March 18, 2008

• A Different Generation of Asians

  When our generation thinks about becoming parents, we think about how we want a relationship of open communication with our children.  When our children are younger, we want to teach them the way that is right, but when they are older — when they have become adults, we want to release them into the Lord’s hands and walk beside them as friends.  When they are adults, we want to have intimate conversation with them, we want to laugh with them and cry with them, and give them the freedom to make wise or foolish decisions (they are adults after all, and we want to treat them as such).  That is a high value of our generation. 

  The generation before us, however, has a different value.  They see themselves as the teachers of their children – no matter how old their children may be.  They believe that if they provide for the children when they are young, then they have successfully shown love.  When their children are older, they want to continue to share from the knowledge of their years and experience. 

  Our generation longs for authenticity and relationship.  So in seeking this, we share honestly with our parents.  We take them with us on our journey of processing through dreams and decisions, and in our more courageous moments, we even tell them our doubts, because we long for them to be our friends, to just listen and allow us to make our choices and to be supportive of our decisions as our friends would.  Our parents, however, perceive these moments as another opportunity to teach us, instruct us and thereby, to give us their ‘wisdom’.  In their minds, this is their ‘job’, their responsibility, and we will never be as wise as them.  But, often, the feedback we get from them feels more like criticisms and commands tied up with an expectation of obedience (and not merely ‘suggestions’), and we sigh because it doesn’t seem to us that they really believe that we have matured.  Their desire to maintain the role of ‘teacher’ in our lives feels like lack of faith that we have ever grown up. 

  Some of us struggle long and hard to prove ourselves to them – to help them understand that we really have grown up, that they need to stop treating us like children and more like adults.  Others of us give up all together and choose to exclude them from much of our musings, our doubts, our thoughts — we shrug it off, saying that it doesn’t matter that we are not taking them on our journeys, but all the while we feel that something is not quite right.  The reality is that our hearts are still aching for that close, intimate relationship with our parents — the kind of relationship that we value so much and they know so little about.  But we continue to be at such cross-purposes:  We want authenticity and friendship; they want to be our teachers. 

  So is there a middle ground, a way of mutual satisfaction of expectations?  For awhile now, I thought I had found it.  But then there are days when this miscalculation flies back at me and tells me I didn’t have it quite right after all.  So I am still searching.  What about you?

  • 5:27 pm
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