Looking the Future  

Looking the Future
Dr.Wagner Paulon
1986 -2008

When you ask parents what they most want their children had in life, the answer is usually "happiness". But where is happiness and how we can help our young people to achieve it? Helping them to become financially secure? Health care of them? Protecting them from tragedy and misfortune? Certainly we can make efforts in this direction, but in this unpredictable world can not be sure of a success more than temporary.

Many of the challenges that young people in future will have to face and many of the adjustments that have to perform are impossible to predict: to recognize that, just look at the estimates of last year, made by experts, about how the world would be today. But if parents can not give children a plan for the future, not prescribe how they should live their lives, what else can we do?

If you look at the reality without any bias, it seems to me that the best we can do about our children is to develop in them a clear sense of identity and secure itself and a commitment to a system of basic values. Without it, human existence has little real meaning or purpose. Life brings many crises and disappointments. But the young emotionally mature - able to achieve an effective integration of their own needs and desires of their conscience and their ideals, and the demands of the real world - are much better prepared to face the inevitable "ups and downs of fate" than young immature, rigid and inflexible, or undefined and self-indulgent or neurotic.

Be "mentally are" not being able to pass through life without conflict. Nobody can avoid conflicts between their own needs, goals and wishes and demands of reality, or between conflicting domestic needs, in any case, a reasonable portion of a conflict often serve as impetus for further growth and personal development. What parents can and should do is help the children to learn to tolerate a reasonable amount of frustration and conflict and deal effectively with them, to be realistic and moderate in their needs and fears.

Asked once to Sigmund Freud, what he meant by emotional maturity. He replied: "Lieben und Works" - the ability to love and work. When genuinely love our children (which certainly does not prevent moments of frustration and irritation acute), to recover them and respect them as people, to enjoy your company, to be worthy of their trust, we can help them become is able to love and to trust others.

By encouraging our sons and daughters to be independent, competent, confident and responsible, we can help them, in the words of Freud, "the work" - that is, prepare them to face the challenges of changing demands for vocational and assume the responsibilities of citizens. As we have seen, this task is best performed by parents "competent" or "democratic" than by authoritarian or indulgent parents, ultratolerantes in their educational practices - and certainly not be remiss not indifferent.

But in modern society can not be expected that the parents themselves do all the work. Children need health care and adequate nutrition; need to grow into decent places; need to be surrounded by friends and adults that they can provide models of successful social behavior responsible. And need good education, which can stimulate and develop their natural abilities and prepare them for careers and rewarding to be responsible citizens.

Finally, when they become young adults, individuals need to find jobs and can be accepted as members of society.