What did the guys from ‘Amici’ tell you? “I found a lot of interest in them. They told me that during Covid they saw darkness ahead, a sort of wall and…”. So Francesco Vaia, director of the National Institute for Infectious Diseases (Inmi) Spallanzani in Rome tells ‘Libero’ about his experience as a guest on the show ‘Amici’. Excuse me: we’ve all seen that a bit, don’t you think? “Of course, but the pandemic has exacerbated the concerns of the youngest. It is as if sociality had been taken away from them. The lockdowns, the prolonged closures, the Dad, all that time spent in front of a screen,” notes Vaia. We often put them on ourselves: “You stay on the computer for a while while I do my own thing. It didn’t help”, he continues.
There were social networks, though. We weren’t locked up on a desert island…”It’s true and social networks are very important, but if used well. Sometimes it’s as if our kids live ‘on-life’. You know the expression”, recalls the director . Between reality and virtual? “Exactly. Sometimes they don’t know if they are in or out of life, it’s as if they were talking to their avatar – he underlines – Like those who push the car at very high speed… Well, for them it’s like being in a video game. I I’m not saying – he adds that the computer is not important, on the contrary. But we need to encourage young people to live, to encounter each other. If you take that away from them, you take away the most important thing they have”.
Why is it in adolescence that one forms? “In reality, today we train from twelve years of age and older. Kids – Vaia replies – want to feel more adults and are even starting to mimic the vices of adults. Like smoking or alcohol. All things which, unfortunately, have increased. But allow me: it’s not a question of judging them, nor of having the pretension of directing them. We need to listen to them. Too often we point the finger: ‘But look at them, they grow badly’. It’s our fault. For two years we kept them locked up in the house”. There was also a need, at least in 2020. She explained it to us too, years ago. “Sure. It’s the opposite. They told me they wanted to go back to class, they wanted to be with their friends. I mean, they wanted perspective. That’s what we have to give them.”
I play devil’s advocate. I’m not quite Methuselah, but twenty years ago there wasn’t all this attention for teenagers. Your grandmother, your mother would tell you: ‘Wake up!’. And she ended there. Aren’t we exaggerating a bit now? “No. It’s a question that has left itself gangrenous. And it’s not even that before there wasn’t so much attention, perhaps we thought of something else – Vaia replies – But we are responsible, who have built generations that have increasingly distanced themselves from reality Do you think it’s fair that one sits at the table and is always on the cell phone? Ah, don’t tell me about it. I’ll change the table… It means that there’s no attention paid to whoever is having dinner with you. This too means getting used to healthy lifestyles. Then there is the medical aspect, more specific”. That is? “Hypertension, diabetes, obesity… Do you remember Sars-Cov-2? Those who paid the most were the most fragile people And those are the typical pathologies of unhealthy lifestyles,” he notes.
By the way: Covid and guys, what weighed the most? “For them it was not the disease that fortunately affected them much less. The lockdowns weighed above all on them, with the fear of the unknown and catastrophism”, remarked Vaia. Did they think about the end of the world? “There were those who said: ‘Oh God we’re all going to die’. It was a great stress test on the youth population: the kids were afraid, outside their room there were people who were dying, the TVs showed the images of trucks full of coffins in Bergamo, there was the daily count of the dead…”, he recalls. There was also fear for grandparents, those who had one weren’t calm. Did it affect? “More. There was guilt, another very serious thing. At one point there was the warning that ‘if you go out then you come back home and infect your grandfather who dies’. How can you think that a generation can grow up happy if you are felt guilty,” she concludes.
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