Therapist Katerina Murashova: you Have to live your life, and the child will adjust

A conversation about teen suicide with a family therapist Katerina Murashova arose by chance. I gave examples of when this tragedy occurred in wealthy families where the children had good relationships with their parents, waiting to see what Katherine will say it does not happen, then there was something wrong, but it is contrary to my expectations, answered: “No, this can be, and I hear more and more about it – the parents build the child’s performance the direct link between good grades, admission to College and a bright future, and as soon as something goes wrong, the child feels that all life is over”. About this and about how parents with the best intentions depriving the child the opportunity to understand themselves, we talked about it.

Photo: Rolands Lakis / Flickr

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– Is it true that the slightest deviation from the predetermined course can be for the child’s life a tragedy?

– First and foremost it is a tragedy for the parents, because they believe that they have everything under control. This idea they broadcast to the child: if everything is done correctly, then all correctly and work. But life is more complicated, and quickly all is not so simple and smooth, and the parents start to panic, kid, too, and at some moment he could with this situation can not cope. Of course, suicide is an extreme case, mostly expressed in neuroticism.

– One child committed suicide, when his teacher said something like “you will never see a chemical class,” and were all shocked that such a tiny episode became the reason of such terrible events.

– He is insignificant to those whom it shocked, and for a child it was quite insignificant, because crumbling the very Foundation of its existence. Relatively speaking, you thought that if you observe kashrut, the Sabbath, and something else, you must go to the righteous, and you said no, not necessarily. So line up and then fall hard relationship. If you do good in school and listen to your parents, you will have a good job, you go to College, and you all will be well, otherwise you won’t even sweep the streets, because all the seats are occupied by migrant workers. The child thus builds up a coherent picture of the world, but at some point it begins to crumble from both the world and the child, because the child may behave as a programmed robot – he’s got hormones, this, that, and, accordingly, betrays at once all: and the world, and myself. What kind of change? This is very serious.

– You spoke about this phenomenon as a trend, the recent phenomenon.

– Yes, the children of perestroika, whose parents had left engineers in the “Shuttle” was exposed to all sorts of other things, but this – absolutely not. For them the world was not steady – he was swinging right in front of the amazed public. Then the task was to stay on the swaying deck. The idea that the deck is fixed, no one in the head just would not come.

– It turns out that stability is a risk factor, surprisingly?

– All overlap – the risk factor. To draw the child picture absolutely motionless highway, guaranteed a good life, is completely wrong.

Katerina Murashova. Photo: Mikhail Tereshchenko

– Do I understand correctly that “orangeriet” adds risk, as the child, do not collide neither with suffering nor loss, nor with the frustrations, having met with this, could not withstand this, believing that it is impossible to survive? For example, if the girl threw, and for the first time a child suffers if he can commit suicide, feeling it unbearable?

Yes. For example, in the family of Anatoly Mariengof where his son Cyrus killed himself because of unrequited love at 16, as by all accounts absolutely stunning purity, beauty and other qualities of a teenager who grew up in a very happy family: Anatoly Mariengof, despite all his quirks, all his life he lived with one woman, loved her, and everything was fine. And, it would seem… of Course, the deck needs to swing – no one is talking about the storm, with the storm growing children also has its risks, but the idea of the absolute immobility is a big risk because at some point the deck will inevitably swing.

In lectures I always say to parents: you can do with your kids all you want because it’s your children – even porridge eat, but when you define your strategy and tactics, draw to themselves what in the world you cook them, what do you think they will face and what not.

You have the right to decide anything, but for different future they must be given different sets of Sciences.

For example, if I believe that my child will chew my future teeth, and there’s nothing I can do, I’m a poor teacher, saved her money and will send him to study in England is one set of skills. If I believe that my son will inherit my tailoring shop, then the other. If I think I already stole enough money from the state and my daughter enough, and it does not matter what she does, is the third set of skills.

The teenager leaves with smooth roads

– How is the parent equation to write a little predictable variable as teenage rebellion? We really want to drive on a smooth highway our child a bright future, we have all agreed, has a place in the Institute, but suddenly the teenager says that he doesn’t want to College and decided to go into the army?

– If you do all ready, it can pubblicitari, but then still go to the Institute. Another thing, if the Institute did not have any relation to it, and it is purely your decision, it is likely to throw his sophomore year, and that it will continue – indeed unpredictable, because this institution does nothing to his soul, and she needs to feed. And it will have to feed, or changing partners, or using drugs, or drinking vodka, and whiskey.

– Maybe from his youth he played the guitar, everyone thought that this is not serious, pignoli his scandal to the Institute, and he abandoned it and went to engage seriously with his guitar?

I can’t believe I had not seen such to the child of all life paved smooth highway, and suddenly he’s at the Institute went on to play the guitar. Saw tried to do it, and saw break off. The fact that children whose parents always cleared the road and turned them in the right direction, not able to work. And to walk this difficult path with the guitar, they have a lot to lose, be ready, be ready to gnaw with his teeth lateral move, to overcome an incredible amount of obstacles…

It happens that children from wealthy families go off the prepared track. In my youth this was Patricia Hearst, the heiress of a vast Empire, and suddenly she has gone away somewhere, but it’s not the music started to write and sculptures sculpt, and fled to some kind of anarchist and drug addiction (Patricia Hearst, the granddaughter of an American billionaire and media magnate William Randolph Hearst, studied art history at the University of Berkeley was taken and convicted for robbery raids. – approx. ed.). This, to a child who was preparing a place among some financial analysts, escaped to write music, I’ve never met, only in literature. Leave more to the anarchists, drug addicts, alcoholics. That is, it is an escape to another environment with the release of their own, but without the ability to work on a constructive model of his life.

There is no guarantee that a child’s life goes exactly as you suggest, but the focus of the program is not necessary – it is necessary to understand what future do you want for your child, and in accordance with this, to give him the appropriate set of skills.

If a parent believes that his child will never face difficulties that he had it neatly transplanted from the school for gifted children in any Institute of physics, and then will be sent for training in Silicon Valley, and there he will remain forever – it is clear that the skills of the fight in the alley him to anything – he needs English and something else, but something is not necessary. And if the parent thinks, when our country was a generation that didn’t need to defend themselves? – then learn another.

On weekdays, the conductors of the Pskov buses is a special article and the city’s sights: women from 40 to 70. Weekend is on many routes, there are girls – senior school girls or younger students.

Waitresses? No, there are only adults, school children and College students in Pskov do not have this possibility. Couriers? Yes, in some places; but Pskov is not Moscow, the demand for these services is not so great.

– Operate a computer wizard, install operating systems and assemble computers, says a former classmate Katie, now a College student. In a month, have $ 10, if goes well. Norm, I think! But no one we have up to 18 years. Often where someone intercepts on the occasion.

Learned the severity

Denis and Kate is dedicated to

The child is not taught to choose offers to make a choice

– What are the risks in children who grow up in families where parents are very much involved in the upbringing and development of mathematics since the age of two, English three, plus a pool for the back drawing for the artistic taste, the music for the harmonious development and so on?

– In such families the risk that the child will not find. In that moment, when he starts, as he expected, ask yourself the question – what do I want, he will find himself in the position of a child of a Jewish joke: “Mom, I’m cold or hungry?” It simply will not develop the ability to hear their own desires and abilities. And in recent years these children became too much.

The classic version – when a child is so are and then at some point the parents something clicks, they sit around it with very friendly faces and say, “Ilyushenko (or Anya), you’re a big, soon the end of school. Now we, people who care about you and not want you useless force, I ask you: what do you want to do next? What you want to do with my life?” At this point many children begin neurotic at best neurotic and at worst almost psychotic symptoms. Why? Because they the previous fifteen years of his life were not at all prepared for this question.

Parents always know what is best for them, whom to be friends, what to study and so forth, and the child did not protest. He used to live in this situation, when adults know what is best for him, it was comfortable. He loved learning, and the school he chose exactly the same – there, too, everyone knew what tasks need to be solved. He always talked about how to prepare for tests, and he honestly prepared, and well they took the test, was an illusion that everything works. Suddenly he is told that he needs somewhere to find the answer to the question, what’s he going to do with my life. And the parents sit, look tenderly and say, “We in any case would not want you to dictate anything. It’s your life. Of course, we will do our best to support you, but you tell yourself, what are you going in this life to do.” Further shock comes from the parents, because the teenager for some time honestly thinking, says: “I don’t know.”

Here they have become the face of blissful disappointed: “We had 15 years invested what I could, turns inside out, stuffed him in a better school, I got him the best Tutors, he graduated from music school Bayan, an art school, studying painting with oil on bread, we all then killed himself, fumbling it into eight circles and earning them, and now this bastard dares us to say that she doesn’t know that he was going to do.”

Of course, reading it in their faces, the children experience a complex range of feelings. Actually, they all are experiencing, and, as a rule, the child enters this range neurosis, and parents in deep disappointment. Then they come to me and say: “How can this be? Where did we go wrong? There was not one Museum that we would not have brought, was not one of his desires in the field of cognition, which we would not have done if he said “I want dinosaur” – we ran to the dinosaurs, if he started to stare at the stars – we immediately went to the planetarium, and to the best tour guide when he wanted a hamster, we got him a hamster aquarium. What we haven’t done, so he can choose the variety of the world your way? Us why he now says that he wants nothing and knows nothing?”

The answer is simple: they were original position in which the child is not samoupravleniya. So the answer to the question “what to do to reduce the risk of the child, which the parents take great interest”, very simple: don’t be so hard to take part in it. You need to live your life, and the child adjusts.

The baby as a biological creature, like a calf of a mammal, adapted to the fact that the female lives her life, and he follows her.

We’re not breeding creatures. This in birds it is the moment when any Robin feeds her Chicks, she sleeps for two hours a day, and the rest of the catches mosquitoes, because she had five Chicks and it is necessary to feed everybody and two months to grow them to the point where they will be able to do it. So for two months she lives – she continuously catches mosquitoes and she sleeps for two hours a day. But after they have left the nest, she reabilitarea. We are not breeding, and most mammals are not breeding, and we feed our Chicks for two months and longer. But we can’t sleep two hours a day. With the stress to live more than twenty years the education of the young is impossible, and most importantly, absolutely no need. It antibiological.

The babies of mammals are adapted to follow the female or both parents – those species that carry out education together. They are designed to go in single file, and where the female leads? Where it pleases. And when the female starts to portray itself as a breeding bird, at first, quite quickly it is exhausting, and second, if they all get together and 15 years fed the baby mosquitoes the whole family, leading in eight of clubs, they will face a nasty disappointment with the result.

Photo: Dmitry Ryzhkov / flickr

Where did the “nesting” mom

– Do you have a feeling that in recent years parents have become even more perfectionist, controlling every step of the child, or Vice versa?

– No, I, on the contrary, it seems that the peak is passed. The period when everybody was trying to be breeding birds, over because birdie overextended.

The publishing house “Scooter” showed me the book they published, called “Mother zero.” The book focuses on how to get out of this state, about this talk people who were at zero, someone else, but from me as a professional and as a mother who raised children, only one question: “Guys, who you drove? Why people chose this path why he think the bird in the tundra?”

– Can you explain why this generation has killed to death by mom?

Yes, it happened when lost all meaning. The fact that the previous generation of parents or tried to get the meat, or was occupied by others: someone else was building communism, someone tried to serve science and art, someone looking for spiritual paths and so on, in General, there was a range of some of the meanings and not one of them. Then these meanings at once disappeared. Communism ceased to build. Meat first, all disappeared, and then appeared. Censorship is also missing, to turn the figs in the pocket was not necessary. But man cannot live fully only concentrating on its own navel and pocket, so people looked around: Oh, there’s also kids in which they can invest. Here and invested.

But for many it no joy.

– Of course – if they write books about how to go from scratch. It’s weird when a person takes their own child and killed him so that then he should be rehabilitated. But I have a feeling that the peak of this insanity passed.

– What kind of parent model children will take away from your family, if the parents are so grieved with them from morning to evening?

– I think, like someone. The child who grew up in a family of alcoholics, as a rule, the ambiguous relationship with alcohol – it either grows too drink alcohol or not drink. It is very difficult to grow up in an alcoholic family consume a reasonable person. I think there will be the same.

Growing up the child will either consider it the only correct model – “real mothers do, my mother herself gave me, took me in circles, with me tonight read books, sang songs, danced dances and were doing kinetic sand and if I do this with my kids not do it, then I’m a bad mother”, or will think: “I remember how it all happened, as I was sick of it as I did not need it and as I wanted to me left alone, so I’m going to do the opposite – where my mother said “no” I will my children to say “you can”, where my mother used to say “you”, I say “no” – then what is necessary”. Very few there will be who will be able to find a reasonable middle.

– To find it, need to consciously take this path in your head?

– Well, it’s very cool to understand what is happening. Be aware of yourself in what you are doing, take responsibility for yourself and understand why you are doing this, what purpose they serve.

Give the child adequate feedback

– What if we already have this ready teen and horrified that he wants nothing and does not know what he wants?

– There’s nothing you can do. The main work on family education to completion of secondary school is completed. This does not mean that the person then doesn’t change, of course, and perhaps very significantly, in some point, join a self-education, but family education to this point is almost finished.

The only thing probably to do is to realize what has happened, and to tell the child. Not to hang on him the responsibility also for this, but just to tell you how it happened. Then, at least, he will have the info, why am I sitting here like this. Truthful information about what is going on, never superfluous.

But then you have the parents themselves to realize what was happening, because they often start to panic and blame the child, and the accusation is: “Remember and tell, what we to you did not?” Advanced parents are going to ask the psychologist and ask him unadvanced right there in the kitchen: “Neighbor Bob, whose mother during his growing-up four times married, gave birth to children by them, and hanged them on the Bob – he knows exactly what he wants to be an engineer, and has already won some Olympics, which will allow him to go to some College and become an engineer. He knows who he is. Don’t you know? You tell us, what are we to you still did not?”

As you know, the answer is no. The child understands that he did much more than Bob, but Bob somehow knows clearly that he will go to College and be a civil engineer, and he has nothing in there at all. And if you leave him alone with this picture, his next logical thought is “I’m worthless”. But, if you do the simple analysis that we talked about, and tell him why it all happened, he will understand that this history was not the villains.

– How else are loving adults can hurt the baby?

Another important thing loving child adults often deprive him of the best of motives – is the feedback: when I do this, people around me are experiencing such feelings, it is because-like it or not. If everything around him on his every move feel a sentimental affection, whatever he did, he has, of course, be a slightly distorted picture of his abilities, and also the relationship between his effort and results. Perhaps all around the years, expire on pink saliva, but you know that sooner or later he will get feedback and will cry in the corner. Someone is bound to tell him that his pictures are not brilliant, or he’ll guess if he has high intelligence, or he is tired of hearing about these dinosaurs.

It is important to give him feedback in an adequate form, that is not to say “you’re gorgeous” or “you sang poorly,” and show that you really be cautious to what he was doing, and to draw his attention to what worked and what did not work, what you like and what not. For example: “This is the color combination I liked, it seems interesting to me, but it’s – I don’t know what it is, a horse or a sewing machine left me completely indifferent.”

Or: “I think it is not very much your drawings, but I really like how you dance, especially when you’re there turn off the light here is include, making music, and there, in the doorway, your dark shadow – if the music is quiet, I get a completely sincere pleasure.”

The child goes and asks: “Grandma, do you like the way I dance?” The grandmother responds: “you Know, when I see you grimace in the doorway, I have one Association – the devils in hell, no no.” From this, your child receives a lot of information.

First, he learns that people like different things. Second, understand that what may please one, the second can be scary. Thirdly, now knows that moms like to dance, to make her happy, and my grandmother can be so teasing and so on and so forth. If a child will say only “You’re done” or “You dance ugly,” – no information out of it? Parents are often confused with responsibility, they take it where you can not take, do not take place.

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