained love, compassion and guidance, are maintained, are children anymore receiving all that they deserve to prepare them for life. turn on any screen, open any magazine, turn on any radio or iPod, and 99.9% of what you hear is nihilistic narcissism or narcissistic nihilism. children are being conditioned to believe they can think, feel and act like adults, and adults are being conditioned to believe they can think, feel and act (in all the worst ways) like children.
all i can say is that when i was growing up, nobody was marching into our high school with guns and knives, and nobody had to live in fear, sometimes for their lives, every time they walked into the hallway. when i was ten years old, the ten year old girls i used to chase around the schoolyard wore pigtails and played with dolls, and didn't talk loudly and proudly in public places about their fellating experiences. i also never recall being taught by popular culture that my dad is a violent, abusive, womanizing drunk and my mother is a whore. nor that it was okay, in the middle of a public pool filled with seniors, women and young children, for a twelve year old girl to repeatedly scream at her mother that she's a f—–g b—h! nor that criminality was an admirable aspiration, or that my fellow males who weren't pathetic losers were violent physical, mental and emotional thugs, and females who weren't pathetic losers were nothing but their sex toys.
as a material and spiritual optimist, i strive to see beauty in everything i can. as a material and spiritual realist, i can't help but see some things as they are. i don't believe in whitewashing our social dirty laundry out of fear of speaking up or out of egotistical pride in not being able to admit that we are not the cat's a— and there are colossal failures in all this Progress that need to be corrected before it's too late for too many. otherwise, we simply cover up the stains and end up walking around in clothes that stink.
and anybody can call me me whatever they want for this attitude. i know who and what I Am. among other things, a good child and a good parent.