The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Just chill, it’s not so bad after all

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 14, 2007
ePaper

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Just chill, it’s not so bad after all

Swathi Shivanand

Aren’t we burdening our children with our ideas of how they must fashion their lives?

Freedom to choose: Parents should recognise the child’s potential and balance their expectation.

BANGALORE: Your kid spends her or his time watching cartoons, is shy and refuses to say hello to people or may be likes to play housie more than study math. Good enough reasons to press the panic button, to take corrective measures to right her “wrong” behaviour? Perhaps counselling?

Umm… like your kid would probably say, chill out folks!

Anxiety over grooming and bringing up the “perfect child” has spawned a multi-million dollar industry across the world, complete with counsellors, self-help books, summer camps and guilty parents.

Are these concerns a figment of our imagination, fed by media messages or are they real issues that need to be addressed?

Padma M. Sarangapani, whose research interests include anthropology of childhood and learning and is a visiting fellow at National Institute of Advanced Studies, seems rather perturbed at the dramatic conclusions drawn about the “children of this generation.”

So aren’t we burdening our children with our ideas of how they must fashion their lives? “Well, every generation does that to the succeeding one. But children usually turn out right,” Dr. Padma states. She further argues that it is in fact a more “liberating environment” as parents of middle-class children are more open and encourage children to take up innovative professions.

Ratnesh Mathur, co-founder of Genie Kids, a child-development-centre based in Bangalore for the last nine years, believes that “the society has become achievement-oriented and that is driving our kids nuts,” but adds in the same breath that the much-reviled peer pressure is actually good for the child.

“It encourages and eggs on the child to do better. But that does not mean parents need to put the child under spotlight. Merely saying that I am OK if you want to be competitive and OK even if you don not want to be can come as a huge relief to the child,” he says.

Dismissing labels such as “brats” and “spoilt children,” often used for kids of this generation, Dr. Mathur says, “Children across the board are merely as normal as you and me. Labels are what we give them.”

Not convinced yet about letting children be?

A legendary thinker once said: “Times are bad, children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.” Perfect you would think for the times we live in, where self-help books are quite the rage and children quite the brats? Aha! Got you: the author is the celebrated Roman Marcus Tullius Cicero who died in 43 B.C.

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