Dear Director Feltri,
I read the news of a ten -year -old boy abandoned by his parents at Barcelona airport. The family was leaving for Morocco, but the child had a passport expired. And so, instead of giving up the holiday or finding a sensible solution, mother and father thought it well to get on the plane with the other son, leaving the baby on the ground waiting for a relative to be able to recover him. All this, it seems, so as not to lose the money of the holiday. What do you think, director? Is this the level of modern parenting?
Olga Bianchi
Dear Olga,
What happened at Barcelona airport, if confirmed in the details reported by the press, is of a disarming gravity. You can be poor, ignorant, tired, exasperated. But you can also be inhuman. And abandoning a child in an international airport, a jungle of bodies and languages and brakes, in order not to lose a holiday is an act that has no justifications. There are no shades. It is, to want to use a technical term, of abandonment of minor. Point. It is a crime but also a monstrous act, against nature. Dogs abandoned on the highway to go to the beach were not enough, now even the minor children.
Now, I am not a psychologist, however I raised children and I know the human soul: that child, left alone with his backpack and his thoughts while his parents were sitting on the seats of the plane, will never forget that scene. And not because something traumatic happened in the striking sense of the term, but because the most subtle and profound sign of emotional cruelty has been impressed in him: the sense of exclusion.
The parents implicitly communicated: “You are sacrificable”. They transmitted to the son the idea that a booking on Booking is worth more than his presence. An education based on convenience, not on love. And it will be said: “But they had called a relative to go get it!” Worse still. Because this shows that the act was not even impulse, but calculated. They made two accounts: if we remain, we lose money and relax. If we leave, we leave it there and someone goes to recover it. So they chose to climb over the consciousness in the name of a few hundred euros and a hotel with swimming pool. The problem, however, is deeper. We live in an era in which childhood is loaded with an adult responsibility, but without receiving the dignity of the adult. Today a child must get by, he must understand, he must be resilient, responsible, adaptable. He has to wait. And above all he must understand the parents, instead of being understood by them. And so, in a world that celebrates parenting as a right, we are forgetting that the first duty of those who generate is never abandoned. There is one who of sadistic, in this scene that knows of parental bullying: “We start. You remain. Because you’re in glance, because you are not in order ». The psychological damage that can derive is not cataloged under a medical item. It is a silent trauma: the feeling too much, the gaze of others, the perception that love is measured by the ticket in hand. I don’t know what happened to a part of our society, but I fear that we are raising a generation of selfish, fragile, narcissi parents, convinced that everything revolves around their need for escape, lightness, deserved rest. Even at the cost of treating a child as an out of measure baggage to be left to the gate. Fortunately, the chronicles say the police made their parents go down and brought them back to reality. But the moral faults will remain. Because children are not mobile to send or postpone. They are souls.
And those who generate cannot behave as if he were the customer of a resort.
The holiday will also have gone in smoke, but at least we hope it remained intact a crumb of dignity. However, judging by how this story began, it had already been on sale for some time.