Is technology ruining the family?
Not all youth problems end in stabbings. But many could be resolved or at least recognised, if the family and the school regained the awareness and authority of what they no longer are. Guiglia 's notebook
Days pass, but not even with a cool head can we find an answer to the reason for the crime in Paderno Dugnano, in the Milan area, on the night of transition from August to September: what could have induced a 17-year-old boy to kill his little brother? 12 while he was sleeping, and then his mother and finally his father? What demon could have tormented, for so long and deeply, the self-confessed criminal and not even an adult to the point of pushing him to kill his entire family with a knife?
“There is no motive”, repeat the investigators who listened to the words of the young murderer with the same disbelief that we still feel when rereading them.
But if of the family, whose name out of respect we prefer not to remember, only the one who killed her with ferocity remains, and who told the investigators through tears that he felt alone, that "he wanted to do it", and that "there he had been thinking for a while”, we will have to look for an explanation. Which will not be legal – the trial will be dedicated to this with the already imaginable expert opinions and counter expert opinions – nor sociological, given that not all the infinite and human conflicts between children and parents and between siblings are resolved by stabbing, fortunately for society and the world . It will be a realistic explanation.
Without claims of truth, we try to delve into family relationships and life relationships as we see them every day. It will not be difficult to agree on the growing lack of communication between fathers and children, who have never in history had better means of communicating.
But the tablet and the mobile phone, which in reality are individual tools sublimated by the selfie, the self-timer that crowns the "I am" in color, have long since taken the place of the most natural dialogues between those who love each other. Even the most banal question that parents should ask their children when they see them again for dinner, as the psychiatrist Paolo Crepet observed, which is never banal: "How are you?". “And if they ask, how many times do they listen to the answer?”, adds Crepet desolately.
Let's be clear, the family's wreck is not the fault of the digital revolution.
But if the tablet acts as a father or brother for kids devoured by loneliness and the anxiety of appearing, nothing other than appearing, this indicates the problem. Like a thermometer, it tells us that there is fever in a virtually non-existent family, and in a school that does not take the responsibility of capturing that malaise.
Not all inconveniences, God forbid, end in stabbings. Not all tablet-dependent kids rotate like satellites in the universe of incommunicability. Beware of generalizing or exaggerating in the attempt to explain the inexplicable massacre, the result of a cosmic and perhaps pathological malaise. But there are several other, albeit minor, youth problems that could be resolved or at least recognised, if the family and the school regained the awareness and authority of what they no longer are.
www.federicoguiglia.com
Published in L'Arena di Verona, Il Giornale di Vicenza, Bresciaoggi and Gazzetta di Mantova
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/delitto-paderno-dugnano-tecnologia-famiglia/ on Sat, 07 Sep 2024 04:58:47 +0000.