Relationship is everything

How to relate to adolescents? In his latest essay entitled Call me an adult (Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2025, pp. 224, also e-book) the psychologist and psychotherapist Matteo Lancini approaches this complex question by offering us an unexpected reflection in the introduction.

The first pages of the book, in fact, are entitled “ Ogliastra ”. But what does this beautiful area of Sardinia have to do with an essay on the difficult relationships between adults and adolescents? Well, Matteo Lancini explains that he has been a guest of Ogliastra for holidays for more than forty years and that he has been intrigued, like many, by the extraordinary longevity of the inhabitants of the area. A longevity that has been explained in many ways: the particular climate, the diet, a lifestyle more tied to natural rhythms, therefore less stressful. For Lancini – and there are many who think like him – the real secret of the people of Ogliastra is constituted by the sociability and the strength of relationships . In Ogliastra, a community life is led that not only prolongs life, but pushes people to want to prolong their existence as long as possible.

In short, the relationship is everything . This is the central point for Lancini, whether we are talking about Ogliastra longevity, or whether we are addressing the issue of the relationship that we adults want to build with the youngest, with our children, with the boys and girls we meet as teachers or in any profession in contact with adolescents. The relationship is all that a child, a son, a student, a patient needs and it is all that an adult must be able to offer, today more than ever. This means, of course, a relationship based on authenticity, on the real ability to be interested in who the other is and empathize with him or her, starting from their way of being, from their way of interpreting what is happening to them. On the contrary, we must avoid that type of egocentric relationship in which we are too often entangled, a relationship incapable of listening to what our interlocutor has to say, which silences the words and emotions that are too painful and annoying to be welcomed and accepted in an authentic way.

For Lancini, for many adults, it is a matter of operating a real revolution with respect to the dictates of a society where the system of values favors the individual, the expression of oneself to the detriment of authentic listening. A society where too often we expect the other to be authentic, but in our own way so as not to feel inadequate in our role as parents or adults who relate to adolescents. Too often, for the author, we justify our choices by saying to the person in front of us: "We are doing it for your own good" when in fact we do it for ourselves, to feel validated and not have to deal with our weaknesses.

Well, in a society like ours, dissociated, dominated and pervaded by an unprecedented fragility of adult human beings, the only way is to focus on the authenticity of relationships to return to being authoritative and credible points of reference . We must therefore build a relationship model less based on doing and more on staying: we stand still, we listen, we concentrate and pay attention, we stay, even knowing that the teenagers in front of us can tell us about their discomfort, their anger, their fatigue, the absence of friends and prospects. We stay, even if staying means receiving a punch in the stomach, even if the words that boys and girls address to us seem meaningless, hopeless, empty.

As Lancini writes: "True change can only happen if we adults truly listen to our children and students, if we allow their words to penetrate and take root within us, making the plant of being sprout in our belly."

A splendid and tenacious plant like the broom sung by Leopardi in a poem that is not by chance a hymn to solidarity, to humanity, to the hope that despite everything has always been the companion of human beings.