Global Voices Online

The youngest of Serbia's current parents were children themselves when the country was in war just over a decade ago. Many had difficult childhoods and now face problems as parents. Zeljko Markovic, a Serbian blogger, wrote this (SRP) on his B92 blog:

Yesterday, I read in one of Serbian daily that, according to a UNICEF research, more than 70 percent of children in Serbia are brought up the wrong way. Namely, parents use methods of verbal and physical punishment because they don’t know of any other way and they were brought up the same way. These methods have different kinds of consequences on the children's character and their mental development. In the future, we’ll have a generation in Serbia that will be frustrated and that will have lots of social and psychological problems and illnesses.

If today's parents - who were surveyed by the UNICEF - use the same correctional methods which were used by their parents, it would mean that we live in a country with distorted social and psychological values…

Perhaps this is the main reason for all our troubles of the last few years, or maybe these methods of bringing up children are just a condition that made it possible for the people to survive the years of war, crime, corruption and, now, of the primaeval accumulation of the capital.

I think that the UNICEF’s data is very significant, and the government has to exert influence to change the 19th-century methods of raising children for the new models.

It’s time for the new people…

But they form themselves within families…

And families are formed by society…

A comment by Zeljka Buturovic:

Not everything that gets published in newspapers is true. Maybe parents punish children because they are not informed about the new correctional trends, and maybe that is the only way to control them. There is no reason for someone to think that verbal and physical punishment permanently damages a child's personality, except for some extreme cases.

A comment by V. Stojkovic:

The best theoreticians of the classical and modern psychology and pedagogy […] agree it is enough to love your children. There are very good children whose parents have never read a book on children's upbringing. It is not necessary for parents to be experts in upbringing, but it is necessary that parents love their children.

Love your children, no matter what the UNICEF says.