爱华网系列专题：《点亮生活的智慧：人生之钥》
Insistence on relief the minute a need arises is as bad as any addiction. Training children to survive unaided – physically, emotionally, socially – is a duty all parents owe their offspring. And the earlier it starts the better. Would you be one of those who go through life apologizing to your parents for being what you are or, rather, for not being what they had hoped for? If so, you are the victim of an artful, not uncommon, form of parental manipulation. Nothing is easier for a mother, or father or, in extreme cases, both, than instilling a sense that the offspring does not measure up to expectation. It suits their purposes ideally: augments their ability to exert control, lessens the risk of misbehaviour and, not least, ensures continual efforts on behalf of the child to win the approval otherwise withheld. If this hold can be maintained into adult age, the advantage grows in proportion, often transferring to the new young family, who will live in awe of in-laws and grandparents.
As they get elderly and more dependent, such parents step up their demands, making son or daughter dance attendance,terrified of doing anything to displease. Still no effort will ever be sufficient to make up for disappointing them. Only death will break the fetters of this carefully devised entrapment. And the parents will go to their grave never having received the gift of their child’s true affection. Like most seven-year-olds, I adored my first teacher, seeing her as infinitely superior in her elevated position of authority, appointed to dispel the darkness of our ignorance. Every word uttered by her, every scrap of knowledge she imparted, I lapped up as if it was mother’s milk. One day she introduced us to the concept of origin. “All you see around you in this class-room,” she declared, “has been something else before.” Now, as we pointed out different things to her, she would explain how they had started out. A lot of pointing ensued: This desk, we learnt, had once been a tree growing in the forest… just like the copy-book… That school-bag was made from the hide of a cow… the sweater had been knitted from sheep’s wool… And so on.
