Sometimes I think that today the conversations about appearance are something completely different than just 15-20 years ago for the picture children/teenagers compare themselves or have to live up to do not even exist. The body they see in front of them on a screen is really not achievable.
At the same time, they may be wiser precisely because they are forced to be source -critical and look through things quite early. Empty. After all, my 9-year-old realizes that Barbie is too narrow to be able to go if she had been a real person and that the pictures she sees in many contexts are fake. I don't know if I grabbed that age. It was also not something we talked about. Barbie was there and we only had to relate to it. Today they talk, question, etc. It is not so hopeless. At all.
The skewed ideals have in some ways forced us into the conversations and forced a counter -reaction and the questioning feels more obvious. However, this does not mean that as a parent you are less worried today. The full explosions young are exposed to daily are not an easy match. They will be affected and they will feel bad. Probably we cannot wipe out that risk.
What we can do, on the other hand, is to be the counterweight. Show on options. Talk about everything that feels, no matter how smart it is. The war the children are in we cannot stop but we must be the safe harbor where they can land every night. Someone said that it has never been more difficult to be a parent than it is today and even though all generations have been responsible for different challenges, I think that there may be something in that for the reason that we today expose the children to something never before. We know nothing but it may be okay. The alternative to moving far from society is quite far from most reality. The dangerous may not be that social media (and more) exists but how it is used and how we adults relate to it. If we accept the time we live in and understand that we can actually be the opposite to what the children experience?
I myself feel that I am often in some kind of war about all this. What the children get/does not get, should/should not, etc. infinitely. But the times when I feel that I am in a good flow/a good period with the children - we talk, reflect, both about what the world looks like and about emotions - I am less afraid of external influences. In the conversations, they get room for the emotions about what they experience and all that that is beyond my control as a parent seems a little less destructive.
It is true that we humans feel best when we are allowed to feel and have room to express those feelings. The world will change trillion more times, new development will lead to things that today would be called madness. We are in the middle of an AI revolution and who knows how what we take as obvious today-school, professions etc, will look like in just a few years?
However, I think what we can know is, this is: emotions will continue to exist. And the more we go towards a society where the emotional life is not allowed to play, the greater the need to feel and show emotions. Emotions have the property that they do not disappear when we try to delete or ignore them - they only assume new, often creepier shapes.
With that said, I think this is not a completely crazy thought: if the AI revolution here is then the emotion revolution comes on the purchase! (And it's more than welcome!)
To help the new generation become the best at emotion - come in and look at our emotional cards HERE
