In school counseling, one of the frequent requests covers the area of parental counseling. Parents, grandparents, and more rarely, uncles or aunts who care for growing children.
Growing children...
I'll stop here, because the sermon of the Priest who held the funeral service for Grandpa came to mind. Looking at my mother and her sister, who couldn't stop crying, he said that only now does the child remain without parents. Never earlier. Because, as long as parents are alive, you are their child, regardless of your age.
This could be one of the keys that explains parenting in our country. Perhaps this is where the strong bond between parents and their children comes from, even when they are adults. Hence the tendency to accumulate in order to leave them something behind. Hence the desire to protect them from suffering and hardship, sometimes at the cost of violating their adult boundaries.
I was writing that are... or perhaps I should use the past tense and say that were so connected. Because child-rearing in the Mioritic space has also changed. Just as transhumance has changed.
More and more often I talk to parents who tell me they want to be friends with their children. That they want to respect their freedom. And they're not talking about 25 or 30-year-olds. No. They're talking about children in primary or middle school.
In primary school, this “friendship” sometimes paints a very jarring picture: shouting, whims, pampering, emotional overwhelm. The parent ends up gravitating around the child and serving their moods and desires, and the child can become more hysterical than an adult, precisely because they lack the anchor of emotional co-regulation offered by an adult who assumes the role of a parent.
In middle school, you start watching real “movies,” you no longer just look at “pictures.”
Parents who smoke tobacco or vape with their children to protect them from drug use. Members of the same family sitting together, but each isolated in their own virtual world, eyes glued to their own phone. Parents who allow almost anything in the name of freedom and friendship: tattoos, hair dyeing at young ages, false nails, provocative clothing, disrespectful language, and even swearing exchanged between parents and children, “to spice up the family dialogue a bit.”
You watch and you'd want to change the channel. But you realize that the “movie” is playing on all channels.
A few years ago, I traveled a bit more outside the country. In England and Germany, I noticed this detachment of parents as soon as the child becomes an adult. Then I remembered a story told by Professor Adrian Opre. He had been hosted in the USA by a family, and only found out after two months that the hosts had a child. Not because it was a secret, but because the child lived their life independently of their parents.
When we talk about the American, English, or German model, we usually think of the child's independence. Perhaps, however, the parent's independence is equally important there. From this, cultural approaches that emphasize self-determination obviously derive: “do what you want,” “it's your body,” “the choice is yours.”
The traditional Romanian model functioned differently. It referred to a family culture passed down from generation to generation. Evidently, this model also had its flaws. The principle often encountered was: “I made you, I'll kill you.”
I don't idealize the past, nor do I demonize the present. However, I observe the replacement of a child-rearing culture based on socially shared principles and values with a culture based almost exclusively on individual principles. Sometimes even without sufficiently strong values to support them.
Hence a few questions. Does the growing child need to feel they have beside them a parent or a friend? Do those who abdicate their parental role realize that a child without a parent remains, in a certain sense, an orphan, even if surrounded by adults?
And one more thing: when you end up serving all of the child's whims, don't you risk, unwittingly, consolidating their own tyranny?
It's a great art to be a parent. And hard. Very hard. Perhaps one of the most difficult missions a person can have. Because you always have to find the balance between love and boundaries, between closeness and authority, between being present and not giving up your role as a parent.
And to find this balance, every family relies, consciously or unconsciously, on a specific family culture. On a set of principles and values that guide their decisions, reactions, and the way they raise their children.
Dear mother, dear father, do you know what the family culture is that supports your child's upbringing? Can you identify three principles and three values you would like to pass on?
And don't think that mere participation in the family's religious life is enough. Children don't learn values only from what they hear. They learn them especially from what they see in their own home. And sometimes they learn them better from the humble acceptance of their own unholiness than from any lesson about holiness.
Daniela Costache
Personal and Educational Development Counselor
Photo by Gustavo Fring / pexels.com