Relationship between Parents & Children - Essay Example

 Relationship between Parents & Children A child is one of the most beautiful gifts of nature, being blessed with a child is a feeling that has an essence and joy of its own. But becoming a parent brings great responsibility and demands time and patience of parents. One of the exciting yet difficult parts of parenting is to understand the child’s needs and requirements. As children cannot communicate adequately and are unable to express themselves like adults, parents need to analyse and make sense of their emotions, gestures, words and actions.

The relationship between parents and children often boils down to a level where there is a gap between the expectations of parents and the actions of the children. When a child is born the parents want to give him the best of everything and make him the most talented and admired personalities of the world. They want him to have the fame, fortune and charms of a luxurious life that they always yearned for. The parents put undue pressure and responsibilities claiming that it is for the good of the child.

These pressures can take various shapes and forms ranging from emotional to physical output. The problem arises when these interests of parents clash with the interests, desires, needs and more importantly aptitude of the children. Most of the parents would go to greater lengths in making their child a hero and in doing so would ignore the fact that the child is not a material possession, he is alive and born with freewill and a heart and mind of his own. The resultant is a resilient child who feels negativity in his life and in all his relations, or a child who is depressed because despite of all his efforts he is never able to please his parents due to their high expectations.

The outcomes of parental pressure on the children may range from minor quarrels to extreme cases where a child commits suicide. Parents argue that children need to be guided and motivated in order to perform well in the society which is in their best interest. But a child pleads that the amount of pressure instilled on him should be at least bearable. When a child faces too much pressure form his parents then instead of a constructive development in his life all this pressure test brings sheer destruction.

Parents often see their unfulfilled wishes being accomplished by the next generation. The answer lies in the human composition, where each individual is created differently having a unique set of aptitude, strengths, needs and wants. So either the parents are successful or unsuccessful in their lives they put their children through all kinds of pressure and claim that it is for the betterment of the child’s life. A story reflecting the parental pressure on children is “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by Lawrence, in which the author emphasis that parents should live within their means and should always pay attention to their children without putting implied or un-implied pressure on them.

The boy in the story starts betting on horses in order to win money and make his mother happy but in the end dies after winning eighty thousand pounds on a horse. The mother now has all the money she had ever wanted but a son who is no more, the last words of the story say “My God, Hester, you're eighty-thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad.” (Lawrence) The depressing but well constructed story tells all parents to cherish children as their most prized possession carefully nurturing them and avoiding stressful gestures in order to capture the essence and love of a parent-child relationship.

Reference:Lawrence, D. H. (n.d.). The rocking-horse winner. Retrieved from http://readytogoebooks.com/DHL-rock-P1.html