Guilty Until 18
Enlarge Image The relationships between children (or better yet, teenagers) and parents will always have their degree of bumpiness. The most common scenario is the one in which the child tells his mother that she does not want her as a mother anymore or that he hates her and so on , plus the parent that does not change his/her position for nothing in the world!
Weather it's about piercing , tattoo-s , the way you dress , the way you do your hair , what you eat ,who your friends are and what's the kind of music you listen to , our parents will always find motives to make your existence a difficult one , right ?
Age difference has constantly been the excuse for such disputes between parents and children.
What happens when you have children? - People, that 10-15 years ago were in the shoes of a rebellious adolescent that had to be put "back to his place" one way or another, well, the same people, nowadays, have children of their own.
What happens when you have children of your own? Do you automatically adopt all of your parent's lines that you so hated when you were younger and take them as good advice for your own children?
I completely understand the parent's interest for the education, health, morality, behavior of his child. Because after all, his child is his ID , his most prized ' possession ' in which they invest just about all of their energy and resources and it's normal for them not to want their child to ruin their image in front of their neighbors ,family , friends or even people they don't know.
For your parents, you are' just a kid' that doesn't know much ,no matter how much you strain yourself to prove the opposite ; while they have worked their whole life just to meet your demands and that you can be someone bigger and better than they were. By adopting the 'I do what I want' attitude, and by not obeying them, you ruin all those dreams they worked so hard to build for you.
All of these things come to change when you turn 18(or whatever the maturity age is for you, when you are legally an adult, fully responsible for your actions). 18 becomes Paradise for adolescents. 18 is the time when you can do whatever you want, when you are not forced to listen to anyone, when you have the impression that your decisions will be solely yours and no one can interfere in making them; when you can drink, smoke, crack windows or even heads, when you can run away from home to marry the love of your life, when 4 AM becomes the standard curfew hour. Because you are not 'just a kid' anymore, right?
That's how we discover the emotional blackmail, which adolescents use to threaten their parents and convince them to stay out of their way. It goes like this: "I'll turn 18, you'll see! And I'm leaving this house and I don't want to hear from you ever again! "But right now, the little blackmailer is only 14 or 16 years old and until he becomes 18 ... gosh, how many things could happen if his parents would get in the way of his happiness.
The problem is that his parents won't remain indifferent to this attitude, they will take action and "poke his eyes out" for every premature declaration of independence. Moreover, they begin with threats that the child cannot truly understand and are beyond his/her real comprehension limits. It sounds a little bit like this in every case: "When you'll be on your own and earn your own bread and be out of my house, you can do whatever you want! But until then, put a sock in it!"
The war will never stop. One over the other, it is clear to me that the age do 18 is a psychological turning point for the nation's youth , and for those that feel so persecuted by their parents before they turn 18 , I can only say that the interdictions won't miraculously stop when they turn that age. This was the bad news... and the even worse news is that... at a given moment, they will permanently stop.
