Who will you save in the event of a fire, a child or a woman?

Author: child and family psychologist Lina Romanova.

Socrates, a great philosopher and a father with many children, as you remember, loved to go out onto the square and ask a difficult question to his contemporaries. One of those questions I have tried to bring to the general discussion these days. This is what came out of it.

It was an ordinary autumn evening. The households were scattered around their rooms. I read Socrates. One question stunned me. He asked, “If there is a fire and you can only save someone, whom will you save your wife or one child?” All the men answered, “Baby, of course.” Socrates said, “I will save my young wife. We will burn together and she will give me more children. And if I save the child, it will be painful for me and for him. His face will always remind me of tragedy. And the child himself will lose his brothers and sisters and his mother, and then he will have a mother-in-law who will not be able to love him as his mother loved him. Of course, the controversy did not last long. I wondered what my husband would answer. Asked, without interrupting the reading, he replied, “Child. Everyone will save the child. He is defenseless and... well, I don’t know, I’ll save everyone, but if one, then a child.” I told him about Socrates. He postponed the newspaper. We talked about this all night. It turned out to be unreally difficult.

In the morning, both went to work, the children to school and kindergarten. I had a busy day, I didn’t remember Socrates. My husband reminded me in the evening, “I thought I would be killed at work today. In the break, after lunch, he talked about Socrates, asked his question to his fellow servants. The answers were obvious. I said that in the evening I answered so, but in the morning I changed my mind, Socrates convinced with his arguments. My husband said he stopped eating. They started screaming and proving, called friends and people approached from other departments. Finally, the women from the accounting office were called, and they too, in one voice, began to say, “Are you mad? A woman can be changed for another. Your child is your blood.” The rescue came in the form of the boss. He discovered the absence of all workers on the ground during working hours, attracted to the voices and dismissed an unauthorized rally.

The husband returned to work and found a retired employee, his co-worker, at the workplace. He did not participate in the dispute, missed lunch because of his hard work, and he was an old man on his ear, not especially at work with whom he communicated. “Why are all orals? Did the prize be cancelled?” the veteran came to rest. “Yes, no, there was a philosophical dispute...” the husband asked him. And the old man was a family man, by the way: with his wife forty years together, three sons, each house built with his own hands, five grandchildren, everyone loves him to visit. The old man thought, "And what, all said the child will choose to save? I would choose my grandmother. Children, they are guests in the family, grow up and fly out of the nest. Yes, they love me, and I visit them. Yes, but each one is a broken crack. And I will die with my grandmother.”

The wisdom of this man was shocking. I thought, maybe that’s why we have so many divorces that we don’t value our family properly. Maybe it’s not our children and it’s not all for them. Maybe everyone will be happy only when parents value each other above all else?

Who would you save in a fire?