A respectful parenting [safe investment]

I tirelessly repeat that parenting is not a minor issue, which is the epicenter of human and social problems. I say almost daily and by all means of dissemination within my reach that the quality of parenting depends on us building a world with more prisons and hospitals or a more humanized world. I do not exaggerate when I insist that lavishing a dignified, respectful treatment, understanding and caring for all the needs of our children, now when they need it the most, is the most important and safe investment in the future. We perceive reality in such a fragmented way that we are unable to register the relationship between dismissing orders for arms, comfort, a child's gaze and the fact that depression is today one of the first global pandemics. We can not see the connection between "spanking in time" and bursts of pistols fired by criminals or terrorists. It does not occur to us to identify the lack of a mother's body, of emotional commitment, of empathy or the authoritarian treatment of our children, as forms of abuse and helplessness transformed in the infinite doses of violence on a large scale that today signify our planet.

We say, "I was raised like this, my mom gave me some good bandages when I needed them and notice that now I am a good person", without noticing that the world is populated by "good people" medicated to sleep, addicted tobacco, coffee, shopping, excessive consumption, alcohol, success, work, social networks, the Internet, sex ... "good people" who shout and beat their children, people " well "that in the territory of their personal relationships are only willing to accommodate their own desire by denying and violating the desire of the other, or on the contrary, individuals unable to assert their own desire or need, devoured by the excessive demands of their partners, relatives, companions.

We listen, we repeat and we believe unrepentantly phrases like "my parents beat me, they overpowered my uncivilized character with authority, they left me crying so that I would not be spoiled and it worked, look at me now made a man or a woman worker, responsible, with family" , without noticing the vast emotional desert that we try to fill desperately and uselessly, demanding even in adulthood, what we never received when it was truly urgent, when we depended entirely on mom and dad to survive. But mom and dad were not available to lavish us, because they, like the grandparents and great grandparents, learned that the child who asks for attention, look, maternal body, parental accompaniment ... is excessively demanding, so he is labeled as a crybaby, bad , disobedient, manipulative, awful, sickly, spoiled ... and that repress their needs and not bother with their "exhausting demands" is the same as being a good, quiet child, a child that does not even feel ... and in that we become. And so we end up as eternally needy adults, clinging to imprints lodged in a place of our emotional memory without conscious time or registration, managed with the disguise that suits us, interpreting the character that will "save" us from a hostile and predatory world. Thus we grew far from what we are, lost from our essence in the midst of the shadows that devour the conscience and the possibility of making us free. Time and again born to survive and not to be loved.

If only we were able to realize that the difficult thing is not to satisfy the needs of real children now, but the really difficult and exhausting is to deal with a world full of adults turned into eternally deprived children.