ORDINARY PARENTS DEMAND THEIR CHILDREN TO BE EXTRAORDINARY: THE RAT RACE WAS HIS DOOM

By Gundhramns Hammer

May 3, 2013

Source: Missizio´s Blog

Jonnie was asked once about his nationality at school, in a world filled with lots of nationalities in the USA. His answer was:

"I´m half Jewish and half Italian." His teacher was satisfied. 

He was 10 years old at that time and his parents had put him in a special school and pushed him too hard to be the very best in everything because he had scored very high in an culturally bound IQ test.  Ordinary parents demand their children to be extraordinary.

Like a boiling tank with no pressure valve, later this rat race turned out to be his own doom. 

He only lived to be 21, for his body was pushed and put under too much pressure, the weight of learning to be successful exceeded his body´s  capacity in a life that was meant to pace it alone the tracks that were set in the Ice Age.

His family and I were good friends. So, for an Easter Day, I was invited to spend the day with them in Blue Springs (Missouri). We all had a good time and amongst all of the things we talked about there was the question Jonnie had been asked by his teacher.

He repeated word by word to us his story about nationalities at school.

As a joke, I asked Jonnie:

Jon, which part of you is Italian and which is Jewish?

He replied smiling and would point with his right index finger at his left arm as the Jewish part and with the left index finger to his right arm as his Italian part in his body. And he kept on smiling and joking around at the same time that he was playing with his pet hamster on his shoulders.

Jonnie was of Italian descent from Palermo (Sicily) on his mother´s side. His father was the son of a couple who had escaped the rage of Nazi Germany and had settled in the Saint Louis, Missouri.   

In the Summer, Jon would sometimes visit his Italian grandmother who lived in my neighborhood and spend the whole day with her. It was a time for him to relax from his rat race at home and school.  


He would then munch on saltine crackers or feast on a peach pie and celery sticks with peanut butter raisins on them (Fig. 1). He used to call the raisins "ticks". And for a drink, he would have a glass of soda pop, usually orange. 

Figure 1. Celery sticks with peanut butter and raisins. Source: Generation Healthy Kids.

He was a sensitive kid who enjoyed listening to music as he had also learned to play the piano as part of his "genius training", although he was a normal child regarding intelligence.

Once he also got involved into organising a biology club in his own neighbourhood with his friends. They would go about picking up the trash and condoms that teenagers used to leave scattered around in the lonely alleys near his home in the weekends. 

Not everything was rosy coloured for Jon. He once got in trouble with the principal at his school. Jon denounced the principal for a serious fault in the school newspaper, for which he earned the admiration of his schoolmates and the hatred of the man he had dared to touch.

There were occasions in which he would listen to some music at his grandmother´s home. He loved Duran Duran´s Ordinary World. 

One day, Jonnie confessed to his grandmother:

"Grandma, I feel like crying. This music makes me sad and happy at the same time."   

Life went on as usual. When he reached 14 years of age, he was fed up with everything. The pressure was building up deep within Jon until his body would one day burst and give in to cancer.

When he turned 19, out of curiosity, Jon wanted to travel to Germany to see the land of his grandparens on his father´s side. 

So he made a trip to this Alpine country. He stayed there for a couple of weeks visiting with family. 

He came back to the United States a completely different man. He had become a homosexual and returned home ill with a terminal cancer in the bones.

Both things broke his father´s high expectations and his mother was shattered. So was his sister. After the trip,  Jon only lasted a couple of years alive and then he passed away in a hospital.

What happened to Jon in Germany is a secret he took to his tomb.

Jon was a victim of his own family and system, pushing him too hard to reach the stars when he was only an earth-bound kid meant to live life at a relax pace.  

Afterall, man´s biological nature evolved to the beat of Pleistocene times and is not meant to be on a rat race day in and day out. 

Going against Nature´s plans and designs is obviously the equivalent of hitting our heads hard against a wall much to our own regret and failing health in the end.  
 

So, Jon, wherever you are in the Infinite, we all remember you. Here is a tribute to you, one of your favourite songs: Duran Duran´s Ordinary World.

Parents and their fantasies for their children

Jon´s story happens all of the time. A lot of parents make the mistake of living out their own fantasies and filling up their shortcomings in life through their children regardless of the outcomes.

Nowadays, it is a common practice to send children to kindergarten when they are as little as 2 or 3 years old, with the excuse of "making them brighter, smarter and more sociable", something to be proud of and show off as a trophy. 

This happens very frequently because both parents have to work to  make ends meet at the end of the month, for they often live beyond their own means. 

There are also cases when callous mothers get tired of their own children (1-5 years old) and stick them in the day care centres the entire day, so moms can go shopping or getting together with friends. 

Motherhood has also been globalised (Chavkin & Maher, 2010). Children have to stay with grandparents at home whilst their mothers are working hard in foreign lands to send monthly remittances to the whole family to barely survive. That is if the mothers are lucky and do not fall into the hands of human traffickers.

If and when it can be avoided, sending small children to schools at such a early age should be considered a crime, for it is the age at which small children need to be with their own mother.  

There is never a good substitute for a mother. Mothers are culture shapers, for they are in charge of passing on the culture they were born into. Mothers are behind wars and peace. 

"The hand that rocks the craddle rules the world", so goes the saying.

As Chavkin & Maher (2010) point out: "Motherhood is one of the most intimate essential of human connections and therefore of concern to all."

Joseph Chilton Pearce once said, a "Mother is the infant's world, hologram, content for her intent... safe space." She is the solid ground upon which the child builds strength and security to explore the new world around him.

Perhaps in the future if we have any as a species, we will look back and think of these present times as children´s dark ages.

We can only give what we have and were given. What we have is what we give.

So, let us give our very best. We all will be richer for that.


References

Chavkin W. & Maher M.-M. (Eds.) (2010). The Globalization of Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology and Care. Routledge Research in Comparative Politics 35. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, UK. 271 p.

Ellis B. J. & Bjorklund D. F. (Eds.) (2005). The Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Child Development. The Guilford Press, New York, NY, USA. 540 p.

Meadows S. (1986). Understanding Child Development: Psychological Perspectives in an Interdisciplinary Field Inquiry. Routledge, New York, NY, USA. 250 p.

Robinson M. (2008). Child Development from Birth to Eight: A Journey though the Early Years. Open University Press, Bershire, UK. 241 p.      

 

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