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Education Plus
Leave them kids alone
- Photo: S. Siva Saravanan
Worrying factor: It is unfortunate that parents enforce strict and unspoken rules on children without their consent.
We were discussing in this column about kids losing their childhood in the rat race. I know a parent who takes his son to tennis coaching before sunrise and after the strenuous session, the boy travels for an hour by bus to go to one of the prestigious schools.
Later, in the evening he attends a music class for an hour and as he returns, the tuition teacher is waiting for him.
His parents believe that they are role model parents, providing ‘every thing’ to him. Maybe ‘yes’.
The parents import Swiss oil to massage his legs, give Complan health drink thrice a day to improve his height, does not allow him to watch TV for fear of his losing concentration on tennis and studies, and send him to summer camps to improve his vocabulary standards.
The boy later became a totally introvert and depressed. Enhancing basic talent is different from forcefully injecting it, to generate a “Our child-other’s envy” baby. Thirst for recognition:
It is unfortunate that we enforce strict and unspoken rules into the life of children without their consent.
A rich family influenced us to give a role to their six-month-old baby in my film, accepting to expose the kid to outdoor heat, arc lights and reflectors, just to boost before their people that she acted with Megastar Chiranjeevi at a tender age. Children are expected to slip into neat little boxes labelled ‘popular’, ‘intelligent’; ‘athletic’ etc and a non-performer is mocked and shunned.
But don’t you think expecting too much from an average child is callous?
For a simple question, “What is Sin è ÷ Cos è?” an intermediate student hesitatingly replied ‘One’.
He was forced to prepare for IIT entrance and his parents mortgaged their house for a lakh rupees to pay for his coaching fees.
He was constantly ridiculed in the class as synonym for ‘stupidity’ that caused him depression.
The over-ambitious parents blame educators, educators blame parents and in turn both blame the media, video games, Internet, cell phones and the cricket culture without realising where the fault lies.
yandamoori @hotmail.com
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