“If you love me, tell me no”: when borders help you grow

“In a person’s life, the essential thing is desire. There is no life without desire. Instead, we take it away from the children. In order not to risk, we do not set limits. And if then, for a refusal, for a no, you feel guilty, you are not authoritative“.

A few days ago on the way home I came across a small group of children, they must not have been more than eight years old. They played at the park enjoying the last remnants of sunshine on a Sunday like many others, in a street like many others. A few steps away, the parents, evidently friends with each other, followed them and joked. A picture of an ordinary afternoon, if it were not that to capture my attention was a question and answer between the children: the object of contention was a scooter. Moral of the story, in a few moments, a trivial altercation between children turned into an exchange of very colorful words that would have made most adults pale.

Most, but evidently not the parents of the children involved who started laughing amused among themselves. Because if it is not so surprising that children can also report bad words without obviously giving them too much weight, what leaves some questions open is that none of the parents of the children involved has thought of correcting and limiting those words and that aggression. Worse, they reacted with hilarity, as if those behaviors were not only legitimate, but all in all also funny.

The question of the “limit”, of the alleged inability of today’s parents to firmly pronounce a “no” and to keep the point, to exercise their parental role to meet whims, long faces and grievances, has jumped not only numerous times to the news, but unfortunately seems increasingly topical.

A lack of authority (which is far from authoritarianism) would slowly lead to abdicating one’s responsibilities, sometimes for too much tiredness and aware of going towards some moment of tension, other times not to “play the part of the bad guys”, because educating means losing one’s voice, and not to raise it inappropriately, but to explain, to make people understand, to be close, to drive.

Parents would seem more and more at the mercy of children who reign at home as little sovereigns, who dictate the rules, who would be totally unprepared to receive a “no”, to the effort to get results, to a bad grade (which when it arrives then generates disproportionate anger and the tendency now increasingly common to blame others for everything). Totally unaware that the world does not exist to meet their needs.

If you love me tell me no

I thought about the episode of the parquet several times, and it was the driving force that made me deepen the theme with the book by Juliana Ukmar , neuropsychiatrist, family and couple therapist ” If you love me, tell me no .

The doctor, without too much theory but with very concrete examples, reports many of the cases she treats with problems that are apparently very distant from each other, then she goes on to highlight the fact that the discomforts of all these boys “casually” had the same origin, as if it were a common thread: The Omnipotence caused by an education or rather by a totally lax and unregulated “non-education”.

“” . They received a nice house, hot meals, elegant clothes, good schools, but all in all they do not know how to enjoy it, they have no enthusiasm, they do not have real friends. Their life is a continuous struggle against two parents for whom rightly or wrongly, they feel transparent and inessential. “.

“Facades” that will inevitably come from the outside world, which does not use too many pleasantries or special treatments. They will get to the bad grade in the Greek high school version, to the first refusals from a schoolmate on whom you have a crush on, they will get to the first job disappointments, to the first inevitable frustrations that an adult has to face in his daily life. In short, the first times in which life “resizes” their desires and their perception of themselves.

How will tomorrow’s adults react to the inevitable harshness of the impact with the world without the tools to face it? Without the critical sense of admitting one’s mistakes and limitations, without the drive to improve, without the humility to question oneself? Can there always be mom and dad to parry the shots?

Giuliana Ukmar uses a strong but effective metaphor: she asks to imagine a completely dark room in which there are no doors or glimmers of light.

This is the universe of a teenager to whom no limits are placed . A rule to be respected, a border, represent a foothold, a safe haven, the certainty that there is a parent who knows what the right path is and acts as a guide.

Abdicating the parental role , in a nutshell leaving children and adolescents at the mercy of themselves (and of their own self-destruction in the worst cases) burdens them with the enormous weight of choices and decisions that are absolutely unsuitable for their young life tags. When the parent, on the other hand, decides to return to his rightful place, i.e. the helm of the boat, the child is given a priceless gift: he is given back all the lightness and light-heartedness he needs, that of his age, because he c ‘is a parent who is really capable of doing his part.

Education is an effort that no one is willing to do anymore

In this regard, says Paolo Crepet , psychiatrist and sociologist who has long maintained that the problem of education is turning into a real emergency: ” If your father and mother have never said no to you since you were born, the first no that tells you an outsider you don’t accept it tags. Education is a task that no one is willing to do anymore: it involves parents, grandparents, educators, even those outside school, starting from the sporting sphere. All this has a dramatic impact: it is a generation that no longer knows dreams because passions have not been taughttags. By dint of saying yes everything turns grey, colors are lost. Everything is anticipated compared to yesterday, today at the age of 13 you lead the life you once did at 18. Society anticipates its rituals: the sooner you mature, the sooner you become a consumerist. Today a 13-year-old boy on his cell phone buys what he wants and this creates a disproportion, it’s a fictitious maturation: you’re not mature because you’re on Facebook, but if you have your own autonomy. Today we justify everything, we don’t know our children, we are used to never denying them anything. Everything is consumed too quickly, even life “.

Thinking about parenting, it certainly cannot be denied how hard a task it is: we repeat it often, and not out of flattery towards those who read us, but because it would be difficult to deny it. Today’s life has become complex, balances are not easy to maintain, frenzy is the order of the day and unlike a few decades ago, parents often find themselves alone, both in a practical sense and, even worse, morally. An African proverb says that ” It takes an entire village to raise a child “. How much truth in a few words. To raise a child we would need the energy and passion of the whole species, parents and non-parents, of all humanstags. There doesn’t seem to be time out there for any of this, and families are feeling the pinch. Indeed, to tell the truth, society often seems quite annoyed by children, in many cases, to be honest it seems that they even annoy, just think of the looks parents receive when a newborn cries in a restaurant or on an airplane. Being a parent these days, even for all these reasons, is not easy.

And yet, the kids have tremendous need of us, of our strength, of our enthusiasm. There is a thirst for examples, for sharing, for lived experiences, for passions. Of dreams, of stories, of goals to be achieved, of hands smeared with colour, of loud laughter and skinned knees, of stars to look at, of bare feet in the sand, of wind-blown hair.

There is also a need for “no”, pronounced so as not to get lost. There is a need for parents to regain self-respect, to teach their children to respect life.

The letter your teen can’t write to you

In 2015 Gretchen Schmelzer, American psychologist and blogger, decided to write a touching letter “The letter that your teenager can not write you” of which we report an excerpt:

“Dear Parent,

This is the letter I wish I could write to you. Of this battle we are in, now. I need it. I need this fight. I can’t tell you because I don’t have the words to do it and in any case it wouldn’t make sense what I would say. But, know, I need this fight. I desperately need it. Now I need to I . I need this conflict, even if, at the same time, I also hate it.

I need to argue with you

I also feel the same thing inside, but I need you to tolerate it, and to have other adults help you do it. Because I can’t do that right now. If you want to get together with your adult friends and do a “self-mutual-help-to-survive-your-teen” group,” go ahead. Or talking about me behind my back, I don’t care. I only ask you not to give up on me, not to give up this conflict. I need it.

Please stay on the other end of the rope. Know that you are doing the most important work anyone can ever do for me right now.”

So, we remain on the other end of the rope, even when fatigue is felt, even when giving in seems the easiest way to go.

It is not easy, but it is the greatest gift we can give to our children. And one day, even far away, from the bottom of our hearts they will be grateful to us.