Children and young people have a different perception of time, linked to the construction of their identity: parents have a central role in helping them on this path
«This summer I don’t want to do anything. I just want to close myself in my room and rest. I don’t want to think about anything ». This is the phrase of a 17 -year -old teenager in the context of his reflections on the summer that is approaching.
This example allows us to reflect on how Time in adolescence may have lived not only as a bearer of expectations and vitalitybut also as an interruption, a need to stop, wait, a need to start for the construction of one’s self.
The construction of identity
Adolescence is an evolutionary phase in which, together with body, cognitive, emotional changes, the space-time macrosystem of reference is restored. In other words, if the child lives immersed in the present, for the young man the time of the future takes on new shades and implications: Time is loaded with meaningas well as of anxieties and hopes.
For the infantile psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, development in adolescent age has as its objective the construction of personal identity, and this also occurs thanks to a new relationship with time, in which the sense of belonging to the past are combined with the movement towards the future and “futuristic”. The latter must be understood as an emotion of hope, motivation and research towards the new and possible. However, so that this happens, it is important that from the outside the boy is recognized the possibility of a “psychosocial moratorium”, that is, it must be exempted from adult obligations and responsibilities, so that he can have time to live and resolve their personal development crisis. If the process is successful, the young man will be able to integrate all the previous identifications that he lived in childhood within a new adolescent configuration, where there will be room for a new body and for new needs.
What happens if something doesn’t work?
In some cases, children block their development process and can react in different ways to this phase of growth and evolution of identity:
- On the one hand there can be one regressing withdrawal response. What does it mean? The boy refuses the news, does not seek new spaces of autonomy and is limited to a daily life made of school and home, manifesting little interest in the interactions with other children. For example, it may “throw yourself on food” to vent one’s frustration, or demonstrate excessive attention to the sphere of nutrition – a primordial sphere of satisfaction of needs – so as to maintain the illusion of having everything under control. Also the cases of “social retreat” and the new forms of Internet Addiction (dependence on the Internet) are signs of a closure in the face of the time of transformation and growth
- On the other hand, the boy can also demonstrate risk behaviors. With this we do not refer to the “test” of smoking a cigarette or drinking a beer, things that fall within the normal experiments of adolescence, but, for example, to early and promiscuous sexual behaviors, or to bullying or particularly provocative attitudes, which put themselves at risk and others. In similar cases the relationship with the time is overturned: everything is lived “until the last drop”, everything runs and must be chased. Time becomes something that persecutes and oppresses the young man, and he remains to run against time, against responsibilities, against that adult being who requires compromises between themselves and others.
How should parents put themselves?
The family has the task of welcoming the difficulties of the adolescent, of protecting and guiding him, but above all the role Primary of the parents is to “stay”beyond changes in mood, provocations, attacks on the rules that children put in place daily. Staying in your place, do not give up, suffer from “no” data but being able to keep them, make yourself available to welcome outbursts, also respecting the need for loneliness of the child: these are difficult tasks, today even more complex due to the different challenges that families have to face.
It is necessary, both for parents and for children, a new work on temporality (which concerns what is temporal, in opposition to what is spiritual): letting the children of the past go away, keeping the affection of the memory, is a difficult step. The fear that children can commit mistakes or may be injured by others sometimes block adults on the childhood threshold. In these cases the son is always too small to get out alone, too small to decide the sport you want to do, too small to study without external help. In this way, the adult unknowingly passes the idea that growing is something dangerous and painful, and does not help the teenager to face the new challenges that growth in front of him with the right grit. Even falling into the opposite error of deriving is a frequent risk. Some parents believe that the boy is now able to act and decide on his own, but if they escape their driving and protection function, they put the young man in a state of anguish towards future time, because he does not give him the opportunity to reflect us together.
The correct position corresponds to a fair listening and a constant presence in the life of girlthewho can thus trust and rely on the parent who is seen as an authoritative, and non -authoritarian reference, thus feeling free to make mistakes and giving himself time to do but also not to do.
If we think of time as a flowing river, we must imagine that the boy has the freedom to explore all the ways in which the river can be crossed, slowly immersing his feet in the frozen water, while the parent holds his hand. There he will be able to take a pleasant bath, splash with friends and every now and then rest on the shore, while observing the river. The task of the parent is to be a good guardian of that flowing riverwhere the water cannot be stopped but the dangers and treasures of that passage can be looked together.
