ZORAN RAKOVIC: The Wound Is in the Living Room

We medicate children rather than transforming homes. This essay explores how parenting, trauma, and emotional maturity are the roots of New Zealand’s education failures.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,

which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them,

but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

So wrote Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet, likening the parent to a bow, and the child to an arrow shot forth. It is a vision at once humble and reverent. The parent is not the destination, not the guidepost, not even the archer. The parent is the tensioned wood, drawn and held in place by another force, made firm not to control, but to serve.

Today, New Zealand’s education system is in a state of quiet, unadmitted crisis. International rankings slip gently downward. Literacy and numeracy levels falter. Attendance sags. Our children, when tested, often emerge confused not only about the facts but about their purpose. Educators burn out. Policymakers panic. A flurry of fixes is proposed: reform the curriculum, ban phones, train the teachers, fund the breakfast clubs. All these may help. But all of them start too late.

We have forgotten that the child is not first formed in school. The child is formed in silence, in the gaze of a parent, the rhythm of a home, the unspoken values that wrap around the earliest years like air around lungs. We have forgotten, too, what the Church reminds us of: Gravissimum Educationis, the Declaration on Christian Education from the Second Vatican Council, affirms that “since parents have given children their life, they are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators.”

The State has a role. The school has a role. But the parent is the soil. And in New Zealand, that soil has been eroded.

When we speak of improving education outcomes, we must stop pretending that this is merely a question of teaching strategy or exam format. We must begin to speak, quietly and seriously, about the condition of the modern parent.

What is the parent’s capacity to model curiosity? What is their ability to set limits lovingly? Can they show attention in an age of digital dissociation? Do they sit with their children in wonder or merely transport them between scheduled events? Can they read? Can they reason? Can they regulate their anger, their phones, their spending? Have they been educated, truly educated, not just credentialed? And above all, have they healed from what they were made to endure?

As the writer bell hooks puts it, “to truly love children, we must first be willing to love ourselves into wholeness.” A wounded adult cannot raise a whole child. A distracted adult cannot raise a focused child. A parent who has not wrestled with their past cannot be present in a child’s future.

This is not to shame parents. It is to raise them.

The late Donald Winnicott, a British paediatrician and psychoanalyst, spoke not of perfect parents but of the “good enough” parent: someone present, attuned, and emotionally stable enough to create a holding environment in which a child can risk exploring the world. Winnicott did not speak of exam scores or literacy benchmarks.

He spoke of the quiet architecture of the soul. For Winnicott, a parent’s emotional maturity was the scaffolding within which a child’s identity could grow.

And that scaffolding, in New Zealand, is cracking.

Jean Piaget taught us that children pass through stages of cognitive development, each with its own internal logic. But what is often missed is that it is the adult who must adapt to the child’s level, not the other way around. A parent who is unaware of these developmental needs may unwittingly demand rationality from a toddler or infantilise a teenager. Education begins with attention. And attention begins with humility.

Murray Bowen, the pioneer of family systems theory, noted that anxiety and emotional dysfunction are passed down intergenerationally not just through genetics, but through patterns of behaviour and reactivity. If a parent cannot self-regulate, their child may absorb the parent’s chaos as their own. Teachers, then, are not just contending with children, they are contending with the children of wounded adults, carrying silent burdens into the classroom. No syllabus can remedy that.

Viktor Frankl, writing from the crucible of suffering, said that what man needs is not a tensionless state but “the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.” If we want our children to be purposeful, we must offer them parents who are not adrift in entertainment, nor sunk in bitterness, nor numbed by resignation. We must offer them parents who have a story to tell, a story of meaning.

And yet we do not prepare parents. We offer them no rite of passage, no civic catechism, no ongoing education. We assume that parental instincts will be enough. But instincts are not sufficient in a world of relentless distraction, economic pressure, and cultural fragmentation. To raise a child today requires not only love, but skill. And we do not teach the skills.

Gabor Maté, writing on trauma and parenting, states clearly: “It is not the child’s difficult behaviour that is the problem: it is our lack of understanding of its source, and our lack of awareness of our own unresolved issues.” Maté points out that many of the diagnoses we slap on children are actually reflections of a social disorder: a society that has lost its patience, its empathy, and its rootedness. We medicate children rather than transforming homes.

Carl Jung, more poet than psychologist, warned us that “the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of a parent.” What the parent represses, the child inherits. What the parent fears, the child avoids. What the parent resents, the child absorbs. If the parent never pursued their dreams, never processed their grief, never asked why they live as they do, then the child becomes the repository of those ghosts.

And yet we hold teachers responsible.

We train them, audit them, regulate them. But the parent remains invisible. We scold schools for their failure to inspire, but we forget that no school can compete with the power of example. If a child never sees their parent read a book, why would they treasure literacy? If a child never hears a parent ask meaningful questions, why would they believe that inquiry matters? If the television, the iPad, and the phone are the dominant companions in a household, the school becomes an alien planet.

Alfred Adler, early pioneer of individual psychology, believed that all children strive for belonging and significance. These two needs are met not with expensive toys or advanced classes but through connection and contribution. And these, Adler insists, begin in the family. “A misbehaving child,” he wrote, “is a discouraged child.” Discouragement often begins when the parent has been discouraged themselves, never affirmed, never seen, never healed.

Maria Montessori saw this too. She wrote that the adult must prepare not the child, but themselves. “The real preparation for education,” she said, “is the study of one’s self.” Her vision of the parent and teacher is not of a commander but of a gardener, someone who prepares the environment, protects it, but does not dictate how the plant should grow.

And yet in our public discourse, we rarely speak of parents this way.

We speak of them as clients, taxpayers, or voters. We speak of their rights. We speak of choice: school choice, funding choice, curriculum choice. But we do not speak of duty. We do not speak of formation. We do not ask: what does it take to be a parent capable of shaping a citizen?

In Gravissimum Educationis, the Church offers us a luminous path. It speaks not of standardised testing or funding formulas. It reminds us that “the role of parents in education is of such importance that it is almost impossible to provide an adequate substitute.” It does not say the parent is the only educator. It does not say schools do not matter. It says that without the parent’s active participation, the entire structure is precarious.

And if the parent is primary, then our national conversation must change.

We must begin to ask: what are we doing to form parents in wisdom, not just in survival? What spaces do we offer for fathers to grow in patience, or mothers to recover joy? What libraries, what evenings, what silence do we allow? What stories do we tell about parenthood, not as obligation or burden, but as vocation and privilege?

We may need education not just in parenting techniques but in healing family systems, developing emotional maturity, practising intellectual humility, and cultivating moral clarity. These are not lessons for the child. These are for the bow.

A bent bow cannot send the arrow far.

There is a great temptation to speak only of systems and policies. Of budgets and outcomes. Of NCEA revisions and Year 10 retention rates. But in truth, these are all ripples in a deeper river. If the adult is fractured, the child cannot be whole. If the adult is shallow, the child cannot be deep. If the adult is rootless, the child cannot climb.

We must tend to the root.

The great lie of our age is that education is a service purchased by the State and delivered by professionals. In truth, it is a generational covenant, begun in the silence of the home, made visible in the classroom, and fulfilled only in the life the child one day leads. It is not a transaction. It is a transmission.

And what we do not have, we cannot give.

So, before we call for education reform, let us call first for a revival of parental dignity. Let us ask not only what the child needs, but what the parent must become. Let us speak again of the parent as the child’s first philosopher, first poet, first priest. Let us offer spaces, language, and hope for parents who were never raised well themselves.

To reform the child, reform the parent. To improve education, improve the home. To straighten the arrow, tend to the bow.

For truly, the house of tomorrow cannot be visited even in our dreams. But we are still, for a brief and precious moment, the door. Let us stand open.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand. His substack is HERE