A good Kosovar family
Parents risk prioritizing family image over their child’s happiness.
By Beltina Syla | July 6, 2024
In a good Kosovar family, it is important to maintain a good public image of the whole family. Such an image features the family’s morality and the parents’ success in raising their kids to be well-behaved, loving and in jobs that their family and community will approve of.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Your family wants a better life for you and supports you. But just how important are children for maintaining the image that parents want their social circle to see?
But just how important are children for maintaining the image that parents want their social circle to see?
In such an environment, whether it is created consciously or unconsciously, parents place their kids under a lot of pressure and high expectations. Meanwhile, their children’s actual abilities and talents may not ever have the chance to shine.
Usually, parents feel like they should take control over their children’s lives, deciding for them even when it’s not needed. This may start with hobbies, interests and passions. When kids aren’t given options to choose, they won’t know where their actual abilities lie because they never knew the capacities of their own talents and weren’t able to follow what comes naturally to them.
Kids have tried to speak up in such situations, but in most cases, they were shut down immediately. They were told not to talk because their opinion didn’t matter or that they were too young to know what was best for them. When their opinions are not considered, their confidence will lower. At some point, they will stop trying to speak up because the outcome will be the same no matter the situation. Suppressing their emotions and doing what their parents order them to do becomes the new normal.
Later on, parents feeling entitled to making every decision about their child’s path without considering the child’s thoughts or giving them the option of choice leads to the kid not being able to grow as a person. It will be difficult for them to have their own opinions and develop critical thinking skills.
In some ways, it may seem that parents are being considerate and only want the best for their children’s future. However, being demanding, controlling and not putting their child’s needs and passions first will only damage the kid’s mental health. This can grow into bigger problems when children become adults and are on their own.
The pattern will continue into the children’s adult lives if it’s not broken. It will affect decisions that are a big part of their personal life and career, two very big factors that impact their mental health and happiness in the long run.
The controlling usually comes so that their children don’t go off on so-called bad paths and become bad examples to the parents’ social circle, ruining the parents’ reputation and reflecting negatively on their parenting. This leaves the children in those families with the impossible choice of prioritizing either their own happiness or their family’s approval.
This leaves the children in those families with the impossible choice of prioritizing either their own happiness or their family's approval.
These kids are left feeling judged by their own parents and the community around them, doubting themselves in every decision they make, having low confidence, comparing their work to other people’s achievement and needing to prove themselves even when it’s not needed. They let go of pursuing their own happiness to fulfill any expectation their parents have of them just for a chance of approval, even if it is always doubtful whether it will come or not.
The chance that children in such environments will choose happiness is not that high. Finding the courage to go against your family and fight for your own future and happiness while seeking parental approval is mentally draining. Even if you do go against their wishes, it won’t take long before they stop supporting you, because your happiness and mental state was rarely a factor in their decision-making. The biggest reason for this is the image they seek to uphold.
And all this pain has its roots. My parents were never supportive of my true abilities. Being a child with explosive emotions and not knowing how to deal with them led me to become a very creative individual. Any time I had the smallest chance to show myself through art, I would take it without thinking twice. Parts of me were growing while I was creating even if I didn’t know it at the time.
Parts of me were growing while I was creating even if I didn't know it at the time.
But my parents never saw being and flourishing as a creative child as an option; art was seen as a waste of time, as something that was never going to give me what I needed in life. Creating in the dark and trying not to lose my creativity when my parents couldn’t see it was truly painful. I started seeing my art as a burden, something that I should have never pursued.
Growing up, there weren’t times when I could freely express my feelings through art, so slowly and unconsciously, I forgot the most important part of me.
I gave up on myself. I let everything go without knowing that my happiness and the way I dealt with emotions was gone too. Doing what my parents wanted and what was expected of me made me numb and gray and I still wasn’t enough for them. How could I be?
Doing what my parents wanted and what was expected of me made me numb and gray and I still wasn’t enough for them.
I wasn’t enough, not when I was myself and not when I did everything they wanted me to. All of that made me spiral and my mental health suffered.
So, what was I supposed to do now? Not following my passions, specifically art, meant that there was no more me. I was gone. And for what?
Somehow, as much as I felt pain, I also began appreciating my creativity even more. As I started to create again, to write and express whatever I was feeling, I started to find my way back to me, as a whole.
I started by telling people that I write. I didn’t tell many people at first, but those I did tell were interested. They asked me about what and why I write, but I kept that very concealed. I didn’t say much until I promised one of my teachers that I would print out some of my poems. She read those and told me about the monthly open mic nights at the community center. There was one going to be held the upcoming Saturday.
I had never been to that community center, and I didn’t know anyone there except for the teacher who was going to accompany me. I was anxious, excited and very scared because I had made up my mind that I would go up on stage and share my poetry with an audience. I didn’t know how anybody would take it.
I read it and people listened. Meanwhile, I was shaking, not looking up or engaging with the audience. After the event was over, people came up to me and told me about which of my poems had stuck to them and why.
Before I left, I went up to the hosts, who had been very supportive and welcoming. One of them told me that he was proud of me. Hearing that for the first time after I shared my poems, which are an extension of me, immediately changed my self-perception and my perception of my art. I was fully myself and that was enough. I felt accepted in ways that I never had before. Hearing that opened so many pathways to finding me.
As I started talking to friends and others about my experience, I found that my friends’ parents also generally had such expectations. If the expectations weren’t met, parents may think that we didn’t love or respect them. But these are our lives and we can’t let our happiness depend on other people’s approval.
But these are our lives and we can't let our happiness depend on other people’s approval.
I found that usually, people have breaking points in which the image they uphold starts to crack. That’s when they start having boundaries with their parents and know when to advocate for themselves and stand their ground.
Their perception of life and themselves started to change in those moments. As hard as all of that is, appreciating ourselves in all the different ways we engage with the world comes with growing up.
Feature Image: Majlinda Hoxha / K2.0.
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