By Manuela Mesquita
Parents are not teaching their children to be citizens with an attitude. This is the opinion of Dr. Içami Tiba, psychiatrist for whom, “There isn’t an ideal model for raising children.”
The author of 27 publications, the majority focusing on young people, Tiba believes that parents are responsible for the unstable and impatient nature of this new generation, who has trouble dealing with problems or tolerating things they dislike. In an interview with the blog, he affirms that this generation of egocentric young people still has a lot to learn about differentiating themselves in the competitive workplace today.
What’s happened in society that has caused relationships within the family to change so much? Parents have become much less rigorous and don’t exercise the same authority as before. Is this mostly a product of mothers leaving the home to work outside of it?
This is a silent revolution that happened because parents, both men and women, don’t want to repeat the upbringing they had and didn’t like: limits, discipline, and physical punishment.
The upbringing they received has pushed them to not repeat this with their own kids, as they strive to give privileges to their children they would have liked to have obtained from their parents.
In reality, this upbringing has not been adequate because it’s created kids who are not well brought-up, in the sense that they are not citizens who fulfill their obligations. Their parents had these values, but they didn’t want to hold their children to these rigid standards, thus establishing a relationship between children concentrated on their own leisure and suffocated parents.
However, children in this day and age need to be very committed to obtain results. They have to be competitive and have ethics. However, parents teach their kids to be heirs, not successful entrepreneurs who obtain things on their own, advancing due to their own strength.
The fact that mothers started working outside of the home, has accentuated these tendencies, as parents try to compensate for their absence in a way that isn’t positive or healthy for the kids. Of course, mothers can work, but they can’t please their child at whatever cost. This intense “softening” has a negative impact on an individual’s professional life later on.
You’ve stated that 80% of delinquents today have been raised by their mother. Erich Fromm argues that fathers have conditional love, whereas mothers express unconditional love. How does this difference manifest itself in a child’s upbringing?
Women have the hormones for building relationships, and men have testosterone, which pushes them to compete, fight for their territory, and defend their interests. For this reason, a male parent and female parent, balance themselves out perfectly. One fights and the other protects, while giving the child the necessary resources for survival. Imposing obligation isn’t massacring the child. Rather it gives him or her the tools to be a man or women of great success: having learned skills, the ability and will to learn, and the pleasure that goes along with that.
Human beings need to find pleasure in their work, but they have little time to align everything in their busy lives. Children just want to have fun and they don’t want to learn. However, not everyone gets to do what they love all the time. There are aspects of work for instance, that you will never like. Yet, parents don’t teach their children this. For this reason, young people make their choices, letting go of a good job because of a small disagreement at work, or a fight with a girlfriend or boyfriend. They have a low threshold for frustration, dropping out of University because they don’t like one subject. As parents, our job is to teach them to handle these situations.
How can mothers or fathers exercise a “double role” in a society where so many parents are divorced?
In this case, children still have a mother and father. If a couple divorces, it’s due to their own problems, and shouldn’t impact the raising of their children. What you can’t do is continue fighting while separated, throwing your kids in the middle, trying to turn them against the other parent.
The concept of raising children has changed a lot. Psychologists argue that you can’t punish a child too much, and that you need to stimulate creativity. What are your thoughts on this?
I can speak from my clinically based experience. What I’ve noticed is in this modern way of raising children, parents become less and less demanding of their kids, allowing them to make their own decisions when they shouldn’t. For instance, allowing them to stop their studies at a crucial moment. A lot of kids start to work, making some money, and gain a false idea of freedom. So parents may think “At least my child is working,” and yet this is the result of a total lack of preparation.
How should we raise this generation?
I think that to be human is to have the capacity of learning along with our mistakes. In this modern way of raising children, the kids who aren’t given the skills to manage the results they obtain, aren’t ready to make decisions yet. And so parents need to take care of this and assume responsibility. If their children don’t understand this and want to join the workplace anyways, they won’t be successful because they lack maturity. If parents continue to be too easy on their kids, listening to their every caprice, they’re not raising them or doing them any favors.
How does the Internet influence the raising of children?
If parents don’t dedicate themselves to learning, they can’t educate. While raising children, it’s important to be aware of the latest advances. Parents today need to understand MSN, Orkut, etc. The Internet has a lot of great things, and some bad things too. It depends how you use it. Parents need to use the resources their kids use, in order to relate to them. Young people have never had so many resources to meet and connect as they do today. On MSN it’s possible to connect with all your friends in one day. The same thing happens with blogs and on social networks. The vision is different, and we don’t even need to leave the house. We just need to press a button. Young people know what’s happening with their friends, and they make plans. If parents tap into these resources, they will gain in their own professional careers, and also communicate more effectively with their children.
In your opinion does virtual contact substitute physical contact?
Physical contact needs to be better appreciated. For parents who just want to please their kid, regardless of the circumstances, it would be better not even to have this physical contact. They could just control everything virtually, and when they actually did meet face-to-face, it would be without the conflicts and fights, that end up happening precisely because of the absence of parents.
At school we learn to socialize and to share things, like our toys. But when children turn into teenagers, their reality turns into something else. We become individualistic, wanting to earn money. This provokes a lot of confusion. How do we go about this problem? Does the way we teach young children need to be more realistic?
Even in the Vestibular (the exam used to get into University in Brazil), a hard-working student who studies in a group, will do better than someone who studies alone. Similarly, in a competitive sport, athletes develop skills individually, but the team solidifies their strength. Champions are the ones who are among many others. Nobody wins completely alone. If school cultivates group participation it helps the student’s development.
It’s good for the student to realize that the world is competitive. Those who are on the sidelines, will at some point, be fighting the same fight as everyone else. Yet, if you have this knowledge, you become stronger, than you are as a lone individual. This also relates to one’s professional life.
Many argue that this generation is less generous than past generations. Do you agree?
I agree because this is a product of the way they’ve been raised. They’ve done drugs, they’ve become more egocentric, they don’t give value to hierarchy, they want results on a short-term basis, and if they don’t see these results right away, they want to move somewhere else. They don’t have a strong career vision for themselves. In your career you need to get your hands dirty. They can’t handle this. They’re self-centered and that’s due to the way they’ve been raised.
In your book “Família de Alta Performance” you explore excellence in the quality of life of an individual. However, we know that currently it’s really difficult to reconcile everything in our busy lives. Is it possible to have an extremely successful career while also being an excellent mother or father? If so, how?
By trying to do things in the best way possible. No mother or father is going to be the best they can be, if they aren’t dedicated to understanding the current Educational system and the way kids are being raised, making their kids benefit from the best advances available. Business professionals need to update themselves constantly. The same goes for parents. It’s not a question of constantly being with the child, but actually knowing what he or she is doing. Teaching at a distance is an example of how the virtual can be really productive.
In your book you also talk about how certain changes could make our lives better. Could you cite some of these changes?
The first is the way in which parents can make their kids happier people, by making their child a citizen within the household. In other words, parents need to instill a principal of collaboration within the household, called the citizenship of the family. Just like at work, you don’t wait until the last minute to take care of things, or wait until the day before a payment is due to present the result to your boss. The same attitude should apply for family citizenship.
How do you think the raising of children will evolve in the near future?
I believe that when facing a problem, we need to mobilize our resources to overcome it. Those who mobilize resources are those who win. This generation is bothered by how difficult it is to join the workplace in a time of such economic crisis. Since a lot of people are suffering, there are going to be a lot of new things popping up, and they are impossible to predict in today’s market conditions.
But do you think there’s going to be a sort of pendulum swing? Are parents going to go back to the way they were before, becoming more strict in the way they raise their kids? Do you think this should happen? Or are there more modern ways to raise a happy child?
I don’t think things will go back to the way they were before. There’s a movement which aims to prohibit everything, but that doesn’t work because children need to learn. They need to ask why. However, they can’t ask questions that don’t lead them anywhere. A child doesn’t have to question studying or education. This isn’t a question that will make him or her grow. If we aren’t able to separate things, we will think that all questions are good, or all of them bad. It’s not that simple.
Laziness always finds answers or excuses not to do things. We need to establish family citizenship. Studying and education need to be an obligation, whether our children like it or not. The most important thing is for people to start learning, and to find what they like through this process. Today there are many more opportunities for happiness than unhappiness. But to tap into them we have to be competent, and dedicated to an eternal learning process. The raising of our children is currently going in the wrong direction, so we need to turn around, and grow.