Павел Эрзяйкин - Your children are not your children

Questions

My son started working, but having his own money, he doesn’t share with the family. I think he should take part in the family expenses, but he is of a different opinion. How can I make him change his mind?

Why do you think you have the right to command his money? Do you think that way he should pay for his happy childhood? Expectations don’t work anyway. If you expected your child to start working and giving you part of his salary, then you had to tell him about that at the beginning. Expectations not having been clarified always end up in an offence, „partisan’s war,“ revenge and fear. You should make the situation clear, „Why do you start working? What do you want? How much will you earn? Are you ready to support the family budget? Or will you live apart and earn your living?“ You didn’t clarify anything, the child started working, received his money and suddenly learned that he had to give it to you. In other words, his mother thinks, „I want a new fur coat. Where can I get money? I’ll take from my husband and my son,“ but she doesn’t notify anybody about that. However, the child has his own plans for his money. So it happens that there’s one wage, but two plans for it. You demand, he resists, and you start racketeering, threating and blackmailing. If you don’t talk to your child, don’t negotiate, but present him with a fait accompli, you deprive yourself of clarity, stay among your own illusions, and when you face the reality, you get stressed and start attacking your child even more furiously.

Cash Dispenser

My daughter is always asleep – she goes to bed early, but still it’s difficult to wake her up to school in the morning. When she comes back home from school – she naps for an hour again. I think this isn’t normal. Is she lazy, or has she had problems at school? What should I do?

Since it suddenly started bothering you, then it must have appeared quite recently. It may be connected with some hormonal disorders, but if doctors have already examined her and told you that somatically she’s healthy, we’ll have a look at the psychological part of the case. She might get too tired. School stress is considered to be average, so for some students it’s easy, but for others it’s beyond the limits. If it’s too heavy for your daughter, then sleep is the way to protect her brain from overload. I don’t think it’s a sign of laziness. Laziness is a social diagnosis, but even lazy people wake up when something meaningful and personally important for them happens. Maybe your daughter isn’t interested in what she is doing. Nothing in her life excites her, and that’s why she often sleeps. But we also can’t ignore the fact that the number of hours she sleeps, that seems too much for you, is her individual norm and need.

My child has to go to school next year, but he doesn’t like books, doesn’t want to learn the letters, while most children of his age can write, read and are ready for school. What should I do?

If he can’t read and write now – he will learn. There is the first school year for that. The majority of children learn quickly at school, because it’s easier to study in a group, than at home, alone, with biased parents, who don’t have teaching skills, relying on their own views about the child’s development at a certain age. In the kindergarten my daughter attended, they told parents, „We play and study with your children the whole day and they come home to relax. Please, don’t educate and don’t teach them anything. Give them some rest.“

In your case you need to sort out the problem. Watch your son. Isn’t he just „fishing“? It means that you need him reading and writing, but he doesn’t want to learn to make you „spin“ around him and worry about him. Maybe your child doesn’t care about his age-mates reading and writing. But he may be offended by your constant comparing him with somebody, and then, being offended, he blocks his own development. Anyway just leave him alone. When you stop worrying about him, he will start thinking himself how to learn to read, to write and etc.

I try to bring up my son free from stereotypes, but communicating with his peers, who have got used to following some dogmas, he becomes an outcast. I think it will end up in his losing his trust in me or his staying alone. How can I prevent this?

You’re right. You already feel that your child doesn’t trust you, keeps you at a distance, or you wouldn’t ask me anything. The purpose of our upbringing is to make the child adequate, teach him to be appropriate, essential and sufficient, but not shocking by his extraordinary looks and deeds. If we teach the child to shock, we leave him to be assessed, disapproved and finally becoming an outcast. One mother was proud telling me about her son criticizing pedagogical skills of his teacher of English right at school. The teacher said, „Either me or this boy!“ The principal chose the teacher, the boy changed schools, and at his new school he teaches his mathematician how to teach mathematics and his teacher of PE how to teach PE. This is a dreadful situation. The thing that frightens is that the boy uses his talents to make people hate him. If you know everything, and it’s too easy for you at school, pass all the exams without attending school and enter the university. You can use your abilities for your wellness, growth, development and for earning money. Or you can use your abilities for pampering your arrogance and self-importance and becoming an outcast.

All our classmates are engaged with some activity apart from school – they visit some courses, clubs or trainings. But my daughter still can’t decide what hobby to choose – she isn’t interested in anything. Is that OK?

It’s OK, if it’s the manifestation of her individuality and she is really not interested in anything now. But it may be the sign of „fishing“: I see that my mum wants me to be engaged with something, but I won’t do anything to spite her. However, fear may be the cornerstone for this situation. You might have criticized her when she was younger, when children fall in love with everything and want to do everything. You condemned something she wanted and forbade it, so now when you „push her out of the house,“ she is afraid to make her choice, because she is afraid of your negative reaction to it.

My two adult children haven’t spoken with each other for about two years. All my attempts to make them closer are in vain. I don’t understand how a sister and a brother can behave like that. The children of my friends are mostly close and friendly to each other. Why do they have so nice relations?

More often we don’t talk when we’re offended. Keeping silence we try to punish the person who insulted us, so that he/she would feel as hard, bad and lonely as we do. Your anxious taking part doesn’t become a cure, but something that makes this situation even worse and permanent. Keep out from the relationship between your children, stop worrying about them, and then they will take care about their relations themselves. Pushing and getting together feuding children won’t make it any better.

We bought a bicycle as a present for our six-year-old daughter, but she doesn’t use it. Although we had asked her before what she wanted to have as a present, she said – a toy stroller. We offered her a bicycle, because we wanted to buy something more serious. She agreed to buy the bicycle, but now it keeps standing in the corner. Why?

She hasn’t played enough with a stroller and she dreams about it, never mind what you think about her age and what she has to be fond of. She doesn’t ride a bike now only because the stroller is still more important for her now. She agreed to buy the bike, because she didn’t want to upset you; she wanted to please you, but not argue. After a while when she grows up, you will be surprised, „Why is she so secretive? Why doesn’t she tell us what she wants? Why doesn’t she share her plans?“ Because when she was six, she understood that her sincere dream isn’t so important for parents as their own opinion about what she should want and need.

If a girl became a mother at 20, when it’s early to speak about some maturity and abundance, what should she do?

Abundance is the feature and quality of a person, but not the age prerogative. A twenty-year-old mother can be „abundant.“ But at the same time a mature woman can be „poor.“ In fact there are a lot of stereotypes about age and about the time to become mothers. They call thirty-year-old women having their first child „old nulliparous,“ thus creating fear and forcing immature people having nothing in their lives to parturiate as early as possible – at 15, 16, 17. But other doctors say that it’s not safe to parturiate before you are 20. So, 30 is late, 20 is early 2 2 The data is true for Russia. . Nobody takes into account the real readiness and maturity of the particular woman. The size of the coxofemoral bones, hormones and etc. are more important for the doctors, because they want to do everything „right.“ The same dishonesty is in the diagnoses, which are written just in case. If one doctor overestimates the disease, never mind, the other doctors will understand him and correct. When they don’t want to be responsible for the result, the doctors start shifting responsibility to the mother, to the father, to the vitamins, to the toxemia and to the violation of the diet. All this rat race has nothing to do with what is growing there in the abdomen. Meanwhile future parents having seen the half-page diagnosis get afraid of what they decide to do. The mother feels the guilt complex, because they said she did something wrong during parturition. Then this fear transfers to the children programming their further life. When the child is 30, they find excuses: he is so immature because of the birth injury.

Feedback disturbances between parents and children begin right from the moment of birth. Parents try to please other people, listen to their advice and keep their advice like old stiff photographs, paying no attention to their own children. When children grow up and get out of control, parents are surprised, "But we were bringing them up correctly – all the relatives and neighbors approved of us." The thing is that bringing up children you shouldn’t rely on the morals and what other people do, but on what you see "here and now," relying on what you feel when you contact with your children, understanding what your children say and how they do it.

What is most important is that we want our children to hear us. But if they were able to accept what was told, if they understood, felt and changed after that, it would not be of particular interest. Their consent and acceptance of our rightness is what is important. We change upbringing for self-admiration,"Look, I’m a strict parent! What correct words I tell my children!" But children aged 6 or 7 don’t hear what we say. Firstly, because we repeat one and the same thing. Secondly, because we ourselves don’t implement what we teach them. So our connection is unilateral – from an adult to a child. I’m the parent, so I’m right, I know how it should be, and you’re little, you must listen to me. We don’t think what the child feels about that. I’ve planted a seed, will it grow? It’s important that I’ve planted it, that I was raising it, that I was repeating the same thing a hundred of times … But what’s the point of it, if it doesn’t work?