By Olga Brandão
If it is fair to blame difficult children or teenagers for their lack of effort and self-control, it will be honest to share the responsibilities, although without saying that they have not found someone who can captivate them, understand them and guide them.
To guide, more than a function, is a duty. The child brings an irreplaceable purpose and needs help to conquer and develop it. Education is an arduous task (...). What counts in life is not just culture, but spiritual progress revealed through qualities, feelings, attitudes and habits.
Everything that is acquired in this world comes through intuition. But good intentions depend on an certain environment (people and things) where there is agreement, mutual understanding, order and tranquility. Parents who understand each other, enough to appreciate and cherish each other, provide their children with free development. The child and adolescent need an environment that favors the satisfaction of their interests and values.
Although parents feel love for their children, there is not always mutual friendliness and kindness, because psychological factors are part of living together. The call to such factors is the solution to such a difficult problem: to make the child or adolescent a truly human being.
Love is nourished with kindness and affection. If there are children who can do without it, with no excessive harm because they are more evolved, it should not be forgotten that the call to their sensitivity is the only way to educate. But using sensitivity does not mean abandoning authority.
If you look closely, you will always find an affective imbalance in the difficult child. Reciprocal aggressive attitude of parents (violence, anger, revenge, stubbornness) provokes the child to repeat the mistake.
Becoming affectional in order to understand one's children is not a demonstration of weakness, but a conquest of ascendancy and esteem. The less aggressive and depressive the way parents and relatives act, the less belligerent will be the child's or adolescent's way of acting. It is good for parents to understand that their reciprocal disagreements disturb the development of their children, who, later, perhaps will not be able to understand the reason for their weaknesses and flaws so harmful to material and moral progress.
There is nothing more contradictory than looking at the effect of individual flaws without researching the cause. To judge the children responsible for all the failures is a mistake. What is innate in a child, is related to what the outside influences made of him/her. However balanced the child may be, he or she will not be able to grow, progress and be harmoniously transformed in an environment, where there is no harmony. The child's aggressiveness may be enclosed in psychological needs, in character reactions or in his/her authentic personality, but education has no other purpose than to prevent and cure the error.
The preventive principle consists in countering the child or adolescent from becoming difficult or more difficult than it is, providing mutual understanding, appealing to their sensitivity in order for them to feel appreciated. If the results are not very satisfactory, the only way is to expand the environment, making it more accessible and invigorating.
An invigorating environment means neither material comfort nor the satisfaction of all wishes: hard tests harden the character and fine tune the sensibility. An invigorating climate is what provides experiences that awaken acceptance of order and discipline for a better life, which instills the notion of rights and duties and promotes effort as a helpful agent.
There is no lack of opportunities in the family to educate for the responsibility in obtaining autonomy, to fight aggressiveness, for the cultivation of politeness, for the preservation of love.