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Polish child-parent relations? [3]
How would you compare child-parent relations in Poland and the West? Are Polish teens just as toxic and disrespectful towards their parents and other adults as their American counterparts? Does a wall of alienness separate many adult children from their middle-aged or ageing parents, where each side live a life on their own with little interaction?
What inspired this question was Europe's present heat wave being reproted by CNN. I recall the one of 2003 when in France alone 15,000 elderly people died of excessive heat. The authorities had quite a time trying to track down the heat victims' children fo funeral arrangements. When finally found, some of them said about their mothers: 'You mean to say she was still living?'
The Western model comrprises nurseries, infant schools, nannies for youngsters, a drift-apart syndrome in the adolescent-adult phase and old people's homes towards the end of the road. I beleive in Poland there is still the institution of a 'babcia' as child-minder and more people tkaing care of their eldlerly rather than shipping them off to a 'dom opieki'.
But, as with everything, things are probably gradually evolving ('Western is trendy!?') in the direction of the Western model of child-parent estrangement. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
