In human psychology, a healthy relationship between a mother and her children is vital for the latter to enjoy a positive environment when growing up. To signify how important this connection is, a lot of cultures around the world have created celebrations for this particular relationship. Nowadays, most of us under the influence of globalisation have decided to follow the tradition of the United States to celebrate it on the second Sunday in May. This year, we celebrated Mother’s Day on May 8 in Macau.
Even though we now have a regular day to celebrate Mother’s Day, teenagers in different cultures have their own methods to show their affection to one of their closest family members. In the Chinese context where our emotions are supposed to be hidden under the traditional Confucius teaching, most of us are perplexed about how we should present our love and care towards our mother. This is even more problematic in that youngsters are by whatever reasons supposed to show their peers how independent and cool they are from their parents. We often feel ashamed in front of our friends when our parents show us too much affection.
There is no doubt that we love our mothers, but it is also difficult to manifest our feelings to our family members. Think about our parents’ tough love: we know that they want the best for us when they hope that we can get good grades, choose our career path wisely, or simply not staying up too late. However, this good will is often manifested in the form of discipline, arbitrary and unpleasant. We would much rather be with our friends than be with our family members, because our friends usually are not judgemental.
While we may love our parents more than our friends, I think most teenagers will like their friends much more than their family members. That is the crucial difference between love and like. As a colleague told me, love is a powering feeling that brings more weight, care and understanding. Like is more superficial, but it is also much easier to share this emotion with someone, as we do not need to be concerned about their background, trying our best to change their every single deficit we find in them.
One of my suggestions here is to lower our emotional level towards our dearest when we are with our family members, particularly our mothers, and we may ask them to do the same favours for us as well. To be more concrete, it is much more appealing to go to our friends’ party, because we like to be with them, than perhaps going to out grandmother’s birthday because the latter is full of seriousness and pressure.
Sometimes, we can copy the mindset similar to how we hang out with friends to accompany our mother, do things together in a similar fashion when we are with our friends. This is not an easy task as we are so used to the hierarchical relationship with our parents, but we have to acknowledge that as we mature the older relationship does not work anymore. Try to talk with our mothers casually, maybe about the taste of the food in a new restaurant, or the new clothes you bought last night. It is much easier to talk to our mothers after we have grown up as a friendly figure rather than a parental figure, since it involves a less authoritarian relationship, and I think this is one way to extend our relationship with our mothers beyond Mother’s Day.
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