“TV series allow teenagers to improve their social skills,” says narrative consultant Ekaterina Zhornyak. “And the acute emotional reaction of parents only indicates what you should pay attention to in relationships with children.”
“The son does not miss a single episode of Univer, the daughter laughs at the flat jokes from Happy Together and Margosha … What pleasure do our growing children get from watching these superficial and tasteless stories? From their point of view, these series are quite informative, because they describe adult situations that a teenager is just starting to live. Regardless of the genre and plot, the characters decide whether to take into account the interests of a friend or only their own, learn to hear someone else’s opinion and ask for forgiveness if they are guilty, try to take responsibility for the consequences of their choice. Watching peers on the screen, a teenager feels more confident and calmer when he realizes that he is not the only one who has to get out of a conflict with classmates or explain himself to a girl. So, in general, everything is in order with him, he is “normal”.
Then what do our chagrin, annoyance and even anger at the sounds of a familiar musical screensaver say? Let’s answer the question: “What are my hopes and plans are threatened when the child turns on the TV again? What values of mine does this hurt? Maybe you want him to see something really worthy, beautiful, develop an interest in high culture, and these hopes seem unrealistic at the moment when the child watches an artless series. Maybe you hope that he will share your life values, and you are afraid of losing your close relationship with him, and his attachment to the TV exacerbates this fear … It turns out that the series themselves have nothing to do with it — our emotional reaction to watching them as a child just reminds us: in a relationship with a son or daughter, it is worth talking more often about what is truly dear to us in life.