Everybody grows up. It’s just part of life, one of those unavoidable things that just have to happen, one way or another. Going from that innocent child whose needs that every parent learns to know through the various signals from birth to the emotional mess that comes with being a hormonal adolescent, we all go through the process like clockwork. What’s interesting to note though is that despite our parents knowing us from birth, after learning every facial expression and nuance of ours, most times it becomes difficult for them to understand us as we transition through our troublesome years and somewhere along the line something happens in the adolescent phase as things get messy and the lines of communication go through a tough evolution that sometimes gets damaged along the way.
In a recent article I read, a study was conducted that measured the difference between the parent’s estimation of their child’s happiness and the child’s own estimation of their happiness. What was found was an interesting and significantly different result that highlighted that maybe our parents don’t always know us as well as we would like to think.
The results showed that parents based their judgement on their own personal feelings, going so far as to assume that their children’s happiness was in line with their own emotional feelings instead of objectively assessing their child. It’s curious why they would do this, but I think it most probably stems from the fact that most parents feel that they know their children inside out, after all they raised them, right?
But what I feel these parents and in fact most parents don’t take into account is that children grow up, they change and become their own individuals that, though moulded by the lessons of their hopefully capable parent's hands, are also carved by the effects of outside influences that is the world around us. Just like they did before them, the children grow into their own people as they venture into the world.
My guess is that the reason parents don’t know, or realise this change is happening is because those frayed lines of communication that evolve over time have either not been given the proper foundation they needed in order to grow from or the messy transition into adolescence has not been kind to either child or parent. But the bottom line over all, is communication. How else can such a disparity exist in the perceived happiness that parents have of their children versus what their children have themselves?
But communication isn’t easy. How can it be when you think you’ve known something for its whole life only to be told you know nothing? Truth is we want to believe so badly there is nothing we don’t know, but the arrogance of such confidence is where the cracks start to form and the children grow further away from who we know them to be and who they truly are.
Yeah communication is hard. It’s the process of continually discovering that the person who you think you know might just be someone else. The constant discovery of the old as it reshapes into the new. That little thing that makes misunderstandings just a little less awkward and brings about better companionship.
Maybe, just maybe, if there was better communication the difference between what parents perceive to be their children’s happiness and what actually is their happiness won‘t be so far apart and in the long run that messy hormonal phase won’t be so messy after all as parents finally grow to understand their children just a little better. After all, once a blue moon ago they were those children too.
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