A Life Of Law: The Power Of Parents

The More time I spend with these people, the more overly influenced I think they are by their parents. I think for all human beings to develop to their fullest capacity, the souls of all folk have to be allowed a certain level of freedom to roar and explore.

The irony of the particularities of what I've been watching of the last few weeks and months (namely over bearing parenthood) is that it is meant to help the "child" become successful in life by focusing them completely on what is meant to be important. But even this is almost irrelevant because what is meant to be important is entirely from the perspective of the parent and not the "child".

I use the word "child" mockingly in the above paragraph, because the human beings in question are actually over the age of 18. They are men. Men in numeric terms, but remain mere toddlers in terms of thought process, ideals, lifestyle and soul. They remain unable to think for themselves with regard to anything important or culturally significant, and for all their lives have been unable to make life changing decisions on their own.

They have gone to university, but lived at home -- with their parents. They live by the strict rules their Mums and Dads set down. What is in some ways more worrying is that they are not able to viably question any of the boundaries they live within, but shirk and tremble when they get too close to the edge.

I am of the strong opinion that a certain amount of rebellion, pointed in the right direction and with the right force, can make an adolescent a stronger and more rounded individual. The alternative to this is living forever by unquestioned rules, never wondering what "different" may actually mean.

The setting for such a baffling childhood is the great English countryside. Rolling green hills surround what would be a quiet little village, if this place was not without shops and community areas. Indeed, what it actually is, is close to a large housing estate, but without the inner-city trouble.Imagine your typical 2.4 children nucleus of a family. Now imagine it with Mondeo man. Now imagine it with Mondeo man voting conservative, and now you get a better picture.

The rules are the house are strict, and the two children are taught from an early age that the word of each parent is to be obeyed at all times.

By the time the children are teenagers, they are too scared to rebel in any way shape or form, but unquestioningly follow the rules set out by society: at school, and soon at university.

One reason they probably follow the rules so closely is because there is no need for rebellion. They have had a very comfortable upbringing, remember, in the English countryside, with all the mod-cons and materialistic goods of the twenty-first century.

And then I meet them.

I'm not from "the wrong side of the tracks", but I know what it's like to be poor and I know what it's like to live in an inner-city area. My family wasn't exactly poor when I was growing up, but I do remember a few months when money was a little hard to come by. At university I lived, for about 18 months, in the centre of Liverpool. While at university, I studied American Studies, and tailored my course to learning as much as possible about African American history -- the history of a striving people divided from their homeland and all the historic and contemporary hardships they faced. Basically, I know the score.

I say to these people, "you know, about half the Africans who left the west coast of Africa on slave ships didn't actually make it to the New World. No, they were thrown overboard by the slavers, so they could claim on the insurance." The response I usually get is blank one, of no emotion. "Oh, right." And then they'll usually start talking about something like a new movie or a song that is in the charts. Sometimes I might follow them. "You know what one of my favourite movies is? 'Empire', by Andy Warhol. Yeah, I like it because he broke practically every rule of film-making. He didn't move the camera at all for eight hours, and just left it pointing at the Empire State Building, until all the lights came on." The response is void of any conception of how dramatically brilliant the film is. They've never heard of it and just dismiss it as something else. They don't question it in any meaningful way.

The same is the case when I try and discuss politics. I could spend hours explaining my theory of socialism to them, and they wouldn't know which bits were slightly Marxist and which bits verged on liberalism. Instead, they just accept it as it is and don't make me think of how right or wrong it might be.

Sometimes too much mothering can be a lot worse than too much freedom.

Give a child too much freedom and he might wander about the inner city streets dealing marijuana and talking gangster, but if he's smart he'll soon realise that education is the way forward, and he will be stronger for what he has seen out on the streets. The child who is forced to read for reading's sake by his father for three hours a night cannot gain life experience that way.

And there it is. These people loose out on valuable life experience because of over bearing parents.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright