The Generational Baggage Carry-Over That Needs to Stop
The way we think, behave and understand things most times reflect our background, the type of home training we received. Our emotional capabilities, mental resilience, spiritual exposure, professional development all fall under this umbrella of home training. It’s also true that the way we raise our immediate family now, shares similar tendencies as well — our background.
When you measure the level of success in life also, you find out that the way we were raised plays a huge role in it. If you’ve lived with parents who were professionals in their respective fields of work, it molds your mindset to aspire to achieve that. Likewise, when you have parents who were carefree, it makes you feel the need not to strive hard — or at least it draws you back.
That sort of thing will either motivate or demotivate the child to emulate them and follow suit.
From generation to generation certain other traits and habits got passed down to us. Meaning these tendencies were not only inherited from our parents. They were passed down from generations before that to them. We only forged our mode of training ‘directly’ from our parents, so to speak.
While these habits aren’t necessarily always directly proportional to how a child turns out in the future, neither are they wrong, they, however, always play huge roles in molding how they come to form our children’s being in the future — emotionally, mentally, and professionally etcetera.
These traits lie not only the good but also the bad and the ugly.
Let’s just say that in the end, presently, you turned out to be a decent being — although maybe still fighting your demons.
But the mental stress, lag, and emotional drain you’ve gone through, I presume, wouldn’t be something you wish upon your own children. The method of training our parents or caregivers have used in bringing us up might not serve as the best template for our own immediate family.
This sort of baggage can mar the upbringing of our own children since we are training them through the same lenses with what we saw our own parents or caregivers do.
This is why it’s important that the developmental baggage in all facets of life that we’ve faced should be dropped during our time and not carried over to continue in our children’s generation. Because when we train them with the same hand as our parents or caregivers did, they’re bound to emulate them and keep the train moving.
Bringing up a child entails a lot. There’s no one-size-fits-all handbook for it. However, a lot of things need to be considered beyond what we already know about or experienced on our own when training our own children.
With that said, many of the inconspicuous baggage that needs relinquishing in our method of training our own children should include
Things like:
First of all, understanding who your child is
What they like and dislike, how they think and speak. How they learn and if they unlearn too. Their personality. When you get to know this, it molds your skills on how to go about training them. Don’t get carried away, for instance by similarities you might have seen in one of your siblings and the type of training he/she got from your parents. Bring up your child your way.
Treating your child as a different entity, even though they share the same gene as you or your family relatives, means that you respect their identity.
Another point noteworthy is the millennium you bring up your child in
Yes, it might sound strange to be aware of the time before or while training your child but this is paramount. Because the way things work now isn’t the way it did back in the days of our parents and generations before now.
Nowadays you discover that most children are exposed to the internet, some have a phone or tablet of their own, while others watch the television — unguided. This already puts them in harm’s way during their upbringing. And while denying them these gadgets or exposure seems like the reasonable option out of this, it’s not — especially if it’s because you were denied one as a child. As it’s been stipulated, less is more, nothing can be everything. Rather than these, wouldn’t moderation and guidance serve as better strategies that faze these harm away?
Freedom
One of life’s luxuries we couldn’t afford as much as the youngsters of these days do is freedom. Freedom to eat what we like, go to where we want to, and basically, do what we like. We cannot say that because we were denied such freedom, then our children must suffer it as well. Again, guidance and moderation come into place here.
I recently heard a piece of unparalleled advice from one of my favorite Korean dramas. In this drama, the coach let his athletes do whatever they wanted to prove that he trusts them — as a strategy to instill that trust back in them not to indulge in activities that jeopardize their status. If you ask me, that would have been the best way to instill trust in me, while growing up. And still is.
Neglecting, scolding or spoiling your child
This is a double-edged sword. You want to show your child by every means that you love them and care about them. But you don’t want to spoil them either. So you’re torn between either sparing the rod and spoiling the child or not. Well, I can’t tell anyone how to bring up their child. But I know that no child deserves to be neglected in whatever shape or form. At the same time, we cannot let them get away with things because that will not be teaching them consequences.
Overall, scolding or pampering a child should be a decision that you make on your own based on the current situation but not borrowed tactics from one of our parents’ handbooks. Because different types of children are born. You might have gotten away with being beaten ceaselessly while growing up, but these days, it’s considered physical abuse. A serious one at that.
You might have also gotten away with being scolded with very ugly words in teaching you vital lessons while growing up, but now, it’s considered a serious verbal and emotional abuse.
I’m sure there are various ways to teach a child a lesson. It doesn’t have to be the same way we learned them.
Gender impartiality
Today, gender inequality is a big issue. A huge factor to this, in my own perspective, has a lot to do with how we were raised. When you raise your girls to understand that they are the pillar of any home who bears the most emotional burden in any relationship, it gets ingrained in their mindset. In the future, they blame themselves for not being able to keep, even a toxic relationship, going — which could lead them ultimately to suffer from depression. When you raise your boys to be hard as men like you were taught to be and forget each person to their own types and senses, it could breed contempt when they do otherwise, self-loathing inclusive.
When you disparate between your children and put them in a box or category, it is the reason why there’s gender inequality issues, chauvinism, and feminism in the world of today.
Let’s raise our children equally so that they can understand the importance of unison and inclusivity in driving the world forward. After all, it always takes two, then a family, the whole world to make a change, not one person.
Being a parent teaches us on its own (natural inclinations, hunch, and tendencies), how to go about bringing up our children. And while our parents or the generations before then might not have been wrong in bringing us up the way they did, we still can’t afford to get carried away by their methods. By either bombarding or neglecting our children who are born at different times from us. Instead, let’s learn from their mistakes and correct the path to a better upbringing for our own kids.
There’s a time to implore those good ol’ tactics and many times when we don’t.
I believe that if anything should be emulated, they should be things that coincide with the child’s personality. A method tried and that seems to work. Not a method that appears like an imposition.
This is to prevent your child or children from loathing themselves and resenting you when they grow up. Alongside all the emotional and mental trauma they would have suffered or will suffer.
We are the generation that can stop this and will stop this from continuing. And the time is now. Because we now know better. We’ve come to terms that we might have been abused in different shapes and form judging by how things are now and we are still living okay. We’ve agreed that our parent’s parenting skills might have been a little archaic and brash, and we’re learning to accept that a change needs to be put into place. Who better to?
Imagine if we do not stop it here and carried on, the sort of gene or behavioral tendencies we would likely be passing on to our own kids?
Now, imagine our children’s future and our generations to come. Who are we maiming and who are we changing? What are we enabling and what are we eradicating?
If you ask me, I think the power is in our own hands, to make this coming generation, hence the world a better place.
