This article is a harsh critique of how parents and in-laws are currently disregarded by their children and relatives. Especially the elderly parents, who have basic needs: attention and affection, which have been denied to them by the insensitivity and selfishness of their children, who prefer to entertain themselves with new technologies rather than converse with family members. This behavior conveys to grandchildren, not the notion, but the certainty that just a few quick and occasional visits, some weekly phone calls, an occasional lunch or dinner, and necessary medical accompaniment are enough to fulfill what they should do for the health and well-being of the elderly.
Attention and affection are to the joy of the soul, as the air we breathe is to the health of the body.
In recent decades, a generation of parents without present children has emerged, driven by a culture of independence and autonomy taken to the extreme, which negatively impacts the way of life of the entire family.
The exodus of the younger generation in search of survival resources and development has always occurred. Work, studies, fleeing wars and persecutions, drought, and brutal hunger have pressured young people to leave their parental homes since the world began. Young people also fled from the violence and brutality of their ignorant and ill-tempered parents. However, none of this was experienced as abandonment: it was a rupture in the most drastic cases. It was a separation experienced as an interval, brief or made definitive, if life did not grant them future conditions for reunion.
Separation and Responsibility
Just as parents left and still leave their children in the hands of other relatives when they depart in search of better living conditions, work, and studies, there were children who separated from their parents. Generally, however, this is not perceived as emotional abandonment. There is no neglect or forgetfulness. The children who left also took on heavy responsibilities to support them and their younger siblings. Gratitude and return, in the form of care even from a distance. Even when a child is not present in their parents’ lives, their voice on the phone, now sent through modern technologies, along with images on screens, carries the melody of affection, longing, and genuine concern. And the elderly nourish their hearts and heal the wounds of their souls because they feel loved and can bless them.
In today’s times, however, within a very broad and deep social spectrum, abandonments and distances occupy no more than a few blocks or kilometers that can be overcome in just a few hours. A generation of ‘orphaned parents’ has emerged. Orphaned parents who do not refuse to provide financial help. Older parents who support their grandchildren in schools and pay for study trips abroad. Parents who give their consigned credits for children to incur debts in their honored names, who anticipate inheritance for them. But they have no seat at the family life of the younger ones, their own children and grandchildren, perhaps not directly due to their disinterest or lack of time, but due to the belief that their parents are self-sufficient.
They are older parents who are alive but emptied of a home for which they fought so hard. Unfortunately, it can be said that elderly parents with present children in their lives are becoming an increasing rarity. Children approach when there is a serious illness to be treated. They pay for treatment and caregivers, and due to the presence of many strangers in the lives of their elderly parents, people who fulfill their functions while they, the children, work, travel, have fun, and confine themselves to their exclusive ‘only for adults’ and ‘only for teenagers’ programs on one side, and ‘only for people their age’ on the other. Older parents who are visited by children and grandchildren with whom they converse and occasionally walk seem to constitute a growing minority.
They have become complacent regarding children who have no time for anything.
By Ana Fraiman for the site: www.revistapazes.com