PUBLISHED: Student & Campus Section, Manila Bulletin, 22 October 2008 Issue (Page F-2)
I’ve always been genuinely interested in learning about the relationships that my peers have with their parents. Sometimes I wonder if my friends find me weird for asking about them: family background, characteristics, degree of closeness, and the like. It’s certainly not a topic my peers would normally bring up. After all, there are lots of other things to talk about, like music and sports and who they’re dating.
Some don’t find it difficult to talk about their parents at all. This usually means that they either share a really good relationship with them, or it’s so bad that they just have to talk about it. Others prefer not to share. Still, others talk about them in a superficial way, giving answers that lead to dead-ends in the conversation. In any case, hearing, or even not hearing, about them is always interesting.
Maybe it’s because the relationship you have with your parents tells something about the kind of person you are—regardless of other outside influences that might exist.
Some people end up remarkably similar to their own fathers and mothers. If you look at me and my father, for example, you could make a couple of observations. We’re both left-handed, we both like our coffee black, and we dress up in almost exactly the same way—that is to say, with almost blatant disregard for common fashion sense. We also think the same way, to the point that we ponder things in the exact same position (someone once took a picture. It’s true.) Also, I find that my fun, boisterous, heavy drinker friends, more often than not, have fun, boisterous, heavy drinker fathers or mothers. I find it very amusing.
On the other hand, other similarities can be a lot more subtle, and not quite as amusing. People talk about how they don’t want to end up being like their moms and dads, yet end up becoming exactly like them. I have a couple of rebellious friends who have some insanely strict parents, who in turn were rebellious in their own time as well. I hope it’s not an indicator of what kind of parents my friends will wind up becoming.
Sometimes the influences are tragic. One of my good friends once noted the behavior of her womanizing uncle, saying that maybe the reason why her uncle is such a womanizer is because he never had a mother figure, so he started looking for affection in other places. Maybe she’s right.
It would be wrong for me to generalize all forms of parental influence as bad. Just because your parents complain that you’re going out too much this sembreak does not mean that their advice isn’t sound, or that they’re raising you the wrong way. Besides, who am I to speak about parenting?
But I guess parents should take time once in a while to think about the kind of kids they are raising—or leaving behind, as the case may be. Sometimes we might be a little bit hard to understand, but it might help to look at it in our point of view once in a while. After all, parents were children—and hormonal teenagers—too, once upon a time. And hormonal teenagers don’t often take lightly to moralistic sermons.
On the other hand, I think we have to meet them halfway. The reason parents can sound so moralistic is because they do have some wisdom to impart. They have experience. If we can respect and listen to our teachers, then I think we can do the same for our parents. It’s a matter of balancing between the extremes of youth and experience, I guess.
In the end, I’d like to think that as people with independent minds, we have the greatest capability for forming ourselves, quite apart from outside influences. But if our parents’ influences are inescapable, then they have a pretty huge responsibility, because they might be dictating the way our lives play out without even knowing it.
It’s the same responsibility we’ll have when we become parents.
Oh no.
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