Growing at the Speed of Light or Not?

 

 

Growing at the speed of light or not?

Having a teenager makes you see life with another pair of glasses. As a parent, it is easy to be aloof and sometimes dismissive of our children’s motion through life. Are we too tired as parents? Or do we see them all grown up from the outside world that we do not see their inside struggles?

As I was sitting on the couch this morning early having a heart to heart conversation with my son, it all made sense.

We live in a very fast-paced world, where the internet goes at the speed of light. With such, so are our children. How many times we have requested their help with anything related to computers, electronic apps, social media settings, and whatnot that is all related to the web, and in a microsecond, they had the solution?   But are they really growing as fast as the net makes us believe?

All this is bringing me back to this anecdote. Years ago my son was struggling in math. I was concerned as math is base of so much of our everyday life applications, that he would fall behind and not able to catch up. He had a fantastic teacher, Mrs. G. Mom of three boys thus very familiar with their intellectual and psychological development. She made me feel at ease by letting me know that he was not mature enough to comprehend the concept, but not to worry he will get there and the light bulb will soon shine. As she knew a side of my son, the academic side, better than me I trusted her fully. Sure enough, the light bulb moment came on and the concept understood and never struggled on math since.

I was trying to apply the same ideology to our life, his life. Here he is fully immersed in every aspect of social media. Actually, that is all our kids have to relate to their everyday life. We, as adults, relate their life to that as well. However, their development is not based on the web speed, but to the human developmental speed thus causing havoc amongst the two as one is growing faster than the other.

We live in a culture that is stressing success and not allowing our children to develop at their own paste. Consciously or subconsciously we, as parents and peers, are projecting an image to our children that it is not ok to fail and we perseverate that ideology by comparing and pushing them to become the person that they are not ready to be.   When did we decide or started not understanding nature and the process of it? When did we stop seeing our children?

We, parents, are we the creators of stress which promote anxiety in our youth?

Is this a cause of why our youth is struggling so much? Is this the cause of so much misunderstanding amongst the generations? Who is placing such pressure? Are we as parents not seeing that our kids may be light years ahead of us on a world that is based on technology and do not see that after all, they are still our little humans that will go thru growing at their own speed?

So many unanswered questions…

xoxo

Giangi