Generation Gap

Psychologist Florentina Carolina Baciu
CJAPP Maramureș
Thoughts on the debate organized on the 4^th of November 2012 by the students of Mihai Eminescu National College from Baia Mare during the Gruntvig Project Reunion Meeting “Youngsters and Elders for a Better Life”.

Location: Mihai Eminescu National College - Baia Mare
Number of attendees: 112
1. Youngsters aged between 16 and 19
2. Project teams from: Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and Romania

I decided that the starting point of this activity should be the values, more specifically the students’ values system versus what they believed constituted their parents’ set of ethical values. I operated on the assumption according to which a real, genuine dispute must be triggered by principles, matters of essence, convictions. Otherwise, the so-called generation gap is solely a caprice or often enough an immature, rarely elegant way of getting attention.  

And so, the attending students were requested to identify a set of 7 values by which they conduct their daily lives. Once identified, the students were required to choose three such values which they considered to be of utmost importance. They were then instructed to do the same while taking under consideration their parents’ perspective. This task caused the students to make an effort to identify, empathize with their parents given that they found themselves in a situation in which they had to imagine/infer their parents’ fundamental values based on their behaviors, ideas and attitudes..

What surprised me….?

…the fact that the students’ fundamental values were beautiful, insightful, mature, meaningful and able to help them survive in crisis situations…

…the fact that the students easily revealed/identified the values their parents lived by (I mean… we did not witness an endless series of “ummm” or “give me another minute to figure this out…”). The students had a natural, coherent well-grounded discourse as if they had had the entire previous day to rehearse the answer to this question (which obviously was not the case).

…the fact that there were determined students, daring enough to come forward and support ideas different from the mainstream.  This was the case of a girl student who confessed that in the tempestuous search of her self-identity as a teenager she was guided, supported and helped by a psychologist.  The adolescents present in the room smiled, made a few sarcastic comments while others explicitly disapproved of such an idea, which was seeing a psychologist. Our young student, with a strength and a tranquility sprung from an inner purity provided arguments justifying her choice and expressed her surprise over the other students’ distrust in the psychologist’s ability to guide them throughout crisis situations. For her, this choice was a beneficial one. She turned out to be ok, got to follow the path that she had wished for herself and the disputes barely existed between her and her parents.   They got much closer to each other and significantly more eager to communicate, “She” – an adult-to-become with “Them” – already adults. The appointments with the psychologist were less and less frequent while at the same time being more insightful. They were all grateful to each other.

…the fact that the high school students were unbelievably comfortable with the English language. Terms, ideas, concepts, accents and intonations – it felt like English was their second mother-tongue, there was no stuttering, no “how do you say in English this….”, the discourse was coherent, very much like in a televised talk-show or debate. They projected such a perfection that it caused me to forget even the basic English I knew, and even more than that, overwhelmed by the elegance of their phrasing and the depth of their ideas, certain instances just went by me as I was telling myself, just like an country person taken for the first time at the zoo to see a giraffe, “this is just unbelievable”. These kids’ performance brought praise to their high-school, project, community and country. Through their thoughts and eyes I saw a different Romania, not the one showed on TV but the one I had missed so dearly.

But what surprised me most was the fact that a significant number of the students’ sets of values were pretty similar to those attributed by them to their parents. Astonishment! (felt deep inside, secretly but nonetheless intensely).  I was thinking to myself: Where is the conflict…? In what corner of the soul, conviction, and attitude should I be looking for it? Then I smiled. If they (parents and children) are heading in the same direction, how come they don’t realize it? I wonder whether the generation gap is nothing but a matter of perspective, approach, vision or strategy?...

I left the meeting with many more questions, a few assumptions and a contagious hope.

I shall only share with you my assumptions. These are enough to enable you to figure the questions out by yourselves and then reveal the hopes…

… Isn’t the gap between generations a rebellious, non-conventional way for me to assert my individuality…?  

… Even though I live by the same values as you, I am impacted differently by the events, love, gratitude, life. Is this a mistake…? What do you do to understand me…? What do I do to understand you…? (an educational and healthy rhetoric).

…Why do I try so hard to separate myself from you when in essence my values are just as yours and vice-versa…? Maybe you should show me more often that you love me and you have faith in in me since the values I believe in are not yet enough to keep me on the right track.

 Tranlated by Ioan Fechete