In the message of Angelus on Sunday 17 August, the Pope launched an appeal to us parents of the third millennium, reiterating a key concept of pedagogy: do not be afraid to say the no that help to grow. It is a principle that educators have always know they have to propose within relationships with those who are growing. It is such an important principle as to represent a key point of psychopedagogy. Freud first said that the parent’s task in the first half of a child’s life involves helping him transit from the pleasure principle to that of reality And that this step inevitably implies exposing the child to frustrations with which he must learn to relate, in order to then be able to face them, cross them and overcome them. Asha Phillips dedicated a title and the relative book – which has become best seller – to the message reiterated yesterday by Pope Leo XIV entitled The no that help to grow upRe (Feltrinelli ed.).
Supporting the value of the “no” with those who are growing now seems to represent one of the main labors of contemporary parents today, who are perhaps the first to have renounced that authority that has always seen the mothers and dads of the previous generations moving in front of a child with firmness and awareness, indicating the importance of the limit to helping him not to submit to the rule completely and immediately, which became prevailing in the third millennium. We modern parents love our children so much, that they cannot tolerate to inflict renunciations and sacrifices. It seems to us that making them disconnected coincides with not loving them enough. And this adult fragility has led many minors to not be able to develop those emotional and cognitive skills, socio -lines and self -regulatory fundamental to be in the world and confront the principle of reality in a healthy way. Many times the parents would like to impose a healthy “no” to their children, but in the era that has rewarded, above all, the logic of instantaneous gratification fear that this “educational posture” can prove harmful, if not even traumatizing for their child.
To this the pervasiveness with which the digital world has invaded everyone’s life, very small included, also contributed to this. The digital world is a world in which the yes always triumphs: at your every touch on the screen, you always receive an answer, in a very quick time. Each expectation disappears in the instant satisfaction of each drive and more and more often parents are faced with children who claim possession and use of connected tools, of which they can never do without, never. It is enough that there are a few minutes of emptiness in the life of a child and many adults are – often unconsciously – to provide him with the screen of a device, with which to entertain and fill the empty time. But through these digital automatisms, the child learns more and more intensely not to “know how to stay” in the suspended space of an empty time in which he experiences effort, boredom, frustration. Viziosi cycles are triggered in which the child, in front of boredom, immediately demands something that “pulls it out of there”. More and more often parents realize that they are not able to put a barrier between the desire expressed by the child and the educational need to teach him to demand him over time.
So we realize that the no of the adult disappears in front of a child who cries because at the restaurant he wants to have a smartphone in his hand or of the pre -adolescent to whom the adult does not know how to put a limit on night navigations, to infinite and ubiquitous scrolling, to the infinite hours of video game. Many times, we therapists be asked by parents who live a sense of frustration and enormous impotence because they are perceived totally incapable, in front of children of only 9, 10 or 11 years, to say no necessary to put those limits that the child is unable to self -emphasize. At this era where the emotional and behavioral problems in the evolutionary age are growing, the Pope’s call to an authoritative adultivity capable of supporting the value and power of “no that helps grow” is more appropriate.
