Dear Mummy and Daddy...
(In Love Joy ’94, a family life seminar conducted by Blessing Youth Mission, children 8 and above were given a questionnaire to fill up. A few said that they had good parents, a happy home and they loved life. But the majority had expressed the difficulties they faced with their parents, at home and in the world. Some had gone to the extent of stating that they did not like to live in this world. I have comprehensively compiled here what they had written. No parent ever thinks his/her own child would make such statements. One mother exclaimed, “I always thought I was a perfect mother. But it is a revelation to know that my son is not as close to me as I thought. It is a challenge and I shall start working on myself.” If each parent takes the message as seriously as this mother, children will become “Happy people,” no doubt! Obviously, everything does not apply to everyone but many things apply to many. I have more or less retained their language and expressions.)
Dear Mummy and Daddy,
We love you very much. If we are ambivalent we want to change for the better. We believe, by being open you’ll understand us better and help us to love you more. We want a family surrounded by LOVE and JOY, and that is why we open our hearts to you.
We are unable to be free with you
You don’t understand or even try to understand us. We feel you belong to the older generation. If you will only try to see how much the world has changed since you were children, how easy it would be to talk to you! We fear that you may misunderstand us and create a storm if we ask certain things, and therefore the questions remain buried in our hearts. We are not small children. We are growing up and we need to know. You are not broad minded and so we are unable to talk to you about love and sex. We can’t ventilate our feelings to you. There are things which upset us in this world but you don’t care a darn bit about them and so we react out of hurt. Sometimes you probe us to find out wherefrom we got that information. That fear has sealed our mouths.
You are so reserved and indifferent towards our affairs. We wish you openly talk to us about our future, especially in choosing our lifepartner. Our opinions remain muzzled. We want to discuss our aspirations with you. But when you push your aspirations for us down our throats, we get closed. You fail to see our point of view.
At times when we open up, you are far from friendly. Your businesslike reply instead of a loving counsel puts us off. Please don’t be closed and uncommunicative. You both come home tired and tense. So you don’t have the time to talk to us.
When we overcome all our mental hurdles and dare to ask a question, you snap, “It is not for your age, you chatterbox!” If home is not the place where we can get our thinking straight, then where do we go? There are times when we feel too shy to ask you personal matters. We keep wishing you’ll hold us close and help us come out of our shyness.
Moreover, we never sit together and talk as a family. Anger is always oozing out of daddy’s eyes. Your faces discourage us from talking to you. At times you explode and beat us up when we ask questions. So we lapse into silence. Blow after bitter blow breaks our spirit.
We want you to drastically redesign our relationship.
We want you, mummy and daddy, to show us some perceptible love at home. We want you to be our friends. We want to talk to you all that we talk to our friends. We don’t like you criticising us on minor details, like hairstyle, dress, etc. Discipline us and counsel us; but we feel hairstyle and a decent modern dress are permissible. Just because “your” church folk will disapprove of it, why should we sacrifice what all our classmates do?
Constant scoldings drive us nuts, especially if you shout continuously, “Don’t go there, don’t do this,” and so on. We don’t like to have somebody around all the time telling us what to do and what not. We don’t want you to be overspiritual, but be balanced.
Correct us, but do it with love. We want you to be patient. Why do we get beaten up so hard? We get mauled for forgetting the answers after studying long and hard. Sometimes when you shower abuses we feel like running away from home. We don’t want you to beat us after we enter teenage. We want to be treated with dignity at home. Don’t speak ill of us to whoever comes home.
You are too strict with us, with our studies and lives. Rigid rules at home make us unhappy. You expect us not to lean to the right or to the left of your code. It’s as gruelling as walking a tight rope. So we are always tense at home.
Dear Mummy and Daddy, you must first understand what we say and then correct us if we are wrong. Don’t jump to conclusions. Explain to us the results of bad habits and not leave us in the dark. Once we say, “We are sorry,” we don’t want you to remind us of that again and again. When we squabble among ourselves, listen to both sides and do what is just. The older siblings should not always be forced to adjust to the younger unjustly. We don’t want girls to be treated as inferior to boys. And don’t blame us for your faults.
We want you to spend time with us. We hate daddy coming home late. How we wait and wait for y ou dad to come home and play with us, and get devastated. We don’t want daddy to smoke and drink. We want you to stop your bad habits and dirty business. That affects our mind and studies. We want you to love mummy. We don’t want you to hate her family. We want mummy to be at home. Mummy’s absence makes us dull. It is ages since mummy talked to us with a smile. Don’t be peevish or working non-stop. We don’t want you to backbite about daddy to us and humiliate him. How nice it will be if we can go out as a family to picnic, atleast now and then. Occasionally when we go out also, you spoil our mood by getting angry. Don’t always tell us to pray and read the Bible.
We feel lonely at home.
We need friends. They are part of our life. We want you to invite our friends home so we can play with them. Permit us to go to their homes. You think our friends spoil us. We understand that you are responsible for us. But don’t curb our friendships without reason. Without friends the zest goes out of our life. You don’t trust us and it hurts. Please respect our friends and be kind to them. Atleast now and then we want to go out with friends to safe places.
You imagine horrible things about us. We have no privacy even as upperteens. If we are alone in our room you think we are reading a love letter. If we are out, our rooms are ransacked. Talking to any age group of the opposite sex is suspected. You even ask our friends or neighbours about us. You eavesdrop when we talk to our friends. It is demoralising.
We are bored at home. Home is like a jail. We are not given any freedom. Don’t keep us under vigilance round the clock.
How wonderful it would be if you involve yourselves in our cultural, spiritual, social and college activities. Involve us in important discussions. You want us to do things your way and we don’t like it. You don’t let us develop our talents. You only want us to study, study, study and thus extinguish our other talents with a snuffer. You pressurise us to pursue a course for which we have no aptitude. Don’t let our dreams die young!
We want to look up to you.
Mummy and Daddy, we don’t want you to quarrel with each other. Home is like hell when you fight. We hate your short-temperedness and endless tangles of misunderstandings. We long for oneness at home. When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. We feel insecure when you shout at each other and at times even talk of divorce. The postwar silence is still worse and we become nervous and tense. How nice home will be if parents are loving, patient and kind to one another.
When you do ministry and are not truthful, we are disappointed. You have the right words to say, but your lives don’t match up. We don’t want to see immorality in you. We want family prayer and spiritual training at home. We want you to tell us more Bible stories.
We hate hocus. If you promise, then do it. Or else we lose trust in you. We don’t want you to tie up everything to studies. If we ask anything, you simply say, “You get first mark and then we’ll get you what you want.” Your beautiful promises are carrots on the stick. We never seem to reach them. All cannot be equally intelligent. When we are expected to do something we cannot, we get frustrated.
We want a happy atmosphere at home.
We want singing and dancing at home. A happy home should have roaring laughter, love, peace and joy always. Home is where the family members understand one another well and accept each person
as she or he is. There we should be able to share everything. Parents will be at home and we will bask in their love. A happy home will have grandfathers and grandmothers. It will be like heaven. In such a home love and discipline will be balanced. Parents will be gentle and kind to us.
A happy home will not have too many conditions. Parents will not discourage our efforts, attempts,
ventures and extra-curricular activities. We will be allowed to watch good TV programmes. We will
not be punished before our friends and relatives especially for silly mistakes. Parents will speak lovingly to our friends of both sexes.
A happy home will have love towards birds, dog, cat, etc. and our parents will not show hatred towards them. A happy home is where if we step in after many years, happy childhood memories will thrill us.
We face many problems.
We have no appreciation at home or outside. So we suffer from inferiority complex. Old fashioned
parents and grandparents are a sore. Constant scrutiny drives us mad. We are unable to measure up to your overexpectation of us and therefore feel angry and frustrated. We are vexed with beatings, overcorrection and overstrictness. We feel lonely, discouraged and unwanted at home. To cut it short, at times we feel like orphans at home.
At school we have to constantly guard ourselves from bad company. If we do not accept bad friends, we sometimes get no friends at all. So we constantly struggle to keep up our friendship and at the same time maintain our holiness. The pressure of studies is too much. If we don’t cooperate in mass copying, there are people to take us to task. Rattle snakes of lust follow us like a shadow. Eveteasing is unbearable for girls. There are some school bullies who tease and even beat smaller boys.
Sometimes we fight with friends. And do you know it is terrible to lose a friend? It is difficult to be a Christian at school. We are mocked for our faith. We are unable to witness to fellow students. Teachers beat us, sometimes unnecessarily. If God has not blessed us with a high IQ, we have to live with daily beatings. On the whole we lack peace of mind. See, how many issues we have to grapple with ?
We are scared of our future.
We feel insecure in this topsy-turvy world filled with murder and violence. We are unsure of our future. There is no one to understand us. Neither is there love in this world. We can't stand the unhappiness at home. We are often tempted to commit suiside. Sometimes we wonder why we are born in this world.
The thought that we are sinners is overwhelming. Why should we live longer and commit more sins? We are unable to live holy and pease the Lord. We are unable torestrain our sexual emotions.
So at times we feel it is not good to live. We feel this world is too much for us. Still we are hopefully waiting for the fiest dawn to appear after a long dark era.
Mummy, Daddy, Will you give us a Home Sweet Home?
Dr. Lilian Stanley
13 Church Colony
Vellore 632006, India
+91 9843511943
lilianstanley@gmail.com
Blessing Youth Mission
13 Church Colony
Vellore 632006, India
+91-416-2242943, +91-416-2248943
hq@bymonline.org
www.bymonline.org
Click here for more options
To buy books written by Dr. Lilian Stanley, kindly reach to us in the follwing address
Blessing Literature Centre
21/11 West Coovam River Road,
Chintadripet,
Chennai 600 002, India.
+91-44-28450411, 8806270699
blc@bymonline.org
Dear Mummy and Daddy...
(In Love Joy ’94, a family life seminar conducted by Blessing Youth Mission, children 8 and above were given a questionnaire to fill up. A few said that they had good parents, a happy home and they loved life. But the majority had expressed the difficulties they faced with their parents, at home and in the world. Some had gone to the extent of stating that they did not like to live in this world. I have comprehensively compiled here what they had written. No parent ever thinks his/her own child would make such statements. One mother exclaimed, “I always thought I was a perfect mother. But it is a revelation to know that my son is not as close to me as I thought. It is a challenge and I shall start working on myself.” If each parent takes the message as seriously as this mother, children will become “Happy people,” no doubt! Obviously, everything does not apply to everyone but many things apply to many. I have more or less retained their language and expressions.)
Dear Mummy and Daddy,
We love you very much. If we are ambivalent we want to change for the better. We believe, by being open you’ll understand us better and help us to love you more. We want a family surrounded by LOVE and JOY, and that is why we open our hearts to you.
We are unable to be free with you
You don’t understand or even try to understand us. We feel you belong to the older generation. If you will only try to see how much the world has changed since you were children, how easy it would be to talk to you! We fear that you may misunderstand us and create a storm if we ask certain things, and therefore the questions remain buried in our hearts. We are not small children. We are growing up and we need to know. You are not broad minded and so we are unable to talk to you about love and sex. We can’t ventilate our feelings to you. There are things which upset us in this world but you don’t care a darn bit about them and so we react out of hurt. Sometimes you probe us to find out wherefrom we got that information. That fear has sealed our mouths.
You are so reserved and indifferent towards our affairs. We wish you openly talk to us about our future, especially in choosing our lifepartner. Our opinions remain muzzled. We want to discuss our aspirations with you. But when you push your aspirations for us down our throats, we get closed. You fail to see our point of view.
At times when we open up, you are far from friendly. Your businesslike reply instead of a loving counsel puts us off. Please don’t be closed and uncommunicative. You both come home tired and tense. So you don’t have the time to talk to us.
When we overcome all our mental hurdles and dare to ask a question, you snap, “It is not for your age, you chatterbox!” If home is not the place where we can get our thinking straight, then where do we go? There are times when we feel too shy to ask you personal matters. We keep wishing you’ll hold us close and help us come out of our shyness.
Moreover, we never sit together and talk as a family. Anger is always oozing out of daddy’s eyes. Your faces discourage us from talking to you. At times you explode and beat us up when we ask questions. So we lapse into silence. Blow after bitter blow breaks our spirit.
We want you to drastically redesign our relationship.
We want you, mummy and daddy, to show us some perceptible love at home. We want you to be our friends. We want to talk to you all that we talk to our friends. We don’t like you criticising us on minor details, like hairstyle, dress, etc. Discipline us and counsel us; but we feel hairstyle and a decent modern dress are permissible. Just because “your” church folk will disapprove of it, why should we sacrifice what all our classmates do?
Constant scoldings drive us nuts, especially if you shout continuously, “Don’t go there, don’t do this,” and so on. We don’t like to have somebody around all the time telling us what to do and what not. We don’t want you to be overspiritual, but be balanced.
Correct us, but do it with love. We want you to be patient. Why do we get beaten up so hard? We get mauled for forgetting the answers after studying long and hard. Sometimes when you shower abuses we feel like running away from home. We don’t want you to beat us after we enter teenage. We want to be treated with dignity at home. Don’t speak ill of us to whoever comes home.
You are too strict with us, with our studies and lives. Rigid rules at home make us unhappy. You expect us not to lean to the right or to the left of your code. It’s as gruelling as walking a tight rope. So we are always tense at home.
Dear Mummy and Daddy, you must first understand what we say and then correct us if we are wrong. Don’t jump to conclusions. Explain to us the results of bad habits and not leave us in the dark. Once we say, “We are sorry,” we don’t want you to remind us of that again and again. When we squabble among ourselves, listen to both sides and do what is just. The older siblings should not always be forced to adjust to the younger unjustly. We don’t want girls to be treated as inferior to boys. And don’t blame us for your faults.
We want you to spend time with us. We hate daddy coming home late. How we wait and wait for y ou dad to come home and play with us, and get devastated. We don’t want daddy to smoke and drink. We want you to stop your bad habits and dirty business. That affects our mind and studies. We want you to love mummy. We don’t want you to hate her family. We want mummy to be at home. Mummy’s absence makes us dull. It is ages since mummy talked to us with a smile. Don’t be peevish or working non-stop. We don’t want you to backbite about daddy to us and humiliate him. How nice it will be if we can go out as a family to picnic, atleast now and then. Occasionally when we go out also, you spoil our mood by getting angry. Don’t always tell us to pray and read the Bible.
We feel lonely at home.
We need friends. They are part of our life. We want you to invite our friends home so we can play with them. Permit us to go to their homes. You think our friends spoil us. We understand that you are responsible for us. But don’t curb our friendships without reason. Without friends the zest goes out of our life. You don’t trust us and it hurts. Please respect our friends and be kind to them. Atleast now and then we want to go out with friends to safe places.
You imagine horrible things about us. We have no privacy even as upperteens. If we are alone in our room you think we are reading a love letter. If we are out, our rooms are ransacked. Talking to any age group of the opposite sex is suspected. You even ask our friends or neighbours about us. You eavesdrop when we talk to our friends. It is demoralising.
We are bored at home. Home is like a jail. We are not given any freedom. Don’t keep us under vigilance round the clock.
How wonderful it would be if you involve yourselves in our cultural, spiritual, social and college activities. Involve us in important discussions. You want us to do things your way and we don’t like it. You don’t let us develop our talents. You only want us to study, study, study and thus extinguish our other talents with a snuffer. You pressurise us to pursue a course for which we have no aptitude. Don’t let our dreams die young!
We want to look up to you.
Mummy and Daddy, we don’t want you to quarrel with each other. Home is like hell when you fight. We hate your short-temperedness and endless tangles of misunderstandings. We long for oneness at home. When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. We feel insecure when you shout at each other and at times even talk of divorce. The postwar silence is still worse and we become nervous and tense. How nice home will be if parents are loving, patient and kind to one another.
When you do ministry and are not truthful, we are disappointed. You have the right words to say, but your lives don’t match up. We don’t want to see immorality in you. We want family prayer and spiritual training at home. We want you to tell us more Bible stories.
We hate hocus. If you promise, then do it. Or else we lose trust in you. We don’t want you to tie up everything to studies. If we ask anything, you simply say, “You get first mark and then we’ll get you what you want.” Your beautiful promises are carrots on the stick. We never seem to reach them. All cannot be equally intelligent. When we are expected to do something we cannot, we get frustrated.
We want a happy atmosphere at home.
We want singing and dancing at home. A happy home should have roaring laughter, love, peace and joy always. Home is where the family members understand one another well and accept each person
as she or he is. There we should be able to share everything. Parents will be at home and we will bask in their love. A happy home will have grandfathers and grandmothers. It will be like heaven. In such a home love and discipline will be balanced. Parents will be gentle and kind to us.
A happy home will not have too many conditions. Parents will not discourage our efforts, attempts,
ventures and extra-curricular activities. We will be allowed to watch good TV programmes. We will
not be punished before our friends and relatives especially for silly mistakes. Parents will speak lovingly to our friends of both sexes.
A happy home will have love towards birds, dog, cat, etc. and our parents will not show hatred towards them. A happy home is where if we step in after many years, happy childhood memories will thrill us.
We face many problems.
We have no appreciation at home or outside. So we suffer from inferiority complex. Old fashioned
parents and grandparents are a sore. Constant scrutiny drives us mad. We are unable to measure up to your overexpectation of us and therefore feel angry and frustrated. We are vexed with beatings, overcorrection and overstrictness. We feel lonely, discouraged and unwanted at home. To cut it short, at times we feel like orphans at home.
At school we have to constantly guard ourselves from bad company. If we do not accept bad friends, we sometimes get no friends at all. So we constantly struggle to keep up our friendship and at the same time maintain our holiness. The pressure of studies is too much. If we don’t cooperate in mass copying, there are people to take us to task. Rattle snakes of lust follow us like a shadow. Eveteasing is unbearable for girls. There are some school bullies who tease and even beat smaller boys.
Sometimes we fight with friends. And do you know it is terrible to lose a friend? It is difficult to be a Christian at school. We are mocked for our faith. We are unable to witness to fellow students. Teachers beat us, sometimes unnecessarily. If God has not blessed us with a high IQ, we have to live with daily beatings. On the whole we lack peace of mind. See, how many issues we have to grapple with ?
We are scared of our future.
We feel insecure in this topsy-turvy world filled with murder and violence. We are unsure of our future. There is no one to understand us. Neither is there love in this world. We can't stand the unhappiness at home. We are often tempted to commit suiside. Sometimes we wonder why we are born in this world.
The thought that we are sinners is overwhelming. Why should we live longer and commit more sins? We are unable to live holy and pease the Lord. We are unable torestrain our sexual emotions.
So at times we feel it is not good to live. We feel this world is too much for us. Still we are hopefully waiting for the fiest dawn to appear after a long dark era.
Mummy, Daddy, Will you give us a Home Sweet Home?
Dr. Lilian Stanley
13 Church Colony
Vellore 632006, India
+91 9843511943
lilianstanley@gmail.com
Blessing Youth Mission
13 Church Colony
Vellore 632006, India
+91-416-2242943, +91-416-2248943
hq@bymonline.org
www.bymonline.org
Click here for more options
To buy books written by Dr. Lilian Stanley, kindly reach to us in the follwing address
Blessing Literature Centre
21/11 West Coovam River Road,
Chintadripet,
Chennai 600 002, India.
+91-44-28450411, Mob:8806270699
blc@bymonline.org
