Grown Children Disrespecting Parents: How to Deal with Them?
Grown Children Disrespecting Parents always Hesitate to Speak their Mind to their Parents
Grown Children Disrespecting Parents is perhaps the most common problem that we all parents face in their daily life. What could be the psychological cause of it? It would be useful to differentiate between younger and older kids if we ponder over the subject in detail. Here are some of the excerpts of the parents and experts on the subject.
Michelle Sandberg, Pediatrician, mother of 3 young children:
I’ve noticed that my 7-year-old daughter is full of energy when I pick her up from school but is more enthusiastic about discussing other topics than the events of her day. I asked her why after seeing this question, and she replied that she’s been in school all day and talking about it makes her feel like she’s still in school. She explained that she’s ready to move on to “different things” once she gets home. I believe this is the primary reason, but I also believe there are other secondary reasons. My sense is that she spends time thinking about other topics during the course of the day and is eager to discuss them after school (since school is structured and she isn’t given the opportunity to discuss or explore other areas of interest). In the car, she is bursting with questions about random topics and my sense is that she has been thinking about them and waiting for a chance to discuss them.
At home, every mom is busy to provide the best childcare to their children and in the process are always busy to find the best ways to accomplish it.
Marcus Geduld, 35 years of study in psychology: A case of Grown Children Disrespecting Parents presented
Why do parents expect kids to want to talk about their day? Usually, when I ask adults “How was your day?” they reply with “It was fine,” “boring,” or some other curt phrase. They don’t launch into a narrative unless something specific is on their minds. Why would kids be different than adults in this respect? Is it wise to conclude it as a behavior of Grown Children Disrespecting Parents?
“How was your day?” and (worse) “What did you learn at school?” are absurdly broad questions. When posed to most people, young or old, their minds are likely to go blank.
In addition, when I was a kid, I generally didn’t want to answer those sorts of questions because…
a) most of the time I could tell grown-ups didn’t really care. They were just being friendly. But I also wasn’t old enough to appreciate social rituals like “How are you?” “I’m fine.” If someone asked me how my day was, I only wanted to tell them if it was clear they were genuinely interested. I’d been burned by launching into a story, only to see the grown-up’s eyes glaze over after the first 30 seconds.
And most kids have had this experience of their Estrangement from Parents:
Adult: How was your day?
Kid: I think my teacher hates me.
Adult (distractedly): That’s nice, dear. Wash your hands. Dinner is going to be ready in five minutes.
b) it could lead to lectures or other actions I didn’t like. Let’s say a kid was picking on me at school. Often, that was something I wanted to deal with on my own. (If I wanted my parents to help me with it, I would explicitly ask for their help.) I didn’t want to tell them I was being bullied, only to have them wig out, call the school, etc. And I didn’t want to say, “I had trouble with math, today,” only to wish I’d never spoken because I would have been forced to open my math book and do practice problems.
When an adult asks you “How was your day?” and you say, “Actually, I’m upset because I’m not losing weight,” you don’t want him to lecture you about eating vegetables. Most grownups are tactful enough not to deliver such lectures—except when it comes to kids. Kids know this. They know that there’s at least a possibility that truthfulness will lead to lectures (or worse). So why would they want to speak up?
c) I wasn’t all that good at articulating myself, except when something explicitly excited me. When I got grilled by an adult, it felt like a pop quiz. And usually, the adult would make it worse by saying, “How come you never want to tell me about your day?”
d) Adults never told me about their day. It seemed like a belittling thing that adults did to children but not to each other.
e) It was not one of my natural social rituals. I and my friends never said, “How was your day?” to each other. We just did stuff.
f) I lived much more in the present as a kid than I do as an adult, so… day? What day? Right now I’m hungry and I want to watch cartoons.
g) I had the stuff to hide. How was my day? Well, the best part was finding those “Playboy” magazines which are now safely stashed under my bed. Are You cool with that, mom?
h) I wanted to watch “Star Trek” and my parents were distracting me by asking me about my day. Which is a boring thing to talk about! Captain Kirk was more interesting than “my day”, which was spent sitting at a desk, doing boring math problems.
Erica Friedman, The Librarian: A good case of a Grown Children Disrespecting Parents
I remember not wanting to talk about school because my parents had absolutely no real interest in anything that wasn’t me accomplishing or excelling at a thing. Problems with classes or people, would simply be blamed on something I was or wasn’t doing correctly, and it was more stressful to talk about things that were stressful, then be blamed for them, than to just avoid the conversation at all.
My parents are good people, they just aren’t empathetic (and neither am I as a result.) We listen critically, but can’t listen uncritically and supportively. To this day, if I say, “wow, today was a lot of work, I had to write 4 blog posts,” my Mom’s response will assuredly be, “Well, you take that on yourself, it’s not like you’re paid for it.” or if I say “client was difficult at work,” she says “Well, it’s just the way people are, you have to do it their way, because they are the client” or something similar. I just can not sense here anything like a Grown Children Disrespecting Parents.
Lukasz Laniecki, A pound parent:
I think the original question is a great one to ask by a parent.
Why? Because it shows that a parent is contemplating some of his or her automatic behaviors.
I think most parents are genuinely interested in their kid’s day when they ask this (unfortunately, lame!) question. Many have already mentioned here why in most cases this question fails to produce desired results so I won’t repeat it.
Unfortunately, most parents operate on autopilot and don’t ask themselves this, and many other, profound questions.
Our parents tortured us with this question, so now we (unconsciously) torture our kid with it. This is nothing but the result of Grown Children Disrespecting Parents, a case of kid’s estrangement from parents and vice-versa.
I’m old enough not to remember whether my parents were guilty of it, but I can definitely tell that hearing 200+ times a year “How was your day?” would make me want to kill the person asking it.
Part of our problem as parents are our expectations in communication with our kids. In other words, I can boldly accept that we are responsible for our estranged children.
Marcus Geduld begins his answer with the following question:
“Why do parents expect kids to want to talk about their day?”
This question (and Marcus’ first sentence) pretty much answers the original question.
We have an expectation that our kid will want to talk with us about his or her day every single time we pick him/her up from school.
If we think about it for a while we will realize that this expectation is unreasonable. Our kid should be thrilled to talk with us about his or her day 200+ times a year, and his or her excitement should pop up every day at a specified time, right after school. This is absurd.
Similarly, we have many other expectations, for example as to what our kid will be thrilled to do during the day. In reality, we manage to score some good guesses, but not all the time and not most of the time.
When I offer my son that I’ll play chess with him I should be equally eager to play his “new version” of chess (and let him explain the new rules to me) or any other game. Why not? Why should he be limited to playing traditional chess with me? It is supposed to be fun, so why should I stick to my offer.
I may want to negotiate with him a little to show him that my preferences should also be taken into consideration but by no means, I should fall in love with my ideas and freak out when he, on the spot, makes up his new version of chess. I admit though, that the rules he invents could be a little bit fairer.
Another question we as parents ask without giving it much thought is: “Who do you want to be when you grow up?” And again, we fail to recognize that the majority of kids hate this question and, what’s even more important, by asking if we are almost certain to limit our kids’ choices and kill their creativity. But, who cares? Our parents asked us this question, their parents asked them, so we blindly repeat it too.
This was a real case of Grown Children Disrespecting Parents.
Katie King, A proud Mother:
Oh, God. I hated talking about my day with my mom when I was a kid. She would fire all these questions at me, and it would be so overwhelming, especially when I was a middle school when you’re just trying to make sense of everything. Talking about your day (or griping about it, whatever) is for friends. Maybe if there were an open forum – like, everyone shares what happened in their day – over dinner or a during a family game or something – then it would feel less like an interrogation.
So, what does above talks denote? We parents are over-enthusiastic, demanding, oversensitive, extra caring, ignorant about child psychology or just a misfit in the conducive world of the kid.
Grown Children Disrespecting Parents is a serious matter. We must definitely ponder over the subject and try to find an answer. Developing wider perspective by visiting subjects at Explore My India may provide sometimes the much-needed spirituality and bonding.
Reference: Quora forum.