By Major General (Ret.) K. H. Konstantinidis
Parents are obliged, by both natural law and written law, to provide for their children’s nourishment, upbringing, and overall care. These responsibilities include ensuring their education and helping them establish themselves professionally until they reach adulthood and are able to stand on their own feet.
Of course, most parents continue to advise their children even when they themselves grow old. However, this is not always appropriate; it often becomes excessive and amounts to interference in their children’s personal lives.
Some children go astray because their parents either neglected them or lacked the ability or the necessary education to guide them properly. Unfortunately, there are also parents who set a bad example through their own behavior.
Every day, we see scenes of shocking violence on our screens: children stabbing one another, kicking one another, and ending up in hospital. Disputes among young people existed in my time as well, but today the phenomenon appears to have escalated into outright brutality.
A child resembles a young sapling that, when bent by the wind, needs a support to help it return to an upright position. Otherwise, there is a risk that one day it will break.
This is the role parents ought to assume. They should maintain an ongoing dialogue with their children, even about the most personal matters, such as their romantic relationships, so that they can support them when they find themselves in difficult situations.
Indifference toward children is not confined to financially disadvantaged families. We also encounter it among affluent parents who, because of their professional commitments, leave their children’s upbringing to others: nannies, tutors, schools, and various other caregivers. Financial comfort cannot replace a parent’s personal presence or parental responsibility.
There are, however, parents who go to the opposite extreme: they overprotect their children to such an extent that they restrict their freedom and stifle their personalities.
Both extremes—neglect and overprotection—are harmful.
In the first case, children risk neglecting their studies and turning to alcohol, uncontrolled partying, idleness, and gambling. In some cases, they may even become involved in criminal organizations, the Mafia, drugs, or prostitution.
In the second case, overprotective parents raise children who lack the will to act independently, depriving them of initiative and self-confidence. They do not allow them to enter society, struggle, test their abilities, face difficulties, or even fail and pick themselves up again.
And yet, it is through trials, failures, and persistent effort that experience is gained. Success achieved through one’s own efforts has particular value because it is a personal accomplishment.
Parents should not turn their children into dependent beings who follow their own footsteps unquestioningly, like faithful little dogs. They should give them room to think, make decisions, assume responsibilities, and chart their own course.
Of course, I do not consider myself an expert capable of offering infallible advice. However, from the experiences of a life spanning almost a century, I have drawn certain conclusions that I share with those who seek my advice online.
Especially in today’s world, with its lightning-fast changes, geopolitical upheavals, and technological frenzy that transforms everything in a very short time, no parent can predict with certainty what their child’s life will look like ten or twenty years from now. Even artificial intelligence would struggle to provide a reliable answer.
CONCLUSION
The duty of parents is not to dictate their children’s future course in advance, but to guide them in such a way that they can chart their own path of development.
Neither abandonment nor suffocating protection. Love, dialogue, guidance, and freedom accompanied by responsibility.
For the true goal of raising children is not to keep them forever beneath our wings, but to help them spread their own wings and fly under their own power—as all creatures in the natural world do.
(18 October 2026)
Major General (Ret.) Konstantinos Konstantinidis
Author – Member of the Society of Greek Authors
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