Just a few days back, I read an article about how modern parenting is getting harder with every passing day. Following section of the article felt like a tight slap of reality check to the confused, cluelessly running around kinda parents like me.
"... Today's parents not only have to rock their career and raise their children, they also have to make sure that their bub eats avocado, scores well, excels in a sport, and knows how to speak at least one foreign language. To top this, parents have to monitor screen-time, keep theirs kids safe online, and work on their emotional growth without losing their own temper as "gentle parenting" is the trend du jour. The stress is not caused by the child or the parent. The stress is caused by the reality not meeting expectations."
My first reaction after reading this section was a big laugh, at myself and at my clan of fellow modern parents. My son is just about to turn 8 now. He did his kindergarten in a very good corporate-brand pre-school. For his primary education, we researched a lot only to enrol him into the branded International Board (IB) accredited school in which most of the kids of our apartment had enrolled. The choice of the pre-school was simpler and easier. The pre-school had a tie-up with my Employer, so we had to pay a nominal fee for a highly-rated, expensive, and a very nicely crafted and likable curriculum. Also, the pre-school's corporate branch was located inside my workplace campus, so we were more reassured of regular checks and immediate attendance to our little bundle of joy whenever he needed us. Logic vs influence debate on our choice of the primary school has been avoided for the good. The reasons for this avoidance may become implicit, maybe by the end of this post.
Apart from the high-rated schooling, my son is blessed (both parentally and financially) to have already enrolled for and having tried to learn following additional skills. We, his modern parents, believed that these would help him achieve more and faster in life:
- Tuition for writing alphabets and numbers, at the age of about 3 yrs.
- Judo, and Art & craft classes, at the age of about 4 yrs.
- Swimming classes, twice at the ages of 5 & 7 yrs.
- Dance classes, at the age of around 6 yrs.
- Public speaking (online), cursive writing, and badminton classes, at 7 yrs.
If I remember correctly, the main reason for the alphabets and numbers tuition was its simple proximity. The tutor lady lived almost next door and was popular for having taught little additional things to a lot of kids in our community. For Judo classes, "modern" parents invited a professional trainer to conduct the classes in our apartment itself, in the initial post-Covid times. Art & craft and the initial swimming classes were subscribed to pass time relatively more productively during the long summer holidays of my son's school. Then, as he crossed the age of 5, we started thinking that he could learn faster owing to his naturally grown-up and improved acumen to follow instructions and grasp things. So we enrolled him at professional training academies for Dance, Swimming, and Badminton, not all together but spread across the calendar year. In between we also realized that he had started speaking very less as compared to his earlier times. Our parental fear was confirmed in one of his Parents Teachers Meeting at school when his teacher told us that he remained quite and was not as active and mischievous as other kids in his class. So we enrolled him into an online public speaking course, in which the trainer used to "simply talk" to our kid, along with other 5-6 kids. Then we developed a fear that though our son writes beautifully in the broken letters form, he might struggle in his exams as we believed that cursive handwriting is faster. We noticed that almost all other kids of his class wrote in cursive form. So we enrolled him into a weekly-twice cursive handwriting class conducted by one of his school's teachers, during post-school hours.
In addition to the above, there have been discussions and trials for Classical Music vocals training, and a piano class. This because we discovered that he's got a natural good voice, he's good at casual singing, and he picked up very fast when I taught 2-3 songs to him via beginner-level piano lessons available on YouTube. Also there have been passing talks amongst the modern parents to enrol our kids to some Bhartiya Sanskriti School, an informal school in a neighbouring apartment that taught kids about the rich Indian culture and history.
I feel fortunate that I got slapped by this recent article. I am lucky that I woke up (hopefully) to see my reality. My son has given me hundreds of reasons to feel happy about in this ongoing journey of my parenthood. There are many moments that I'll cherish throughout my life, and I know there are many more to come. However, when I look back at the aforementioned aspect of my parenting journey, I see the need of a some course correction. Not to say that all of the above mentioned attempts were bad or non-productive, some of them actually helped. Our minds must have had many justifiable reasons at the times when we made these choices.
The most common reason to almost all of these decisions was like - "...how will we identify his natural talent to nurture, without exploring by letting him experience different things...". And of course, we belong to the aware, open-minded, financially stable and thus the fortunate middle-class which can afford the associated costs for exploring the natural talents of our kid.
Taking a cue from the article and looking back at this parental expedition of ours, I feel that our reasons could have held more weight if we were not fretting over some of the basics aspects of our son's development over all these years. He's eight and still struggling to develop a taste, respect, and an acceptable way of eating his regular meals. My wife and I have our roots in Haryana and Punjab, the biggest agricultural states of India having legacies of healthy and rich cuisines. Both of us look naturally "overnutritioned", our son looks otherwise. As mentioned in the article, both of us also have the responsibility of "rocking" our careers and professions, to sustain our "modern" societal tags - "financially stable", "open-minded", "aware" etc. Tired of our failed attempts in his nutritional wellbeing, we have already been giving some popular, well marketed, paediatricians' recommended, elite because expensive, powder based supplements to our son, so that he does not look weak. We do not stop our son from eating deep-fried, processed, made from days-old frozen meat or sourced from not-so-hygienically-verified places non-veg food when he's craving for that just because one of his friends who have shallow influences on him is eating the same at one of our social outings. Here, our reason is our insecurity that eating non-veg might help him become stronger in future. We ignore the sense that "healthy" non-veg is far beyond the general reach of our food's supply chain and it might never find a place in our kitchen. Also, we fear being judged by the influencing friends' parents that though I'm an eggetarian and my wife a passive non-vegetarian, we want to stop our son from eating non-veg and not let him "explore" his tastes. On the possibility of adulteration, they may argue that the lifecycles and supply chain of vegetarian food are also quite adulterated these days.
With all this, he's catching viral fever almost every 45-60 days on an average, for the last 3 years or so if I remember correctly. Here also we bring in a mix of our superficial awareness and "modern" hearsay. The "modern" parents discuss among themselves - "... this flu, which rotates among the family members, is a norm these days...", "... they catch it mostly from other kids in the school...", "...don't medicate him at the beginning, let the body fight naturally and develop immunity...". We let his body fight naturally for 3-5 days and then end up giving him even stronger antibiotics than what he'd have taken at the start of the infection. We defer the visit to the doc until we fail to prove the usefulness of our quackery one more time. And then when the medicines prescribed by the doc bring some improvements within a couple of days, our egoist quack stops the medication as per our will and adopted wisdom. Then a fellow parent tells us about the "harmless" homeopathic medicine. Of course, we can afford that as well and there are no possible sideeffects.
I learnt from a not-so-popular web show that I watched recently. The main protagonist in the show makes a beautiful statement - "... aksar jab hum galti kar rahe hote hain, tab humein pata nahi hota ki hum galti kar rahe hain..." . (When we are committing a mistake we often do not know that we are committing a mistake).
More than 10 years back, I wrote
Take a pause.... Maybe the newspaper article gave me another much needed pause, this time in my parenting journey.
