Parental pressure takes many forms. But all of them are united by distrust of the child.
In the story of the tenth grader who shot the teacher and the policeman, the point has not yet been made. But taught by their own and neighborly experience, the majority immediately rejected the version of pedophilia and the tyrant-teacher, and saw a miscalculation in education that was painfully familiar to everyone. This was partly confirmed by the first assessments of psychologists.
Parental pressure takes many forms. Some parents with inspired zeal take care of the child, trembling over his health, not allowing him to take a step on his own. As a result, they get either a sluggish, weak-willed creature, or a tear-off who is ready for anything, just to assert himself in front of his peers.
Others are most afraid that the child will not go “down the wrong road.” They see him in the dock with suspicious horror, and therefore they also control mercilessly, reproaching for any misconduct and most of all fearing that their child would not fall into bad company. That is, they do not trust his independent choice and do not believe in the firmness of his good intentions.
Others are perfectionists. For them, the most important thing is success and superiority. We (Ivanovs, Rabinoviches, Azizovs) have always been the first. Your great-grandmother… Your grandfather… Your father… Do not drop the honor of the name! In a child, they see no less than a future Olympic champion, minister, academician or Nobel Prize winner.
All these forms of pressure have one thing in common: distrust of the child. It doesn’t matter that everyone has different sources of this mistrust: suspicious fear of illness, perhaps coming from the bitter experience of one of the relatives, the fear that the child will go down the wrong path, or excessive vanity and high self-esteem. In all cases, the father and mother try to replace the will of the child with their own will.
And the goal, mind you, is always good. Isn’t the health of a child or his social sanity unconditional values? What are you telling me about some of his courage, independence, sense of dignity? Leave this nonsense. How is the spine broken? And, God forbid, he will contact the bandits?
So are perfectionists. Is it bad to be proud of your ancestors and strive to be worthy of their memory? What about the desire for success? But here are the arguments… Is my son withdrawn? And why should he be friends with all the punks and mediocrity? He has a different path. Is he too cruel? Well, you know, you can’t build capital on tears. It is enough if he loves his future wife and future children and can make them happy. And for this you need success, position in society, money. All this can be achieved only by work, and not by walks with friends and intimate conversations.
Distrust of the humanitarian component of life was not born today and not in the pragmatic 90s. Already in the “Explanatory Dictionary” by D. Ushakov, published in 1938, there is a note against the words “humanist”, “humanistic”, “humanitarian”: bookish. That is, they were not used in colloquial speech. Then the saying went that a good person is not a profession.
Meanwhile, all the words I have cited are related just to a person. For life, he needs, of course, health, hard work, and success. And without the care, love and guardianship of parents, it is difficult to master the upcoming road. But education requires not only love, but also wisdom. To educate a person as a whole, and not one of its components. Not just a big guy, and certainly not a laureate. So that a cold is not perceived as a family drama, and an adored child would be able to love not only himself, but also another. So that a four or five with a minus does not mean the collapse of all hopes. This reveals only the lack of freedom and narrowness of a person, which cannot be compensated for by any achievements.