Modern children from wealthy families have what their peers of twenty years ago could only dream of: expensive toys, good clothes, a separate room … To provide all this, parents, as a rule, have to work hard and hard. But instead of the expected gratitude, they increasingly have to face protest, misunderstanding, irritation from the grown-up son or daughter. “Difficult age,” parents sigh doomedly, once again going to work.
Of course, age also makes itself felt. But he is not alone. I think these mothers and fathers would be very surprised to learn that the problems of their well-dressed, well-fed and well-groomed children are in many ways the same as those of orphans who grow up without parents at all and sometimes in very difficult living conditions.
It is these children who make up the main circle of my wards, and, communicating with them, I am constantly convinced that the physical loss of parents (drunk, dead, or simply abandoned their son or daughter to their fate) and the loss of contact with them are perceived by children in almost the same way. Day after day, remaining under the care of a nanny or grandmother, not feeling an emotional connection with his father and mother, the child feels the same as a child who actually lost his family: he also suffers from loneliness and rejection, he also blames himself for what happened , feels his own inferiority (“They love others, but not me!”).
However, if a teenager living in an orphanage is forced by difficult life circumstances to fight for life, then prosperous children begin to fight against their parents – at least in this way they try to attract their attention and gain interest in themselves.
Losing contact with parents or losing them physically – children perceive these events in almost the same way.
Of course, we love our children – we just sometimes show our feelings in a way that they do not understand. To us, adults, material goods, which we ourselves were often deprived of in childhood and which we now so generously bestow on our children, seem to be an adequate equivalent of love. But a child – at any age – first of all needs just live communication with his parents: it is in it that he draws self-confidence, builds his self-esteem on it, formulates his own identity and life values through him.
It is not necessary to be maximalist – in order to establish or maintain contact with a child, we are not at all obliged to give up our career and sit with him until he starts his own family. Give your son or daughter ten minutes in the morning and an hour in the evening – only seventy minutes of warm, trusting and natural communication so that in the future they will be able to appreciate what we have given them, and use it wisely, continue our work – or find their own no less important and exciting.