21st century prisoners

Canepa 1
Anel Noelia Canepa Corona
401
26/02/18
David Rivera Revuelta
Children can feel it.
Children can perceive what people feel. If they see someone screaming or shouting they will
know something’s wrong, and if they see someone laughing and smiling they know things
are fine, that there’s nothing to worry about. However, nowadays it is hard to see an adult
laugh. They are busy, worried, they have doubts and preoccupations, and it’s understandable,
the times are difficult, and children know it too because they live in the same environment.
Adults think that they can talk about “adult” problems in front of children because they are
too young to understand, that they won’t pay attention, but they do, when they listen to adult
conversations they can feel what’s the matter. Maybe that is something we should think about.
It is true that some children will not understand, but as in every age, there are people who
understand things and there are people who do not, no matter if they are 5 or 50. It is about
maturity, not age. There are children who will understand when you tell them about topics
like economy, because they are used to hear things like that in their daily life, so they learn.
In Mexico, for example, the economy is not at it’s bests, and is getting worse every day.
People talk about it every time they meet, no matter if children are near and hearing.
In the past, you could go out just by saying “I’ll go to the park and be back by 6 pm”, and
parents would respond “don’t forget your sweater”. Now, you have to tell them a week before
and they will still doubt about letting you go because it is not safe.

Canepa 2
For children or teenagers is harder to go to a park or a friend’s house and as result they just
stay home, doing whatever. Stay home all day, sometimes it’s nice to be at home, but every
day makes them feel like they can’t go out, feel like prisoners.
The only way of communication for them is by message or phone calls. As result, they spend
a lot of time texting with friends, and parents get angry, because when they arrive their kids
are at their phones. Except that they weren’t there to talk to them, so they talked to friends,
because parents were busy working to earn money, money which isn’t still enough.
Adults arrive so exhausted and tired from job they don’t pay much attention to children, and
if they do is to correct them, to ask them why are they still inside their room, and what did
they expect if they didn’t let them go out?
At that age, human being is a communicative being, they can’t live without saying someone
how they feel, what they did, how they passed the day, and asking the same questions to
someone else.
This not only affects their social life, but their school performance as the parents must be the
motivation for the children to keep doing what they’re doing right and improve what’s wrong.
If the parents don’t pay this attention there’s a really small possibility for the kids to know
what’s correct. The students start failing, the problems outside school start increasing, and
parents get mad because their children are doing a mess, though they weren’t there to say
what was a mess and what wasn’t in the first time.
They weren’t there. And every child wants their parents to be there. To be there showing
affect, showing them that they are important, celebrating their victories, comforting their
failures and teaching from them. Every child wants someone who expresses that they care
about them, and if its not parents, someone else will be. This someone else, they can’t see in
person, they talk by technology.

Canepa 3
Why is this? Why not parents? It’s because, again parents must work more to bring money to
the house, and the time they spend working is the lack of time given to children.
Returning to the main topic, after seeing that lack of parents affects emotionally, it can be
concluded that children not only feel something´s wrong; they know it. They have always
been told times were better in the past, but we can’t go back, so they try to do their best to
live in the present, and we have seen that some people succeed, but some others give up in
the attempt.