Are your parents controlling?
Maybe they're pointing fingers at every aspect of your life under the guise of "for your own good."
Maybe they use 360 degrees of "concern" without dead ends to force you to breathe.
Parents are instinctive to love and take care of their children, but every child grows up with independence and letting go. How to balance the relationship between the two may be something that every family needs to face.
A story in the fourth season of "Black Mirror" raises questions about parent-child relationships, parenting, and human nature.
(Spoiler alert!
Sara is a cute little girl. She was lost when she was three years old, which inspired her mother's strong desire to protect her.
The mother decided that she must protect her daughter and never let her be harmed by the outside world again. So, mother implanted a chip into Sara's brain through a program called 'Ark Angel'.
With a tablet, Mom can see where Sara is at any time.
Monitor Sara's current physical condition.
See what Sara is seeing right in front of her eyes. Even, you can control what your daughter sees: as long as there is a picture that makes Sara stressful, such as a scene of pornography that is not suitable for children, a mosaic will be automatically displayed in front of her eyes.
Mom chose to turn on this filter function. After that, Sara's vicious dogs and boys fight and bleed in the neighbor's yard. These pictures frighten Sara and cause changes in physiological indicators. After the system detects it, what she sees is a blurred mosaic.
But while the chip brings protection, it also isolates Sara from the possibility of all external dangers. Facing her grandfather who had a stroke and fell down, Sara still saw only a blur, because the sight in front of her made her nervous.
Even after the death of her grandfather, the sad expression on her mother's face became a source of stress for Sara, and she could not see any expression of negative emotions.
But the more you can't see it, the more curious it becomes. Furious and powerless, Sara began to try to pierce her hand with a pencil to see the bleeding.
Sara's act of self-harm shocked her mother. Realizing that things were not right, she took her daughter to see a doctor.
The tests doctors gave Sara showed that her ability to judge basic human emotions was very limited, and she didn't know how to express anger or understand what happened to the people in conflict in the picture.
This reminds me of a lot of ways parents treat their children: they do everything possible to avoid harm, so they wrap their children tightly and keep them out of the world. The strong protective layer makes the child lose the ability to grow armor by himself.
The doctor pointed out the problem. Ark Angel has many technical and ethical problems and has been banned in many areas.
The mother took the doctor's advice, turned off the chip system, and stopped monitoring her daughter.
But Sara, who is used to being protected by filters, does not have the matching risk assessment ability when facing the real world. She is exposed to violent and dangerous environments without knowing anything.
Sara, who had lost her "protective layer", gradually grew up, and the situation did not get better. She had sex with boys without any safety measures. Out of curiosity, he pestered the boy to give her a taste of poison.
And all of this was actually seen by the mother who secretly turned on the monitoring program again because of worry.
At this time, an irreconcilable conflict finally occurred between the mother who was caring for her daughter and the rebellious adolescent child. When Sara found out that her mother was still monitoring her, in a fit of rage, she smashed her mother in the head with the monitoring tablet.
Sara's cruel actions seem crazy and unreasonable, but this also reflects that her stress response is not healthy, because she has never really recognized anger and danger, so she has no concept of the consequences of her actions.
The tablet was smashed, and along with it was the trust and intimacy between mother and daughter.
The irony is that the mother's purpose from beginning to end is to keep her daughter safe, but at the end of the show, Sara runs away from home and randomly picks up a stranger's truck on the highway and goes away with a large Unknown and crisis.
I believe that the original intention of most parents is to hope that they will become good parents, but unfortunately, they do not know what to do, so they can only use the methods within their ability to protect their children.
In the play, a lot of foreshadowing was made to make the mother's desire for protection justifiable: the loss of her daughter, when she gave birth to the child, she thought the child almost died, and she was raised by her father carelessly when she was a child. All of this has become the reason why the mother monitors her daughter, allowing her to break through the boundaries little by little , and eventually lead to tragedy.
The so-called boundary (sense) is to distinguish what is yours and what is mine; what should be controlled and what should not be controlled, and each other only needs to be responsible for their own behavior.
And the parenting style of mothers - known as "helicopter parents" in the United States: hovering over their children's lives like helicopters to monitor, in China they are called "for your own good" parents - wrong is wrong, ignoring the relationship between parents and children He believes that as long as the starting point is good, all means can be used to control children.
Every time my mother secretly peeps and monitors, instead of asking for guidance openly.
For example, after she found out that her daughter was lying and taking drugs, she did not have any direct emotional communication with her throughout the process. Every time she wanted to know her daughter's situation, she never asked in person. "Bad" boys.
All the discipline happens behind the scenes through a chip, which exploits the autonomy of the daughter as an independent individual and makes the boundaries between mother and daughter disappear. Until the last conflict broke out, my mother was still explaining "I just want to protect you, I want you to be well". But the wrong method not only conceals the good intentions, but also leads to the opposite result.
"Black Mirror" can always use a sense of technology and a dystopian shell to package the truth of life more cruelly. Those who are familiar with the "Black Mirror" series may know that most of its stories are tragic, and the tragic core of many of them is : Technology manages what it shouldn't . In this episode, it ignores the physical and psychological development characteristics of children's growth, and technology has lost its sense of boundaries .
It's hard to say who caused the tragedy, in which the mother, the boy, and the girl are all responsible, but the intervention of the 'Ark Angel' chip amplifies the conflict in family parenting and polarizes the solution.
Whether it is love, marriage, or family upbringing, these matters are within the scope of human beings, but they are all controlled by a set of intrusive procedures, which may bring surprises and convenience to people at first, but behind the scenes Problems will eventually surface in shocking or lamenting ways.
Rather than being self-righteous and controlling another person's life, choose to trust your children and their ability to grow up on their own.
"Every day we jump off cliffs with our eyes closed, but this is a soft land."
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