Читать книгу Parents and grown up children - Natalia Manukhina - Страница 8

I often hear from my colleagues, who have learnt psychology at a mature age, express their regret that they had not been taught that subject before. Indeed, now we find out that we did not use to know many things when we were younger and how we behaved was incorrect, if not harmful to our children. It seems that if we had known more we would have been able to avoid mistakes and consequently would have better relations with our children, who are now grownup people. Now you will hear from parents of grownup children words like those uttered by my colleague – a 50-year-old woman whose daughter is 28: “How many things we did not know about people, family, relations and were not able to do for our children! Now it’s too late. My daughter is already an adult”.

But we did what we could and gave them what we could give. We gave our children everything we had, sparing no efforts and we have a share in all the best qualities and achievements of our children. However, we usually don’t appreciate our children’s merits just as well as our own merits and efforts. Then our children too fail to appreciate all the good things we did for them and take us for granted. Instead they don’t forget to mention our mistakes, faults and inability or unwillingness to give them everything they wanted. It is like a saying: “When people don’t have anything to discuss they start discussing problems”.

By the way, we can still give our children what we were not able to give them before. We can do it now if we think they need it. It is true that they have already grown up, but we can do the same just treating them differently. Now it will be an adult-to-adult and not parent-to-child relationship, which will involve more dialogue and less teaching or passing on our knowledge. This is how we should treat our children and how they should treat us.

It is not late but it’s just the right time now! Parents and children are learning in the same way. Hence, when we parents learn something new, we can share it with our children who, like us, are open for new knowledge, except we are 50 and they are 28. The ability to learn new things is not lost but develops as we grow older.

By the way, 28 years ago many accomplishments that are now strengthened by a great number of studies and are available to the “general public” were not known. At that time psychology was practically in its first stages and the achievements in that field were only accessible to scholars, doctors and “the powers that be”. There were no popular book series like “Assist Yourself” or “Psychology for Everybody”. So how could we give our children something what we did not have ourselves?

Now we have got all those things and can share them with our children. They have become available to us now, when we are already 50, while our children got access to them at the age of 28, which should be taken into account. Some of us already have grandchildren and the current knowledge about a Human Being, which seems quite normal for them, is such a novelty for us. They were born in our time and they naturally take many things for granted, though they will be responsible for further development of what they received without efforts. As for us, while we are alive it’s never too late to try to understand our children. By sharing our knowledge and experience we enrich each other’s lives. The main thing is to be willing and to start doing that.