How can you explain to your children that you were not educated the way they wanted, without having to resort to commenting on your stories and referring to the way your parents raised you.
We could hardly comment without remembering; What we as Parents teach is referential to what we live, even in those stories in which we have changed some details to consider that our Parents were wrong, but in the end it remains referential.
Expressions like; When I was your age or In my generation, they are just a way of recognizing that we are ignorant about what is currently happening in our society and about how to accept its evolution.
Under no logical premise could we evaluate the present with information from the past, nor can we evaluate the past with information from the present; the world simply evolved and we are trying to evolve with it. That is why we are at a disadvantage, because our children were born in the present. What would be the future for us, for them is today.
It is we who must develop the ability to adapt. For them it is simply their habitat; If we pretend that they adapt to our past, we are condemning them to be obsolete and to live dis-adapted for the rest of their lives.
We must be clear that unlike us, today's child and adolescent has many distractors, conflicts of Being and contemporary trends that absorb most of their mental effort. The amount of information they absorb in a normal day is much higher than what we absorbed per week. They are hardly paying attention to discern between right and wrong, the time in which they must make decisions is very short compared to the time we had to decide on the same aspects. For example.
- Decide which career to study. Today there are many options, in our time they were limited. Decide which television channel to watch. Today there are many options, in our time they were few. Decide what to play. Today there are many options and most of them have a cost, (so it can be frustrating not to be able to afford them); In our time most were free. Decide how to dress. Today trends and fashions change rapidly; In our time we subsisted on the same clothes for longer periods of time. Deciding how to communicate. Today it is much easier and faster, there are a variety of options and means. In our time we talked or wrote on paper, deciding what to eat. Today there are many options and many theories about it, about what is healthy and what is not. In our time the options were at home.Decide how to have fun on a weekend. Today there are many options, fashions and trends, most of them with cost. In our time few options and some of them were free.
These are only representative examples of what it means for a child or adolescent today to be part of a society and an evolving world. Without comparing which generation is or was better, it is indisputable that the emotional burdens that are carried today are much more complex than we were lucky not to carry.
The importance of exemplification lies in understanding that these emotional burdens that our children and adolescents have today are represented in different attitudes that we are not used to; with high levels of frustration at not being able to easily get a response or resource.
These attitudes are reflected through tantrums, annoyances, silence, sadness, joy, etc. That for us they have no basis and will never have it, but for them they do.
To all this we must add that today's child and adolescent lives in constant comparison with their peers, with many direct and indirect messages that are observed or heard through the media in general.
Our children are not strangers to the world and will not understand our explanation about the past and about the reasonings that we try to introduce into their minds.
The only thing in which we are undoubtedly ahead is in the understanding and practice of principles and values, which puts us at an advantage over them. Here if it is essential to allude to our generation, for us if the perfection of the moral over the rational was very important.
All of us who were once children and adolescents; In our adulthood we have come to understand the importance of the application of principles and values in our lives, in what we do, in what we think, in what we say and above all in what we decide.
Educating our children with an inter-generational approach is a challenge that at the same time will force us to update ourselves and enjoy more of the evolution of society and the trends that we are living and that we are still going to live.
The challenge is to become more participatory than tax in the teaching / learning process, adapting ourselves to the trends of constant change in which our children and adolescents live, understanding that for them we must be part of evolution and not an example of involution.
