Story of Damaged Children

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

I’ve been living in a kampong since I was 6. Raised there, I see the way people around me raising their children. As I’m learning psychology in college, I know that they raised their kids wrongfully.

Instead of speaking to their children with loving care, parents here tend to yell to their kids. They prefer punish their children; verbally and non-verbally, rather than telling them what is right to be done.  They shouting curses—or anything inappropriate to be heard—to their kids when they angry. They don’t comfort their crying son or daughter, either way they let them screaming or cry themselves to sleep. Children are abandoned to play on the street, while their mothers gossiping in a house nearby. They damaged their children.

How parents raised their children affects the personality development. I see kids who had been raised with this manner—now the same age as me, grows to be aggressive, rascal, high-tempered and none of them achieve good grades. Some even dropped out from school.

What do you think would happen to these kids when they grow up? When they have kids? They will learn from their parents. This, by Albert Bandura is called modeling or observational learning. Thus, the children damaging process repeated all over again.

I’ve been seeing this children-damaging-process for about 15 years now, and the best part of it, ironically, is that I could do nothing to fix this. Either I’m too scared of their rejection when I’m telling them about the right-parenting-things or I’m too ignorant about my neighbourhood.

I see people around me making mistake but I did not do anything. Story of my life.