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Lesson 34 |
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Adolescence |
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What do adolescents respect in parents? |
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Parents are often upset when their children praise the homes of their friends |
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and regard it as a slur on their own cooking, or cleaning, or furniture, |
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and often are foolish enough to let the adolescents see that they are annoyed. |
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They may even accuse them of disloyalty, or make some spiteful remark about the friends' parents. |
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Such a loss of dignity and descent into childish behaviour on the part of the adults |
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deeply shocks the adolescents, and makes them resolve that in future |
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they will not talk to their parents about the places or people they visit. |
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Before very long the parents will be complaining that the child is so secretive and never tells them anything, |
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but they seldom realize that they have brought this on themselves. |
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Disillusionment with the parents, |
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however good and adequate they may be both as parents and as individuals, |
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is to some degree inevitable. |
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Most children have such a high ideal of their parents, |
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unless the parents themselves have been unsatisfactory, |
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that it can hardly hope to stand up to a realistic evaluation |
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Parents would be greatly surprised and deeply touched if they realized |
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how much belief their children usually have in their character and infallibility, |
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and how much this faith means to a child. |
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If parents were prepared for this adolescent reaction, |
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and realized that was a sign that the child was growing up |
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and developing valuable powers of observation and independent judgment, |
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they would not be so hurt, |
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and therefore would not drive the child into opposition by resenting and resisting it. |
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The adolescent, with his passion for sincerity, |
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always respects a parent who admits that he is wrong, or ignorant, |
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or even that he has been unfair or unjust. |
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What the child cannot forgive is the parents' refusal to admit these charges if the child knows them to be true. |
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Victorian parents believed that they kept their dignity by retreating behind an unreasoning authoritarian attitude |
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in fact they did nothing of the kind, |
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but children were then too cowed to let them know how they really felt. |
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Today we tend to go to the other extreme, |
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but on the whole this is a healthier attitude both for the child and the parent. |
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It is always wiser and safer to face up to reality, however painful it may be at the moment. |
