In the famous DR (relationship discussions) complaints such as “you never pay attention, you just stay on this cell phone” or “you don't even seem to be listening to me” are common. In fact, they are so common that perhaps there are not so many relationship discussions anymore because they are both on the cell phone.
In between, if a baby could talk, it might say something like, “Mommy, Daddy, what's so important about this cell phone? Why do I have to compete with him?” And if Freud were alive, perhaps he wouldn't include the smartphone in his theory of the Oedipus Complex?
The baby needs, in order to develop psychologically in a healthy way, the undivided attention of his mother and father. This person project needs to feel like the center of the universe, the number one priority in the house, the most interesting subject in their parents' lives.
Breastfeeding while looking at social media, for example, tells the baby exactly the opposite. Play by answering messages, too. Be on your cell phone during meals, too. However, the vast majority of parents have a strong desire that their children grow up strong and healthy, that they can study in the best school possible and, of course, that they can be happy. This makes us think about what is basic for development.
The basis of healthy development is attention and respect for the rhythm that each baby has. Yes, babies have a rhythm that goes far beyond the time of feeding, they have a rhythm of being.
The notion of what is basic is often not thought of as the basis, but rather as the minimum, or the maximum, necessary for survival. In this, concerns turn to the brand of the hospital where the baby will be born, the brand of milk, the pediatrician, the school and many other brands in which the basic rule is: the more expensive, the better. A good question to ask yourself is what is the brand of your care for your child?
The first phases of life, each in its turn, contain human possibilities. Baby, child, teenager. In these phases, the bases are formed that, for the rest of life, will be repeated and suffered.
But what relationships can there be between this period of quarantine and development? One of them is precisely that giving food is not food, and being together is not being present. Regardless of the play on words, the issue is the quality of presence and attention that parents give their children.
We see in many homes a battle in which on one side are the parents, who don't know how to feed their children with affection and companionship, and on the other, children who don't know how to explain that they miss something they don't know. Both parents and children are strangers to spilled milk through misunderstanding of what is basic to psychological development.
Being with family doesn't mean everything is fine. The lack of what was not built in the relationships between family members and also in the relationships between the self and the self of each member of the group starts to make much more noise, and the walls and doors of the house no longer muffle these feelings; on the contrary, it amplifies them.
Growing up takes work. Parents, then, are required to do a double job, to become adults capable of helping their children to become people. All of this takes a great deal of energy, will and commitment. The challenge is so great that working outside the home for twelve hours is really tempting, not to mention the bonus of being able to think, and often scream around the house, that any sacrifice of keeping a job they don't like or facing infinite traffic, is for the sons.
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Promoting healthy child development in their children calls for parents to work on their own development, which means remedying and giving up many ways of living and thinking. Do you understand now, the price we are talking about here? But that's always been the case, hasn't it? In a very short period of time, society has become much more complex, with requests and demands directly proportional to the advancement of technologies, and fathers, especially mothers, find themselves overloaded in the quest to cope with these two worlds that are so dear to them, the individual and the children.
