By Brandon Sapienza, Staff Writer
My parents taught my brother and I a lot growing up. Specifically, two things come to mind: being respectful to everyone we meet, and make decisions we can be proud of.
Those valuable lessons molded us into what I believe are responsible young men. Other parents have also shared this philosophy with their children. However, based on what I see in person and on social media, the message has not successfully been put into action for some. The reason? Many parents use their children as buffers to live out their fantasies.
Eddie Brummelman, a psychology graduate student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, conducted his own study on this phenomenon. In his research, he found that when parents thought about their own failures and “broken dreams,” they more likely saw the child as a connection of their younger self causing a strong and unwavering motivation to make their child achieve what they could not.
The best possible example that I can use that represents my hypothesis is something I saw on Snapchat about two years ago. A girl who I knew from elementary school, who was at one point very pleasant and looked like she would do no wrong, has done wrong on multiple occasions. This girl did her share of over-consuming alcohol and drugs and subsequently had the police called to her home. What I saw on Snapchat was more concerning than all of that. Despite all the bad behaviors that I assumed her parents knew about, they still chose to make a poor decision and buy this girl and her friend’s cases upon cases of beer and other alcoholic beverages. At one point,I saw that they even engaged in drinking games with a bunch of 17-year-old adolescents.
I can only speak from what I know. My parents would be extremely disappointed in me if I did anything even remotely close to what this girl did with drugs and alcohol. Along with that, even if they agreed to or had no problem with anything I was doing, I can never picture my father or mother walking into a convenience store to buy my friends drinks that would likely impair us for a night.
The point is that we need parents to return to traditional values of parenting. Yes, with the world being the ever-changing place it is, some aspects of parenting need to change with it. However, the underlying morals of teaching your son or daughter not to make poor decisions affect them down the road. While it is nice to have a sense of freedom in the formative teenage years, the cost is worse. If we start returning to strictness and discipline, the country will be better off.
Photo courtesy of liturgyguy.com
Brandon Sapienza is a staff writer for The Bona Venture.
His email is sapienbm17@bonaventure.edu
