The Hypocrisy Of Adult Freedom In Sri Lanka!
By: Thushan Jayaratne
Tags: Emotional Intelligence, Sri Lanka, Children, Dependency Injection, Parents

The Hypocrisy Of Adult Freedom In Sri Lanka!

You are Free Not to Choose by Thushan Jayaratne

Most Sri Lankan Parents genuinely want their Children to grow up to be Independent individuals, without being a burden to Society. What they mean by this of course is that, children eventually have Financial and Physical freedom i.e Owning a house, buying a Car, maintaining job security, traveling around the world etc. So Parents will spend money educating them, sending them overseas to University etc. And if you ask most Sri Lankans what their idea of success is, you would most likely hear answers related to ‘Financial and Physical Freedom’. But are Parents really doing enough to inculcate real Independence? Have we got our priorities of Freedom mixed up here?

Unlike in Western countries, Sri Lankan kids are not expected to move out when they are 18 years old and seek financial freedom on their own. We live with our parents up until we get married and most of the time even after that. Now, I am well aware that there are general Socio-economic factors and individual circumstances at play here, but for the most part we can agree that this is a Cultural thing. Its ok to go away to University thousands of Miles away to study (because you are coming back), but if you want to move out and live on your own in Sri Lanka, you are traitor and probably don’t love your parents anymore, right?

The circle of life is such that, strong and able parents become weak and children become stronger. And it is obviously natural for children to take care of their parents, and most of us embrace this blessing of responsibility to take care of our parents when they are Old; this Financial and Physical inter-dependence is a ‘Fact of Life’ and usually takes its natural course of events. But what we are most of the time oblivious to, is the Emotional interdependence.

From a very young age, we are expected to behave in a certain way, dress a certain way, talk a certain way, eat, sit, walk, smile, cry, get angry in a certain way etc. But alongside this, there are also subtle and sometimes not-so subtle suggestions as how we need to think, form opinions, like, hate, accept, reject i.e emotional conditioning. And while most of us successfully manage to find our own identity by the time we are adults with regards to the physical aspects of our parental conditioning, most of us don’t even realise that there is detrimental emotional conditioning affecting our adult lives.

The unfortunate outcome of this emotional interdependence between parents and children is of course the fact that most of us are feeding-off of and sometimes even exploiting each others emotional insecurities. That is why some children actually only feel really independent and free when their parents and/or the dominant parent passes away. But even then, there is no real freedom, because now they have their own kids and are busy conditioning them via emotional blackmail and dependency aka “ I hope that you will take care of us when we are Old”…thus continuing the dependence cycle.

There is absolutely nothing wrong in children taking care of their parents and even for parents to have some expectation of their kids to do so, to a certain extent. But this hypocritical conditioning of “I want you to be independent and Free but you have to do it while living with me and listening to how I would do things”, needs to be evaluated.

Below is a passage on Children by Kahlil Gibran from ‘The Prophet’;