Yesterday morning, from an institute in Barcelona, a news left us all totally upset. A 13 year old boy He arrived with a crossbow, knives and the necessary components to create a Molotov cocktail and attacked his teacher, her daughter, a teacher who came to control the situation and ended up dying and other students, all slightly injured, according to the news media.
Why?, they all ask. And in these 24 hours we have already been able to attend several possible causes, among which video games are mentioned, weapons (apparently the child is quite fond of them), television, since the child was a fan of "Walking Dead", a possible psychotic outbreak, because apparently the boy said he "heard voices", and soon there will be a lack of limits, the respect lost to teachers, how spoiled children and adolescents are and the lack of a hard hand in childhood. This has obviously reopened the debate about adolescence and its way of being and acting (there is a lack of respect for parents and teachers, lack of motivation in school, how controlled they have their parents and at the same time immature that are many of his decisions). Are these the causes? Is there any more? Why do children and adolescents seem to be not improving our generation at all? Let's talk about it.
A psychotic outbreak?
I was not there. I did not live it. I do not know him. I cannot say what it is and what it is not, but according to the media say everything could respond to a psychotic outbreak. A psychotic outbreak is the way to name the way of living and seeing the life of a person, which for hours, days or months, transforms reality in such a way that it begins to have ideas and behaviors different from the usual ones.
Apparently the boy had already said weeks ago that if he wanted he could kill them and, prisoner of that idea, the day came when he decided to prepare everything and execute it. As we read in The Mail:
"He already said he wanted to kill all the teachers and then commit suicide," one student commented ... "He had a blacklist," another one has abounded. "He always talked about weapons and wanted to be a military," another boy has snapped. "I was always alone," said a fourth student.
Can it be a psychotic outbreak? Yes, it may be the cause. Now we will have to know what is the cause of that psychotic outbreak, because it could be a child who was already diagnosed with a mental illness or it could be all the result of a source of excessive stress, of a sum of experiential factors that have ended up upsetting the kid to the point of doing what he did.
As I do not want to focus on the child, but more on the generalization that has occurred as a result of the news, that simple generalization of "young people now," and since today's teenagers and their behaviors do not respond to outbreaks psychotics, we are going to deal with the other possible causes and factors that have associated the news.
Television and videogames
War movies have been going on for decades, as there are also video games. That some are a bad example? Well, in a way it is, because there are terribly violent and sadistic titles that they are not even governed by current international standards (titles where you can and must torture your hostage to complete the mission, for example). That is why parents are important when it comes to controlling what our children play or stop playing and that is why video games have an age classification, so that they do not receive certain messages when they are not able to understand them, but to internalize them (no it is the same to play to kill when you are 12 years old than to do it when you are 6, for example).
Are video games and TV alone capable of making our youth the way it is? Well, yes and no. Television is a brutal socializing agent. Hence, children and adults capture ways of being, dressing, acting and living. The cartoons and the youth series educate our children or give them adequate or inadequate examples depending on the intention of the program (or are we not tired of seeing completely unreal situations on television, that our children are not able to go through filter of what is logical or illogical?).
Lack of limits or permissiveness
Letting children always do what they want, without explaining what is right or wrong, without telling them what we expect from them, without teaching them to respect others, makes you be a permissive father, a father who does not explain to children the limits, social norms and a father, in short, who does not act as such.
Mind you, not all children with permissive parents are terrible, but in a fairly sick society the risk is very high. Many children are terrible because they make themselves capturing where they do not have to capture and many are because they do not know how far they can go because they do not have a pattern, an example to follow, because they do not receive the rules and they are not explained what is right and what is not, and in such a situation they try and test for that guide they need so much to learn to live.
If a child does not have that guide, that model, and is raised almost alone, the risk is obvious. Not only because he can end up feeling that he can do whatever he wants with anyone, but because He is a child who will grow up with little self-esteem and little love. You will feel unloved and all your satisfaction will come through your ability to do whatever you want with yourself and with others. Because what does a child do when he doesn't find the love and support he needs at home? Look for him outside, either with his friends or trying to do something that gives him some notoriety. Something like "one day I will do something that will make me famous and known", which will not always be for something positive.
The cheek on time
Or the hard hand in childhood as a claim for children to be controlled again through violence, as our parents did decades ago. No, those times should not return because violence is misunderstood by children, because they feel humiliated and because it can generate rancor, lack of trust, heartbreak and even desire for revenge. Or maybe none of that and all it generates is almost blind obedience: "I will do what you want, but don't hurt me," which is also not what any person needs ...
Loss of respect for teachers
It is not that I want to crush the group of teachers now, but already in my time there were many teachers who did not deserve our respect. We had it because in a way we were afraid of them, or because we were afraid that our parents would punish us if the teacher talked to them. But that it was not an adequate way to teach or learn. Who would want to go each day to learn something from someone you fear?
The school has to be something else. It has to be a place where children want to go happy, motivated, to play and always learn from a positive vision in a favorable climate, with classmates and teachers who treat each other well and respect each other as people and classmates, as teachers and students.
Removing fear, which has already disappeared from the classroom, a teacher has to be very able to take advantage of the desire to learn from children or to motivate their students (if they are not already motivated from home) and, above all, you have to treat your students as you want to be treated. Talking with them, listening to them, knowing how to read their eyes to know what they are worried about… Guardiola, former coach of FC Barcelona, once said that the hardest thing about being a Barça coach had been trying to know every morning, seeing the faces of his players, how they were, what they felt, what they worried about and what they needed. As a result of his own concern, he talked to those who thought they needed him and thus tried to continue maintaining a group cohesion, a complicity among all, that made them move on as a group and team. A teacher has to be that with his students. Something like a coach who can treat them with respect and can work the possible imbalances of the group.
Maybe the crossbow killer had suffered at school? They say he was a new student, who had only been in high school for a year. Maybe he got there as a solution to a problem of bullying in another institute and in this one things did not go very well either. We all know that it is a terrible thing, we all try to fight against it, but in centers where disrespect among peers are very common, the bar of what is maltreatment of a partner ends up rising and without wanting to normalize acts that should not be considered normal . I don't know, maybe everything is a revenge of a child tired of being ignored by others in all the centers to which he went, or not, maybe the thing does not go there.
This obviously highlights a very clear problem: we are a stupid and selfish society that wastes more time looking at the straw in the foreign eye than the beam in ours. And as long as this continues to be allowed and we are constantly disrespecting ourselves, our children and adolescents will be nothing more than a reflection of how bad we are doing. But if we don't stop seeing politicians and great positions, people who should be respectable, work for their own benefit, always above the law!
The direct environment: the home
I still have to talk about the mother mass, the mother of the lamb, the source of life and education: one's family. Again, we don't know how that 13-year-old boy has grown up that one day he decided to reach the armed institute and attack every person who crossed his path and that's why I didn't focus on him, but instead generalized all our children And our young people. What environment do they live in?
We have already said that not educating a child is a very serious mistake, because to ignore social and family norms and not pass them on to children is almost to sentence our future and that of our son, who deserves parents to guide him on the path of lifetime. Going to the other extreme, the return to authoritarianism does not have to be the solution either, because there is an intermediate zone that says that the most logical thing is to treat children as we want to be treated, both now and in the future. I talk about spending time with them, about establishing relationships of trust in which the word is important. And I do not talk about saying things in plan "vaaa, do not do that" and then let him do because "it is that my mother, this child is impossible", but squatting and explaining why they can not do something and offer and explain other things they can do. Come on, I'm talking about educating them, something that not all parents do.
But for such a relationship to be carried out it takes a lot of contact and a lot of relationship (worth the redundancy) and the problem today, for me, is not that children do what they want, but that in many homes there is no such relationship of trust with parents because parents spend very little time with their children.
Thus children grow up feeling that they are missing something without knowing very well what it is (because they are not able to objectively see that their parents should be much more for them), until they reach adolescence and begin to tie ends, when their referents already They are not their parents and they become others (their partners, their friends, the characters of a series, the protagonist of a game, namely ...). Then the child makes himself and many times he errs, with no reason to be empathetic, pleasant or affectionate with some citizens of the world, his parents, his teachers, his classmates, his surroundings, of those who feel that they still owe him a lot, behaving totally contrary to how you would like to be treated.
So children grow up with little or no desire to take as an example: always busy parents, who always have something more important to do than to be with them, who work from sun to sun, always stressed and with a level of happiness quite poor, who try to solve by buying things they do not need and traveling to places where Your children don't always have a place. How are they going to want such a life for them?
And I end up with a question: What citizens do we want to leave this world? It is worth questioning, because surely there is much in our way of relating to our children and in the (little) time we spent with them that we could change it to give a better response.
Photos | Photopin (1), (2), (3)
In Babies and more | "Talking with them today will prevent a bad drink tomorrow", Why some children today end up being troubled teenagers
