Distance & Despair

In recent years suicides are being reported more and more in the media. It usually used to be men and women resorting to suicide due to financial problems and poverty. While it was a vivid reflection on the inadequacy of our economic system to provide enough opportunities for livelihood to our poor, it was only an indicator of poverty leading to despair and suicide. In recent days and months , however, incidents of suicide of young boys and girls, teenagers to be precise, are being reported, which is an alarming indicator of a deteriorating society. The overwhelming reason for these suicide is distance, alienation and pressure from their own parents, their own families. For me, economic or administrative problems, are less dangerous. they can be checked by the government or non government organizations, but problems that have to do with the society are deeper, more pervasive, and more dangerous to our collective well being. The crumbling relationships between children and parents in our society, is a fast creeping illness that is rotting our social structure.
Earlier in older times, few people left the social structure or did anything which was an anomaly to it, the men enjoying more freedom in their actions but still bound by social norms. The generations in the 70s and my generation who grew up in the 90s, were exposed to different thoughts and possibilities for alternate lifestyles. But the Millennium Children are exposed more and more to western ways of behaviour, and are encouraged to think and question what their parents want them to do and how they want to behave. The parents themselves are now caught between the new and the old, and feel pressured to be the symbols of values that they felt their parents to be, but unable to be such paragons and unable to transfer those values to their kids because they themselves have confused views of these and their own roles. They do not have the lifestyles their own parents had so the kids are emulating different models. The parents don't like how their children are behaving by emulating them. The kids want discussion. The parents don't feel bound to do so under traditional norms But have no choice due to the newfound freedoms and exposure that cannot be denied to kids now. The parents do not want to qualify their actions to their children. They don't want to recognize that their children are individuals and have their own rights and problems of their generations and they might need to discuss these with their parents. They do not want to recognize that their children view themselves through the lens of their parents opinion of them, and their words, and need to know that they are loved and accepted with all their shortcomings. And the parents feel justified not to recognize this. Their parents never did all that. So they themselves have no example to follow in such situations. They simply don't know how to let down their guard and engage their kids on a human level. So the distance grows each day, and the despair of the teenager, going through the sensitive years of identity crisis, grows deeper. It is this disconnect which leads parents of suicides to declare that their children have not killed themselves, it is an accident or a murder. Even in death, they remain in denial of how their child felt. And their own role in pushing him off the brink.How could he kill himself? I gave him everything. The new paradigm of materialism which has creeped into our relationships. What we don't realize is that Things never make up for love, they can only compensate for a time. The present crisis is of today's parents more than their children. They need to break free of this tussle between the old and the new, select a way of life, and be the example that their children can emulate. Accept their shortcomings, and feel them your own so that they can accept them.The distance between God and Man is impossible, who loves us more that 70 mothers. the closeness between the parent and child, should atleast be one seventieth of this closeness. The love of one mother atleast.