by Sainoor Premji Our children are our future – a future that we all want to be replenished with the best possible upbringing, filled with fulfilling happiness, starred with success, secured with safe belongings and replete with awareness about oneself and the surroundings. However, somehow as parents and adults we may unfairly manage to obscure our ‘future’ by ignoring the present condition of our children, in terms of how healthy their mental state is, how stable their feelings are and how balanced their emotions are. When these needs are ignored, our ‘wants’ remain as ‘hopeful wishes’ and we find it very difficult to stand at the bridge that lies between expectation and reality. On one side of the bridge, we could see how much effort has been put from our end in terms of using proper parenting techniques, providing the right support while growing up, listening to the tantrums of the kids, and dealing with them in a sensible manner. As parents, we always tend to study this side of the bridge from the lens of evaluation. The truth however is that evaluation is a highly negative way to look at our children, because in this assessment we weigh our effort against their improvement, our care against their obedience, our love against their affection, and our guidance against the results. More often than not, due to this hardened approach, we find a glaring gap between our expectations and the results. That can lead to unnecessary annoyance, irritation, disagreements, and ultimately serious disobedience from the child’s side. Our beloved children, with their young and malleable minds, will after a point of time become completely immune and irresponsive to our evaluation-based parenting. They simply think that we are incapable of understanding them and as a result, oftentimes from a very young age, they become reserved with us and much more open to their friends. So, on the child’s side of the bridge there lies grave disappointment. Now as parents, we realize what we actually go through – our hectic routine consists of attending to jobs, maintaining social relationships, shouldering responsibilities, meeting deadlines, and committing to some specific duties. In the midst of all this jostling and juggling, it’s really challenging to put complete focus on our children. As a consequence, the nourishment factor from our parenting goes missing and we begin to depend solely on academic progress reports to judge where our children are heading. Again, this is a terrible way to judge a young life with tremendous potential. We cannot evaluate life against lifeless numbers and figures. The fundamental thing to notice in this scenario is that, although we all were children at some point in our lives, nowadays our children are in an age where fairy tales, dragons and superheroes are holding the reigns of the world, thus we cannot teach them how to behave, how to act, how to focus, how to study and how to thrive, using analogies from the world of grown-ups. It’s like mixing oil and water together which results in a terribly dissolved and disjointed solution. As parents, if we expect the same level of maturity, sensibility, and understanding from our kids, we are simply living in la la land. The irony is, this inability to comprehend is the root cause of all our failures. We cannot blame our children for this because as infants and toddlers, they completely depend on us. Therefore, the responsibility of providing a safe and sound environment where the overall consciousness of your child is thriving rests solely on our shoulders. “When I am finding so much difficulty in attending to my kids’ needs and requirements, how will I be able to take care of their mental health, listen to their day-to-day ordeals, and deal with everything in such a time crunch?” The Solution is… |
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