Myths of Ancient Greece. Mythology for children

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Greece and myths- the concept is inseparable. It seems that everything in this country - every plant, river or mountain - has its own fairy tale story passed down from generation to generation. And this is no coincidence, since myths reflect in allegorical form the entire structure of the world and the philosophy of life of the ancient Greeks.

And the name Hellas () itself also has a mythological origin, because The mythical patriarch Hellenes is considered the ancestor of all Hellenes (Greeks). The names of the mountain ranges crossing Greece, the seas washing its shores, the islands scattered in these seas, lakes and rivers are associated with myths. As well as the names of regions, cities and villages. I’ll tell you about some stories that I really want to believe. It should be added that there are so many myths that even for the same toponym there are several versions. Because myths are oral creativity, and have come down to us already recorded by ancient writers and historians, the most famous of whom is Homer. I'll start with the name Balkan Peninsula, on which Greece is located. The current "Balkan" is of Turkish origin, meaning simply "mountain range". But earlier the peninsula was named after Amos, the son of the god Boreas and the nymph Orifinas. The sister and at the same time the wife of Emos was called Rodopi. Their love was so strong that they addressed each other by the names of the supreme gods, Zeus and Hera. For their insolence they were punished by being turned into mountains.

History of the origin of the toponym Peloponnese, peninsulas on peninsulas, no less cruel. According to legend, the ruler of this part of Greece was Pelops, the son of Tantalus, in early years offered by a bloodthirsty father as a dinner to the gods. But the gods did not eat his body, and, having resurrected the young man, left him on Olympus. And Tantalus was doomed to eternal (tantalum) torment. Further, Pelops himself either descends to live among the people, or is forced to flee, but subsequently becomes the king of Olympia, Arcadia and the entire peninsula, which was named in his honor. By the way, his descendant was the famous Homeric king Agamemnon, the leader of the troops that besieged Troy.

One of the most beautiful islands Greece Kerkyra(or Corfu) It has romantic story origin of its name: Poseidon, the god of the seas, fell in love with the young beauty Corcyra, daughter of Asopus and the nymph Metope, kidnapped her and hid her on a hitherto unknown island, which he named after her. Corkyra eventually turned into Kerkyra. Another story about lovers remains in the myths about the island Rhodes. This name was borne by the daughter of Poseidon and Amphitrite (or Aphrodite), who was the beloved of the Sun god Helios. It was on this island, freshly born from the foam, that the nymph Rhodes united in marriage with her beloved.

origin of name Aegean Sea known to many thanks to the good Soviet cartoon. The story is this: Theseus, the son of the Athenian king Aegeus, went to Crete to fight the monster there - the Minotaur. In case of victory, he promised his father to raise white sails on his ship, and in case of defeat, black ones. With the help of the Cretan princess, he defeated the Minotaur and went home, forgetting to change the sails. Seeing his son's mourning ship in the distance, Aegeus, out of grief, threw himself off a cliff into the sea, which was named after him.

Ionian Sea bears the name of the princess and at the same time priestess Io, who was seduced by the supreme god Zeus. However, his wife Hera decided to take revenge on the girl by turning her into a white cow and then killing her at the hands of the giant Argos. With the help of the god Hermes, Io managed to escape. She found refuge and human form in Egypt, for which she had to swim across the sea, which is called the Ionian.

Myths Ancient Greece also tell about the origin of the universe, the relationship to the divine and human passions. They are of interest to us, primarily because they give us an understanding of how European culture was formed.

So, the promised post about the prejudices associated with prolonged ( longer than a year, sometimes strongly more than a year) breastfeeding.

We need to start with the fact that within the framework of child psychology most of concepts related to breastfeeding relates to psychoanalysis. Those who have been reading me for a long time know how I feel about psychoanalysis. main feature of all psychoanalytic concepts - not just in their unconfirmation by any research, but also in their fundamental unconfirmability. If anyone has read Popper, psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable; theoretical constructions are made in such a way that they fundamentally cannot be refuted, and therefore cannot be confirmed.

Let's start with the timing. Why is the sacred period of “normal” feeding considered to be one year, and not ten months or a year and a half?

The fact is that the pioneer of theorizing on the topic of breastfeeding, Dr. Freud, who did not observe real babies, but reconstructed childhood events in the process of interpreting the psychodynamic phenomena of his adult patients, believed that it is precisely until one year that the child is on the so-called. oral stage of psychosexual development. At this very stage, sucking is the main activity that ensures development. After a year, the child must move to a new stage - anal, and solve the problems of potty training. Freud believed that excessive satisfaction of the desire to suck the breast can lead to passivity, dependence in relationships and te ne. These myths are broadcast to this day. By the way, other psychoanalysts had a different idea about when to stop feeding: Melanie Klein believed that six months was enough, Francoise Dolto and Winnicott talked about 9 months. All these terms, in general, are just made up, this is pure theorizing.

By the way, Dolto strongly believed that feeding after 9 months could lead to mental retardation. She did this at a time when even in the USSR it was well known that mental retardation is caused either by extensive damage to the cerebral cortex, or by prolonged and severe deprivation - such as happens in children who grew up with animals. Alas, Dolto was not interested in such details. As a specialist in this particular area, I can definitely tell you that breastfeeding, even until retirement, can in no way cause mental retardation or delay speech development. Their reasons are completely different.

Now - about all the horrors that await children who are not separated on time.

Myth one: prolonged breastfeeding causes developmental delays in the child.

The source of the myth: psychoanalytic ideas about stages mental development child. For example, Dolto has the idea that in order for a child to develop symbolic communication (speech), he must be weaned, since feeding is bodily communication, not symbolic. He even goes so far as to assert that “children with psychopathology are always those whom their mothers unsuccessfully weaned” (what a heresy, my God, and this was already the 80s, one could at least take a little interest in real children with psychopathology) .

What are the features of these stages? The most important thing is that they are speculative. No, the points at 1 year and at 3 years are really some kind of “milestones” in the development of a child. But there is no evidence that sucking is most important for a child up to one year old, and potty training is most important for a child up to three years old (so that potty training would be the leading activity at an early age? Unless at a very strange family, to say the least). As fundamental principles of development, both Dolto, Freud, and Klein put forward something absolutely speculative, not to say absurd.

Harsh reality: children on breastfeeding develop somewhat faster, their articulatory muscles are better developed (due to a special type of sucking), and they have a higher IQ on average.

Myth two: there is something of incest in long-term feeding.

Source of the myth: again, Freudian psychoanalysis - the idea of breastfeeding as the first sexual activity. It is assumed that the child receives pleasure from feeding comparable to an orgasm (oh how).

Another source of the myth is the sexualization of breasts in principle. It should be noted that erogenous zones, except for the genitals, are culture-specific, and breasts are not something sexual in all cultures. Thus, we have a perverted logic: we declare that breasts are erogenous zone, something related to sex, and if the child sucks it, it’s sex. If we declared the dimple on the back of the head under a pigtail a taboo zone, as in one tribe, the life of our children would be simpler.

Reality: When a baby eats, he eats (and also communicates), not has sex. He is not yet aware that in this culture they decided to hide the chest, and not the dimple on the back of the head. Don't confuse cultural conventions with reality. Breasts were created by nature to feed children.

The third myth: after a year there is “nothing” in milk.

Source of the myth: unknown, apparently just human stupidity, which is omnipresent. How there can be nothing in milk at all is unclear; at least it is white and sweet.

Reality: milk after a year has much greater nutritional value than cow's milk and products made from it that are recommended for baby food.

The fourth myth: children grow up infantile from long-term feeding.

Source of the myth: Apparently the same psychosexual stages of Freud and specifically his idea that children whose desire to suck was “overly” satisfied could become extremely dependent on other people.
Again, Dolto believes that for optimal development, a child needs the experience of frustration - simply, before feeding, it is useful to yell a little. Through the feeling that he does not have something, the child gains the experience of “Feeling himself”, isolating his Self from other objects and from the mother.

Reality: to begin with, no one can really explain what infantilism is. Generally, infantile person- this is something that I personally don’t like (apparently). And to say that a three-year-old is childish is completely absurd: infantilism is childishness, and at three years old it is strange not to behave like a child.
Regarding the “experience of frustration”: in general, it is known that yelling is not useful, but harmful, and that this does not at all lead to “singling out one’s own self,” but mainly leads to delayed development, poor weight gain and other manifestations of trouble.

Is a situation good or bad for a child when all his desires are immediately satisfied, and if good/bad, up to/from what age is an open question, but the reality of life is such that it is simply physically impossible for a child to satisfy all his desires immediately, especially after a year .

As for the influence of feeding on functioning in adulthood - of course, no one has studied this, and it is hardly possible. So all this remains unfounded.

Myth five: after a year, only the mother needs feeding.
Source of the myth: unknown, apparently some kind of rationalization of one’s reluctance to see “unacceptable” desires in a child.

Reality: It's not moms who run after their kids waving their boobs. As a rule, the child asks for the breast - and they often protest if it is not given. I wonder if anyone will doubt that a child really wants an apple if he comes up to his mother and says “give me an apple”?

Breast milk after one year is a serious source of nutrients, vitamins, immunoglobulins and other benefits. If something is useful for a child and he wants it, it is very stupid not to give it to him.

In general, here we can talk about total distrust towards the child. Pay attention to this twist: the child not only does not know what is good for him; he cannot even know what exactly he wants. It is not so much the benefits of feeding for the child that are denied, but rather his subjective experience. "You don't really want this."
I do not believe that any child's wishes should be immediately satisfied. But it is absurd to deny the very fact of their existence. By doing this, the adult is not raising the child - he is protecting himself from his fears: the fear of being a bad mother, the fear of the very fact that the child has desires, his own will.

Let's face it: if a baby is not weaned, he will most likely continue to feed well beyond the first year. Why? Because he wants it. A mother may want a lot of things for a child (for example, for him to immediately learn to go to the potty, to wait patiently for something and not to yell when he is dressed). Usually, if the mother wants something, but the child does not, the child makes his reluctance clear. It’s true that children don’t always need spoon feeding, especially in the volumes prescribed by regulations. And then the mother often runs after the child with a plate of porridge. Why is no one protesting?

Myth six: a child cannot refuse feeding on his own, because he does not yet know that it is possible to live without a breast.

Source: just stupidity and lack of logic.

Reality: a lot of children after a year have experience of being put to bed without breastfeeding - by dad, nanny or grandparents; Children after one year, as a rule, eat solid food, many with a good appetite. To think that they don’t give up breasts because they don’t know how great it is to live without it is the same as thinking that people don’t give up caviar just because they don’t know how great it is to eat barley and don’t want to move from big house to a room in the basement because they do not know that they are not free from their imposed mansion.

After a year, a child can easily live without a breast. He just doesn't want to (and rightly so).

Myth seventh: a mother feeds her child because of her selfishness: she wants to tie the child to her or it’s convenient for her, and this is bad.

Let's start with the fact that there is some contradiction in talking about feeding after a year. Some opponents argue that this is very painful for the mother and labor-intensive, others - that the mother makes her life easier in this way: so that the child does not have to be taught to fall asleep separately (otherwise he, of course, will ask for a boob before retirement), so as not to take him I take him on walks so as not to have to do super-developmental activities with him - mom sticks his boob in his face.

In general, first you need to decide whether feeding makes a mother’s life easier or more difficult :)

Is it bad to want to make your life easier? I don't think so. In my opinion, in a situation of some chronic lack of strength, which mothers of small children have, especially if the child is not the only one or the mother works, you need to use any way to make work easier for yourself, regardless of whether the grandmothers on the bench like it.

In general, rhetoric about selfishness is a separate story. Going to work early, for example, or having a candlelit dinner with your husband is “good” selfishness, and feeding is “bad” selfishness. Which egoism is acceptable and which is not is a purely conventional question and depends on the moment of the reference group.

Next: the mother feeds in order to tie the child to her. I have little to say about this, because, in my opinion, the child early age and without breastfeeding, he is very dependent on adults and is strongly attached to his parents, first of all, as a rule, to his mother. This is the age norm. As for the child’s ability to stay with unfamiliar adults, which is incomprehensibly called “independence,” then, in my experience, infants in this regard are no different from non-infants. Whether the ability to remain without a mother at 2 years old has any inherent value - I'm not sure whether it has anything to do with what is called maturity and independence in adulthood - a very questionable question. On this moment everything that is on this topic is written with a pitchfork on the water.

And all this is even more doubtful against the backdrop of very specific nutritional data. breast milk. When a mother feeds a child any other healthy food, for example, apples, carrots and beef - we do not assume that she does this out of a desire to assert herself as good mother or other selfish considerations. It is most logical to assume that since 1. milk is healthy, 2. the mother knows about it, then the mother feeds the child healthy milk precisely because it is useful.

Myth eight: feeding at night is a way to avoid intimate life with husband.

Source of the myth: not sure exactly, but it seems that systemic family therapists.

Reality: it’s not feeding that interferes with your personal life, but fatigue. Yes, night feedings can be exhausting (however, not all children who are not fed after a year sleep well). But actually feeding and sleeping together can only interfere if the marital bed is the only plane in the apartment on which you can have sex. And there are so many ways to avoid sex when you want to avoid it.

The most important thing: there is no “psychologists have established” regarding long-term feeding. Psychological Research there is practically nothing on this topic. All that is is pure theorizing and someone's personal observations, the results of which, even if true in a particular case, cannot be generalized to the entire population. That is, if a child comes to a psychologist with problems, and these problems are somehow related to feeding, this does not tell us anything about all other feeding children, because parents who have no problems with their children do not go to a psychologist and cannot become a subject observations.

The approach of helping specialists (doctors, psychologists) to feeding often reminds me of the old programmer joke about the boiling water algorithm. Problem conditions: there is a kettle, a tap and a stove, you need to boil water. Solution: open the tap, pour water into the kettle, and boil. The conditions of the problem change: water has already been poured. What to do? Answer: pour out the water, reducing the problem to the previous one. I have a clear feeling that psychologists and doctors want to remove feeding somewhere simply so that the conditions of the task become more clear to them. That is, not for the benefit of the child or family, but to simplify mental work for yourself.

So, there is a natural childish attitude towards the world as probabilistic - as something about which one can only guess. And therefore, this thinking of a preschool child, not trained in logic, could be called probabilistic thinking.

And the analysis of the structures of a child’s probabilistic thinking allows us to understand something essential in the nature of the myth that organizes the horizon of vision primitive man.

The fact is that the totality, universality of the phenomenon of mythological thinking in primitive society can be understood and interpreted as a kind of preservation in adulthood of certain structures of intellectual infantility, i.e. those structures of probabilistic thinking that normally characterize the consciousness of a preschool child. And if we accept this hypothesis, then much of the phenomenon of primitive mythological thinking will become understandable.

To some extent, the essence of those societies that we call primitive is that these are those societies in which no way out beyond the boundaries of the probabilistic way of thinking has been found, and the probabilistic way of thinking is not only the way of thinking of children, but also the way of thinking of adults . The difference between an “adult” and a “child” manifests itself only in the emergence of specifically adult realities.

Thus, it is precisely according to the logic of myth, and not at all according to the logic of rationality, that a child enters puberty. This means that a person who has crossed the line of physiological adulthood continues to think in fundamentally pre-conceptual mental schemes, continues to think according to the laws of irrational, probabilistic thinking. However, the center of this remains fundamentally childish! - a completely new thinking emerges, namely, sexual problematics, and it is precisely these problematics that determine the content of the teenage corpus of myths.

IN modern society The transition to adolescence is not only a physiological revolution, but also an intellectual revolution. It is at this age that a change in the pattern of thinking occurs: from thinking in complexes (a fundamentally mythological type of thinking), the child moves on to formal operational thinking or thinking in concepts. As for primitive society, then there is no transition to a formal operational scheme of thinking at all, and thinking gets stuck at the probabilistic stage, at the stage of complexes. Only the content of the myths changes: a teenager, having undergone a severe rite of initiation, a rite of passage into adulthood, is initiated into a special, esoteric group of adult myths, heavily implicated in sexual issues.

The introduction of initiated adolescents to the esoteric corpus of tribal mythology, sanctified by cruel and sophisticated rites of passage, constitutes the essence of the border that

which in primitive society separates the adult state from the child state. Esoteric information (mythologically framed and presented in the process of a complex ritual action) plus an initiation rite is what, in primitive ideas, makes a child an adult. And, at the same time, this process of transition from a child’s state to an adult is in no way connected with a change in the very way of thinking, the way of intellectual attitude towards reality. An adult member of the tribe thinks in the same way as a child - in the sense that he uses fundamentally the same mental patterns - those that were described above as probabilistic. This thinking is acausal (indifferent to cause-and-effect relationships), illogical; and a certain conclusion is made in the space of this thinking not with strict necessity, but only with a certain degree of probability.

It is clear that this fundamentally distinguishes the world of primitiveness from the one familiar to us, where the difference between the two states - childhood and adult - is not just informational, not just in terms of dedication or social responsibility, but also in terms of the mental patterns underlying these two types of thinking, mental matrices In other words, in our world the very logic of children’s thinking does not fundamentally coincide with the logic of adults’ thinking.

What is the basis for this fundamental rupture of two “thought patterns (child and adult, probabilistic and conceptual), characteristic of all historical (i.e., post-primitive) societies? Of course, the institution of school, the institution of education, on the foundation of which human society builds itself, starting from the era of early civilizations.

A primitive society is a society that fundamentally does not know the institution of education, the institution of school as a certain special period human life, separated from all other life by a fairly strict line. There is only one “school” there - the school of myth, and this school is least of all concerned with changing the mental patterns in which the child thinks. Therefore, the transition to adulthood in that society does not imply any intellectual revolution, but is marked by a feature of initiation rites, marked by physical violence against the body, when the body itself becomes a sign of the completed transition. The intellectual difference between an adult and a child here lies not in the way of thinking, but in the content of the myths that set the framework for this thinking.

Thus, adults and children talk here about different things, but in the same language. And the transition itself from childhood to adulthood is least of all connected with a change in the structures of thinking. Thus, an adult in a primitive society is a person initiated into the realities of adult life, but continues to think mythologically. He is initiated, he takes on an important share of social responsibility and is ready to serve not his personal “I”, but the social other, i.e. external

him in relation to his self and cultural community, and the ritual scars and tattoos of his body testify to the accomplished rite of passage. However, at the same time, he continues to think in the same structures of thinking in which he thought as a child. And, since a child in this society does not receive intellectual trauma through education (since there is no institution of education as such, i.e. school as an instrument for transmitting knowledge alienated from a person), basic structures of reflexivity do not arise in him. He is mythologically stuck with the information that he receives about the world around him, he turns out to be unable to enter into dialogue with this information, he turns out to be incapable of dialogue with the position of another. This is where its total mythology lies.

As for all post-primitive societies, they are based on a special institution of education, the institution of school, which intervenes in the very probabilistic scenario of complex thinking and transfers the child onto the rails of conceptual, formal-operational thinking. And as a result, the child experiences an inevitable intellectual trauma (and therefore a person of civilization is always an intellectually traumatized person), when the child, who just yesterday was open to the whole world in direct mythological pathos, begins to form structures of reflexive mediation and rationality. And therefore, there is a deep difference between an adult and a child in all post-primitive societies: they think and speak fundamentally differently. different languages. One has the direct language of myth. The other has a reflexively mediated language of concepts and formal logical structures. Changing the structures of thinking is the very essence of the transition taking place here.

And when I talk about the similarity of the mythological way of thinking that characterizes primitive communities to the thinking of modern preschool children, to the thinking of a child, I mean not so much that primitiveness is the childhood of humanity, but rather that primitive thinking is not the past stage of rationalization and social alienation - the thinking of a child, but at the same time the thinking of a child, which has amazingly acquired adult status. This is a mindset in which all adult realities - sexuality, social responsibility, the need to start a family and raise children - are perceived within the boundaries of what was described above as a probabilistic attitude towards the world.

However, in contrast to children's thinking, the probabilistic-mythological thinking of an adult primitive man turns out to be extremely conservative and inactive. And this is due to the fact that it is forced to fulfill a special social role- the role of information storage. Fundamentally reproducing the structures of children's thinking, probabilistically open to the future, it turns out to be informationally overloaded with pro-

shady, which makes him a sedentary and inert phenomenon. Living in primitive world adults are forced to devote a huge part of their energy and time not so much to the production of new opportunities, but to the retention, accumulation and preservation of old ones. Adults become hostages of accumulated wealth over millennia cultural values and the mythology serving these values, which is transmitted from generation to generation orally. And this gives rise to one of the most amazing paradoxes. Almost coinciding with children's probabilistic consciousness in its basic structures, the mythological consciousness of primitive man is fundamentally different from children's probabilistic consciousness in its relationship with time.

If the child for a long time remains practically indifferent to his past and is entirely turned to the future (which produces in him, in particular, a probabilistic type of thinking), then myth as the mental horizon of a primitive society turns out to be entirely turned to the past. He substitutes his highest social meaning as the meaning of maintaining tradition, as the meaning of transmitting the values of the past to future generations. While preserving the probabilistic nature of children's thinking, he uses it to retain the past and thereby demonstrates that thinking organized on a probabilistic basis can perfectly serve the purpose of accumulating and storing information. In a sense, adult forms of primitive thinking are not a way of thinking about the world at all, but serve exclusively as a way of preserving an already created cultural world.

Myths about adulthood that almost every child believes in

I realized too late that it was time to stop being a child and finally grow up. It took me twice as long as the average person. There were many reasons, but the main one was fear. Fear that one day I will hit the switch that will light me up as a grown man. It seems to me that this is an unusual fear; we experience it when we try something for the first time.

I can't get rid of these fears. This is something that comes with experience, but I can give you some tips so that you don't make the same mistakes as me. For example…

1. Adult life is not just work, work and more work.

“My parents were always running around trying to achieve some goal, and they looked miserable. Mom worked all day, while trying to keep the house clean. Dad has been sleeping until 4 pm for five years now, and then drinking until he passes out. Watching them, I realized that the work was exhausting. If I become like this, I will put a gun in my mouth and... end my life with a pink fountain and tangled hair.” - my words at 9 years old.

Well, when you grew up...

Adulthood not only work, work is contribution. We know that the father of a 9 year old is not truly an adult, although we cannot say anything about his life. Why? Many adults drink not because they like whiskey, but simply because they cannot enter this life normally.

But from those words, we know that the father of that 9 year old is a piece of SHIT because he just sits there and exists. His wife does all the work. I can only remember a couple of years of them life together when my father was not under my mother's "care". He was working then and spending all his money on booze. He worked, but it brought nothing to the family or society. He died, but never became an “adult” person.

But if you think about it, what does it mean to be an adult? Work more than you did when you were a teenager? It's up to you to decide how much time to spend on your career. But looking back, I don’t notice that now it’s become more difficult for me to work than in school years. Think about it, your day doesn’t end after 8 hours spent at school. You still have something to do after class, if you are involved in sports, choir or wrestling, then you have more time than I did in these same years.

Contribution is the key. Does this mean you should start a family or volunteer to save the world? No! You can invest in different ways. But, being able-bodied and positive-minded, people more often choose to simply exist. At such moments, no one thinks or remembers about them. It looks more like a flowerbed than a person.

2. Pressure of responsibility

“Why should I have soup before dessert? It’s still the same food and what difference does it make what ends up in my stomach first? Please let me eat nuts 20 minutes before lunch” - the usual exclamations of a typical teenager who has already formed his own worldview.

For many children, learning responsibility is a very long and painful process. In the first years we simply get to know the world: we play, have fun, try to communicate. He didn’t set anything on fire, didn’t hit anyone – so there’s nothing to answer for. Then we have to make our bed. Next, we are already cleaning our entire room, learning to cook, and one day we are asked to change the pipes under the sink.

When your parents realize that you are completely independent person, they either send you to study at the University, or create a nightmare in last years your teenage life (depending on when they realize it).

Panic begins on both banks. Some people think that their son is a lazy stump who can do everything but does nothing. And others say that their parents blame everything on them, just to get more rest themselves.

3. The ability to rejoice is lost

Have you reached the age where you become a cynical asshole? I can't imagine myself not loving music and cartoons. Although, as you grow up, you realize that that music and all the things that you were so excited about as a child are simply terrible. But a lot has changed since your childhood. The entertainment industry has taken a big step forward. Even as an adult, you are obliged to try many of the modern teenage "entertainments". I'm not sure that even in 20 years I will be able to resist the mind-blowing rides or new hyper-realistic virtual games.

But most adults have fun when they want to. They just do it differently. Just two different generations it is very difficult to understand each other. For example, my grandmother watches TV all day long. Personally, I can't watch more than two programs a week. But she watches them all day long, eats while watching them, but at the same time cleans, cooks, etc. Why is this so?

Perhaps it reminds them of their youth. After all, the most important lessons in life are taught in youth. When they were young, each generation had ways to have fun that were unique to them. Grandma loves watching TV because it had just appeared during her youth. Well, I like 80s rock and turn-based strategies.

My children would not understand me if I gave them New Year turn-based strategy. "It's boring! Only suckers and old people play this.” However, the first thing I gave my daughter after the computer was headphones so as not to hear her terrible music. And when she gets to my age, she will give her child a similar gift, because her music will seem terrible to her. And she, in turn, will seem like a boring walking sack.

4. You forget how to be young

“I know it's curfew, but we're just going for a walk. We won’t take drugs or have unprotected sex,” adult teenagers tell their parents who don’t want to let them stay out late. “Do you want my life to be as boring as yours?”

When you grow up, you can understand everything that happened from the height of your age. All these amazing memories, emotions, adventures, physical and emotional traumas - they are what made you this way. That is, they created you into who you are now, and it is quite natural that you do not want to experience all this again. But you shouldn’t protect your child from youth (let’s call all these impressions in one suitable word).

Growing up is a smooth process. You won't even notice how you become an adult. It will happen one morning, or at your son's birthday, or at work when you ask for a raise. There will be no crazy revelations or global awareness. You won't even feel anything new. Just realize that several years have already passed since you grew up. And in the evening, watch your favorite childhood movie, cook buns according to your mother’s recipe, or do something else nostalgic. Start giving advice to your children to help them avoid the mistakes you made. And you will see that they do not value you while you are around. And some things will become damn predictable.