English
EspañolA father is a father. A mother is a mother. Neither one of them is a child´s friend, colleague, companion, or an equal. My parents are the personal origin of my life, the people who loved me first by procreating me. Parents and friends are different. Not by any stretch of the imagination are my friends my origin, nor do they love me, as if I were their child, throughout all my life, from the beginning until the end.
Text
“A reversal of the roles of parents and children is unhealthy, since it hinders the proper process of development that children need to experience, and it denies them the love and guidance needed to mature.” (The Joy of Love, n.176)
Commentary
Friends can never be your parent, nor can parents, in turn, be your colleagues and peers. If parents do not manage to be authentic parents, children will have difficulty being children.
Sometimes, the parents “open up” to their children, and the children are the ones who give sensible advice to their parents, instead of the other way around. Maybe a mother is happy to have such a daughter or son. She enjoys having children that are so mature. Perhaps they have a maturity that this parent would like to have had at that age, or even now.
Indeed, you have a “mature” girl or boy who knows just what to say. And, above all, knows how to listen to and comfort you. However, the price to pay for that is that this daughter or son has been left without a mother or father to open up to, trust, and support him, his growth, and his maturity process.
If you are still on time, understand, as a parent, that the relationship of advice, support, and example is a one-way street: from parents to children, not the other way around. If you force it to go the other way around, you are no longer a counselor for your child; the relationship will have lost such opportunity. You can find a counselor elsewhere, but your child only has his mom and dad on hand. So, if they fail him, who will be able to fill that irreplaceable role of being his father or mother?
There is still time. The timer is reset in each new season of your children´s lives.
