Adults seem to forget completely what it’s like to be a child or a teen. It amazes me, and it has for many years. It’s like a big, thick black curtain comes down and what we have all lived through becomes forgotten, suppressed, repressed, unavailable, it’s hard to know what to say to describe it. Teen years especially are horribly difficult. We all feel lonely, confused, angry, sad – many intense feelings.
For some reason, I vowed to remember. I felt it was all I could do. I felt powerless. I felt hopeless often. I was in a dysfunctional family but we didn’t have those words then. It appeared to the outside world that we were “fine”. We ate, we bathed, we had a car, my father had a job, we went to school. There was no outside view of our inner world; there usually isn’t. A lot hasn’t changed at all.
All adults were kids once. How can they forget what it’s really like? I’m aware that parents want their children to be happy, successful, healthy, ok. But the level of denial of how they really feel, how life really works, it’s incredible.
On an intellectual level, I understand several aspects of parenting. Although I haven’t had children myself, I’ve worked with parents and children of all ages for many years. I do understand that having and raising children is much, much harder than anyone expects. Raising children takes enormous amounts of energy, time, patience, money, and on and on. Parents become exhausted, early and endlessly. Generally in our society the importance of parenting is overlooked and undervalued; it’s a second thought, a second job of little importance.
It gets a lot of good words, but rare acknowledgement of just how hard it is. Actually, parenting is the most important job in the world!
Due to this disregard, parents don’t often talk about how tired they are, how overwhelmed they feel, how out of patience they feel so often, so discouraged they are at times. Yes, they talk to close friends and family sometimes and get some support that way; that’s a good thing when it happens. But in the larger society, even in the online communities that do talk about parenting, it still gets short shrift. People are understandably afraid of others’ possible negative opinions of them.
Parents do open up in therapy; I’ve heard a lot about just how difficult it is, and how people’s own childhood experiences have impacted their parenting abilities, often negatively. But it takes a lot for parents, people, to seek therapy.
Then the children come next, often feeling that they are last, not first. They don’t have the ability to see what their parents are dealing with. They know that their parents are unaware of most of the realities of their lives. Although they often take advantage of this situation, and this is nothing new, they still feel gypped out of parental love, attention and understanding.
One of the major sources of these situations that no one wants to acknowledge is the two parent income producing “normal” situation now. Women have needed the ability to work for many, many years and have needed power, recognition, freedom, respect and we have just begun to use our real abilities. However, our larger society hasn’t adjusted to those changes very well. The stress level for two income families is astronomical.
Parents have always had huge levels of stress, but when only one parent worked and extended family members were nearby to help, it was very different. If as a society we had better parental leave, better child care options, more support systems for parents and children, we would be in a much better and safer place.
What about the children? What about the teens? They get lost in the shuffle, the overwhelm, the stress. There are job related issues, there are marital issues, there are financial issues, there are health issues, you name it. But the children come last when they need to be first a lot more often. Yes, they need to learn to wait, they need to learn that they won’t always get their way. But this needs to be tempered with attention, love, consideration, listening!
If we want children to really succeed as people, we need to listen to them. Will they always make sense? No, of course not. But we don’t need to correct them all the time, just sometimes. We all need to be heard, to be respected, to be attended to; these are core needs.
And everyone knows this! But if we don’t have the time and the energy to provide attentiveness to others, we just can't do it. There’s only so much time and energy, it’s more valuable than money in many ways.
Our society tends to stress achievement, competition, and money. “Security” is touted as attainable and necessary. Beyond a certain level of monetary security, it becomes addiction. There really is no such thing as security, but we don’t want to admit it. As we are being reminded often, catastrophic events happen all the time, everywhere, to everyone. Any one of us can become very ill, disabled, or killed, at any time. Instead of acknowledging these realities, we tend to deny them. We tend to strive for “security” in the form of financial wellness. “Wealth management” is the current term. It used to be just “savings”. Financial planners are helpful to a degree, but often prey on our fears. Yes money is helpful, but no it doesn’t solve all of our problems, or keep us safe.