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The News - Novedades Editores - Mexico City
2 de mayo de 1999
©1999: Suzanne Cane y Olvera

WHERE ARE THE PARENTS?

In Mexico, you know where they are.

Would you take a job, do all the work, test it to see that everything is working well - and then quit before getting paid?

Sounds odd, doesn't it? But from my vantage point in Mexico City, parents in the United States seem to be doing it on a regular basis. They go through all the hard work - the dirt, the fights over homework, the expense, the nastiness of the teenage years - and, then, just as the child is capable of holding an intelligent, adult conversation, they ship him off to college knowing that he will probably never live at home again.

Once, on a trip to the United States, I found myself chatting with an American woman as we stood on line for a boat ride on the Mississippi. She could not understand why in the world I would have two of my twenty-something kids still living at home and be happy about it.

"Eighteen and out they go!" she exclaimed. I could not understand why she had bothered having children at all. She certainly seemed in a hurry to get rid of them.
I have heard this kind of thing from many Americans - from both the parents and the children who seem to understand that that is life's unalterable plan.

In Mexico City, unless you send your children to universities abroad, they continue to live at home and commute to school. Mexican kids seem very comfortable with the arrangement, and the parents are happy to see their child-raising efforts bear fruit. Middle-class Mexican parents seem to be in no hurry to see their children leave.

In the United States, many kids seem to be left to their own devices by the time they turn thirteen. Many American parents seem to assume that, by that age, their kids can handle themselves. Perhaps, that is why fourteen-year-old American girls look so grown up and sound so experienced. Perhaps, it explains the importance of peers in the teen's life and decisions.

Some American parents even seem to be afraid of their children. "You have to be very careful these days with what you say to your kid," one American man once told me. "You never know if he might go out and shoot himself."

No discipline or guidance can grow out of such fear, and not much good can come out of a lack of discipline and guidance. I have seen American teenagers slam doors in their parents' faces and swear at them, and I have seen the parents do nothing in response.

That would not happen had these children be taught the basics of decent human behavior at an early age. In Mexico they are.

Breaking bread has always been a key to human relationships. In the United States, many families do not do that. It is not unusual for the different family members to get home at different times, heat something in the microwave and eat in front of the TV. So much for communication and family life.

In Mexico, the family eats dinner together. The big meal occurs in the middle of the day, and the family sits at the table. Parents and children talk to each other. They share experiences and ideas and feelings. The parents get a good idea of what is going on in their children's lives, and the children cannot help but know that their parents care.

Dinner on Sunday might be a larger, more complicated affair as the extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, gets together. The children have the opportunity to develop a sense of family and belonging from a very early age. They feel very much a part of the family group, and they do not count the minutes until they can pick up and go off with their friends. It is simply not done. By an early age, children have learned manners, and they are polite to adults. They know how to handle social situations. What is interesting is that even children who do not grow up within such an extended family tend pick up the same habits from their friends who do.

Another factor that helps to keep the family together is that there is almost always someone present in the Mexico home.

In the United States, when both parents work, the children come home from school to an empty house. In Mexico, when both parents work, the children come home from school to a house with a maid in it.

It may not seem very important, but it is. Maids are an integral part of the middle-class, Mexican household, and they are much more than cleaning women. They take care of the children, and, even when the children are old enough to feed and dress themselves, the maid functions as a witness and a conscience. It is very common to hear a maid tell a child, "I will tell your mother." She will also play an active role in teaching the children respect and manners. When they break the rules, it is common to hear the maid remind the child of his duty to his parents. Many Mexican maids use guilt and shame with the pizzazz of an old-fashioned Jewish mother.

As I watch the reports on the horrors of Littleton, I have to wonder what ever happened to guilt and shame - and to discipline and accountability.

If a person's dog bites the neighbor, the likelihood is that the neighbor will sue him. Might it not be a good idea to hold parents accountable to an extent for their children's crimes as well? As it stands, no one seems to be held accountable - not the parents, not violent TV programs, or violent movies, or violent music, or violent video games. Isn't anyone watching the store?

People tend to do what they have to do. Would it be so terrible to force people to look after their families? To communicate with them? To learn what they are about? To teach them to be respectful, caring people. To teach them to think about whom they might be hurting with their actions?

Indeed, if parents don't do it, who will?

We hear a lot about kids who "fall through the cracks", but it is easy to lose track of them in an American high school. The school is large, and there are different classmates for each subject. An American teenager can go through high school without anyone realizing he is even there. The United States can be a very lonely place.

Mexican preparatorias are different. The class stays together for all of its subjects. The system may not encourage a sense of independence, but every child has a place to be and a group to be with. The cracks become too narrow for him to fall through them.

Money - or the lack of it - also plays a part.

In the old days, kids did not have the economic power and freedom they have today. In Mexico, they still don't! The parents'salaries are not what they are in the United States, and their children do not have the after-school jobs that so many American teens do. Jobs are hard to come by, and, even if they weren't, middle-class, Mexican families do not let their children work. It is part of the family thing.
They let their children be children.

In a way, this constitutes a good case for poverty! Mexican kids simply cannot afford guns, not that they would be able to buy them anyway. Gun control laws in Mexico are very strict. Guns exist but only on the black market, and that makes for a high degree of control right there. Gun shows and gun shops do not exist - except in American movies and on American news broadcasts!

Yes, there are many difficulties involved in living in Mexico. Newspapers never run out of material. But, in spite of the smog and forever-uncertain economy and the street crime that has developed since the crash of 1994, there are enough reasons to make people like me glad that they raised their children here.