Familia com filhos adolescentes: a perspectiva relacional

[Autom. eng. transl.] In this contribution we focus on the family with adolescents, adopting a relational perspective, which sees the long transition from adolescence to the adult condition as a "joint evolutionary enterprise" that involves both adolescents and their parents and their network of meaningful relationships. Since the adolescent's story is often ambivalently aimed at affirming his autonomy and seeking protection in the family environment, it seems more useful to dwell on the parental side. We can briefly say that the task of parents in this phase is to take care of their children responsibly, where the term care refers to the affective qualities of ties, while the responsibility refers mainly to ethical ones. Specifically, when children are adolescents, responsible care translates into an attitude of "flexible protection" that takes into account the need for dependence still present in the adolescent condition, the need for autonomy and their difficult and changing composition. But parents, when they have adolescent children, also have another task before them towards the previous generation, which expresses itself in the care of the inheritance. Conceiving the child not as a possession-product of the couple, but rather as a new family and social generation makes it possible to further widen the horizon and understand in what sense the educational task of the parents does not end with the growth of their child, but requires more commitment in general to take care of the young generations to whom the children belong. Parental parenting then finds fulfillment in a form of "social generativity", which refers to a wider involvement with the next generation and to the creative contribution to society in general. Only in this way is it possible for the parental relationship to be authentically generative, that is, capable of transmitting the "value" of the family and of the bonds in society.