Will your son or daughter be like you?
It is terrible to become an adult: you have children in order to continue your own life, to make a part of something of you or of the one you loved, and once you meet with a person, so different from you that you feel hurt, even shocked by his behaviour. You refuse to understand this new mind. “In my times, children did not do that”-” In my times, parents did… could…” “In my times…” Good old times, which destroy all the values parents had built!
There is a break in your attitude in front of the world since you decide to beget children: you begin to live for them; you have nothing anymore to do for yourself, you have (almost) built all that you wanted. But the world goes on with its progress, its evolution. Society is not static, motionless. And your child, who is going to live in that changing society begins to leave you behind; you cannot catch up with him. Your child does things you had never done. (Then you may have two positions: to accept to live with your child and accept what has value to him; or to continue to live in what you think is for your child and you won’t understand what is new, because you stand with your back turned to the “outside world”).
That is why my son or daughter certainly won’t be like me or like their father. What I am doing now is different from what my parents did. (Cinema, books, travels, music, clothes,…”language” (!) show the progress and the differences easily). What I think, too, is different. History goes on and that is why the position in front of events must go on with it. I am fighting for what I consider valuable, but maybe my children will think with another frame of mind, because either my fight will have reached its aim, or it will have not anymore sense because of the new events that will happen in the meanwhile.
It is very wrong to judge youth badly, because it is longhaired, because it prefers motobikes to cars (and even that is changing), because it fights for Nature and wants to love each other in peace. As soon as you discover new things, you desire new things, and to desire means to fight for getting it. And so on. To judge such an attitute is to refuse the progress of History.
And I can’t tell if my own children won’t have “funny” ideas I would never have had…
Of course, I will teach them what I learnt myself. If I did not, it would make my own youth meaningless. But I will teach them in such a way, that they will see what will be wrong (according to their new times, to the new Society they are) and I will do my best to live with them.
People say that one human life is too short. That is why I do not want my children to be like me: they will continue my own life, my own fight, with their new knowledge. And I hope I will also learn from them. I know that it is sometimes difficult (even if you do want to) to accept and to talk to your children. I hope for them and for me it will be possible.
