Il figlio perfetto
L’ossessivo progetto del bambino speciale

by Paolo Sarti e Giuseppe Sparnacci

Today many couples have decided to have their first and often only child much later in life. This child is born not to guarantee parents a memory of the inexorable passage of time, but to stop time altogether. Therefore, he or she must be the perfect child, someone special who represents and makes his or her parents equally unique and special. Paolo Sarti and Giuseppe Sparnacci expertly and intuitively pillory the invasive manias of the ‘modern’ parent and the clumsy attempts to mould and construct the child’s improbable future success of a child from the day he or she is born. These efforts are regularly destined to fail or make the child unhappy. In this bizarre and tragicomic overview, we find parents who rely on obsolete tests to calculate their child’s IQ, but without understanding the multiform and relational nature of intelligence per se; parents who insist on establishing a relationship with their child even during gestation, on a level inconceivable for a foetus; parents who consider birth a traumatic event and plan delivery with the hope of ‘protecting’ their child. Then there is the superciliousness of those who burden their child with expectations, starting with the choice of a name that will set him or her apart from the ‘group’, educational games designed to augment the child’s intellectual capacities (whereas games should help children consolidate their relationship with the world and themselves), and ‘suitable’ teachers (culminating with the highly debatable practice of home schooling). This spiral leads parents to consider their children as special and ‘tough’, but in reality they have not been brought up properly. The fact that they are untameable is due simply to failure to deal with frustrations, limitations and difficulties (in short, life), from which their parents attempted to shield them.