When Life Gets Tough : What Not To Tell Your Kids To Do

Star Q

i.  Not My Mom's Baked Macaroni

ii.  Cendawan Portobello Sumbat Daging

iii.  Sliced Peach Cake

Image sourced from google

Some of my friends have been declaring in the social media that their children are complaining about the difficulties they are facing in their lives today.  They seem to feel they are working much harder but whatever they make from their concerted efforts is not enough to catch up with the continuous rise of the cost of living.

These friends, as parents, have many ways of addressing these burgeoning questions from their offspring, some give their maternal points of views while others opt for more professional approaches.  However, telling your kids to adopt the way of life that you as parents used to live more than half a century ago, is definitely not offering your kids any kind of solution to their life dilemma. 

Of course you can tell your kids that when you were six years old your father could not afford a television set and that you had to group with other neighbours' children at one friends's house who did own a television set; even then the programmes only started at 5.00 in the evening.

You can tell them that back then you and your siblings lived off the land where your parents planted many different kinds of vegetables and reared chickens and ducks which enabled you to save on food.  You can tell them that you walked miles to and from school because there were no school buses or even public transport back then.

You can impress them with your stories of your many childhood nights which were lit by kerosene lamps instead of electric lights because there was none then.  You can tell them that there was no water supply back then and that you had to rely on water from the well.

At the end of the day, what you can do with your sad sob stories is to merely tell them and hope that they can make some kind of comparison to the life they are experiencing today.  What you should not do is to tell them to suddenly become conscientious and try to live like how you did when you were their age; when things were cheaper and that twenty cents could have got you a packet of nasi lemak and a cold drink!

Children are turning to us as parents to offer them the wisdom of our experience and in some way, provide them with some kind of solution so that they can get through their lives in today's harsh and demanding situation.  They don't want you to tell them to do the impossible that is to turn back the clock and live how you have lived which would be ludicrous to say the least.

Worst of all, don't tell them to go through the time tunnel fifty years back and experience how you lived because you yourself did not have the things your kids have now.  A situation where kids ask for your thoughts about life should be used as a time when your kids see some compassion in you about how difficult life today is for them even if you don't offer them any kind of tangible solution to their problems; least of all it should not be turned into your own personal vendetta.