How Should Family Relationships Be?

The family environment is or should be a center of affectivity and emotional comfort for the individual, the environment in which he can retire and feel safe with the people who support him, but often relationships between family members are tense and fragile.

This can be caused even by a close relationship - physical and emotional - between members, the family is a given and does not involve a deliberate choice of the individual to spend his life with certain people - except, of course, the initial choice of the partners of the conjugal couple.

Relationships between family members should be harmonious, based on communication and love, for personal development and proper evolution of the personality of each member, especially the little ones.

Children need an environment that provides them with security - physical and mental, comfort, affectivity, sincere and open communication. Sharing emotions and emotional support from parents are important variables in the further development of the future adult. The type of relationships that will exist in the family will determine how the child will relate in the future with other people.

Children not only need necessities: shelter, food, clothing, and education, but they also need - like any human being - related to affection, self-esteem, respect for others, communication.

Here comes another issue: relationships between family members are sometimes not based on mutual respect and self-esteem, on the contrary, on authority (the struggle for power between husband and wife, between siblings, between parent and adolescent), and criticism deconstructive that affects self-confidence.

Instead of protecting and nurturing the child's self-esteem - so important in the relationships, he will later have in school, society, his own family, parents often focus on criticism, on everything that is not good for the child. and less on what he accomplishes and on sanctions, not on rewards.

Parents sometimes do not realize how important relationships between family members are for the child, how much they will influence him throughout his life. Relationships that are tense or rather based on superficial communication come from approaching extreme attitudes in parenting style.

There is either a kind of father who is far too authoritarian, harsh, strict, who uses his power to impose limits and for whom communication means that he checks the child, he responds, or the kind of father who is almost completely absent from the picture of raising a child, which does not give him the time and emotional support so necessary, but leaves this "job" to the mother.

As for this, there is the kind of suffocating mother, too involved, who wants to know everything about anything and who does not allow the child (and especially the teenager) any privacy, as opposed to the type of mother not involved, who provides small only the necessities and leaves his emotional development to the fate and the TV! These extremes are undesirable: an overly authoritarian parent sabotages the very notion of affectivity, an uninvolved parent does not even assume it, and an overly suffocating parent turns it into something stressful for the child.

Why, despite the blood relationship, are the relationships between family members often fraught with stress and unmet needs? These are multiple causes: first of all, there may be a real incompatibility between the personalities of those who are forced to spend every day together: wives, brothers, sisters, sometimes grandparents.

Imagine four or five people put together by fate in an extremely small physical space (the intimate space of each person in a family of four members - for example - is usually limited to a small room), people who are forced to see each other every day and have conversations, but they are - even though they are relatives - different in personality, temperament, values, expectations for the future.

And the fact that there are certain norms and rules, limits in the family behavior - for example, of the child towards the parent - can accentuate the tensions: a child may find it unfair to obey his father or when he realizes that it is, in fact, moral and intellectual superior! However, the rules are rules, and hence an entire internal conflict that at some point will turn into an external one!

Another reason why there are tensions in family relationships: far too high - sometimes unrealistic - expectations of parents from children. Many times, parents dream about their offspring, how handsome, intelligent, successful they will be! But they do not realize that they are just dreams and that reality can never reach their level, and when logically the child is wrong and proves to be a human being and not an ideal, the disappointed parent will blame the child because failed to meet expectations!

This type of reaction is usually experienced by parents who are themselves frustrated and face unfulfilled aspirations - thus transferring those aspirations to their children. And the children will face a parent who is always critical and dissatisfied, their self-esteem will decrease and they will form frustrations that will seriously damage them in their relationship with other people and life in general.

When we talk about family relationships, we need to mention the Oedipus complex! It is not the responsibility of the writer of this article to comment on the extent to which the son is jealous of the father and would subconsciously want to have his mother (a process transferred to his daughter), but the reality shows the existence of an inverted Oedipus complex: the father he is often jealous of his son or even his daughter!

This happens at birth when the father realizes that his wife now has another priority, he has transformed from his girlfriend into someone else's mother and transfers all his affection to the child, ignoring him! But this subconscious jealousy normally passes after the first months of the child's life, the father getting used to the new situation and the little one.

Finally, relationships between family members can be strained due to more general problems that lead to stress and frustration for some members: poverty, illness, alcoholism, an unsatisfactory career, poor or extremely poor school results, and behavior. deviant of the child.