Quote:
Originally Posted by SilverTrees
Thank you for the kind follow-up, NeverHappy. May I ask how old your sister is? I'm a bit confused. If she's old enough to travel alone to another country such as Italy, why is there a need for at least one family member to know her whereabouts at all times? Did I misunderstand? Did she travel to Italy with your parents?
I honestly don't think it's possible, even with great love and the best of intentions, to make choices for other adult family members. Children are a different story; that's why I asked your sister's age. But as children get older, I believe the parental role should be to prepare them for life as independent adults....making their own judgments and decisions.
I'll share some background here. I was raised by two extremely strict parents. They did not agree with the model of parenting which I just expressed above. They were authoritarian. I was told what to do and when and heaven help me if I disagreed or asked a question. There was no how or why or discussion. My mother believed that if she kept her children in an extremely small tightly-monitored bubble, that somehow they would reach adulthood, leave the bubble and everything would be fine. It was suffocating! I couldn't wait to move as far away as possible.
So there's that side of it, a parent can unwittingly drive away the child they are trying to protect. The other side is that humans don't learn to make safe and reasonable decisions by always having decisions made for them. Do you see what I mean? At some point, young adults need to figure out how to make their own choices about healthy eating and drinking, for example. Parents can hide away any form of junk food, candy, or alcohol but one day a young adult will encounter these things out there in the world...so they need to learn how to make responsible choices.
Another example is sex. My mother pretended it did not exist....it was not a word or consideration in the bubble she forced her children into. There was no "talk" or any form of sex education or even basic education on sexual health. So then what happened when we encountered sex later? Were we adequately prepared?
I am not at all suggesting that you or your parents are like my parents. I just wanted to provide an example, from my own life, of how trying to choose for family members can have the opposite outcome of the one intended.
If you are interested in research, NeverHappy, you may like to read about authoritarian parents and later outcomes for their adult children. There's a major impact on the child's sense of agency.
Just some ideas for you. I can tell you are very stressed about this issue with your sister. I am so sorry that you're having a tough time.  |
She's 25, and she did not travel to Italy with my parents. Knowing her whereabouts is a safety thing.
And about the strict parents thing, she keeps bringing up in arguments that my parents never let her go out, or never let her have a dance in high school when we were in the U.S. And I can vouch for that argument, and even empathize. But that should not be the argument she makes when we talk about something like this issue. I'm not saying she has, I'm just saying that she should have a better way to cope with that sadness instead of overcompensating. If she thinks it's fair that she overcompensate for her childhood, then it's equally fair that I yell at her all the time for no reason at all. Because she used to do that a lot when I was little, like when I was 14 or 15. But I don't react the was she does; not often, anyway. I don't wanna get into my other issues that I've already posted other threads on, but her story is similar to mine, if I had a lot of friends and trusted my own judgement at the time. Oops, sorry I got distracted.
I hope you don't mind if I P.M you sometime(you can inform me if you don't feel comfortable with me p.m-ing you, obviously), because this can of worms just opened up again when I heard my sister's voice on the phone recently. I avoided talking to her saying that her voice was breaking up. I can't even talk to her now. Before she left, I gather the whatever you call it to go apologize to her for my reaction, but now, I just can't. I wish my feelings subsided much earlier, so that members of this forum would have time to answer for other people's real problems. But apparently that's not the case.