Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
OOPs, stay off your kids
|
Are we stifling our children with too much care, asks BAGESHREE S.
|
Photo: Reuters
SLOW AND STEADY Overzealous parenting interferes with a child's ability for decision-making, independent thought, problem-solving and evaluation. Are we allowing our children to learn and grow at their own pace?
Mamas and papas in Japan are sending their children to school in knife-proof uniforms. They carry bags equipped with global position system (GPS), the same kind used by U.S. military to ensure that their cadre can be tracked all the time. All this, we learn, is to keep their precious ones "safe".
Before you dismiss it as yet another trait of the rich — paranoid about everything from wet nappies to weapons of mass destruction — time you looked around your own desi ambiance closely. OK, we aren't buying knife-proof clothes yet, but a curious breed of parents who count the child's sneezes and burps and report to the paediatrician if it exceeds "normal levels" is for sure going through a population explosion.
Parents as cheerleaders
Yours truly was in the good company of this breed at a workshop meant to enhance several things in children — from creativity to physical fitness — in two hours flat. But the workshop venue was an irresistible temptation to even a sceptic adult: a sprawling bookshop that allows unlimited browsing.
If you thought parents would seize this rare opportunity and run off to spend two blissful hours among books after depositing their children in the workshop area, you got it all wrong. Most of them stood around like cheerleaders and egged their kids on — in this case, to loosen up, let go, and be themselves! And when the mamas and papas finally did move, they headed for the section on books on parenting.
Eash Hoskote, a paediatrician, has seen this phenomenon from up close. And such parents (an American columnist coins a handy acronym for them — OOPs, short for Obsessive Oppressive Parents) could disturb a child's normal developmental process. He gives the example of a little girl who always stood carefully away from puddles of water and heaps of sand, unlike most children her age. He later learnt that she had a mother whose obsession was protecting her daughter from infections.
This, Dr. Hoskote says, happens more among parents with "precious children". Giving the example a 40-something couple who had adopted a child after all medical remedies, gods and godmen failed them, he predicts that the OOPs population is bound to rise with the increase in nuclear families with single children in urban centres.
Shoba Srinath, Head of the Department of Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) who also heads the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Unit there, agrees that "over-involved parenting style" is largely an urban, upper-middle class phenomenon. Uma Hirisave, Additional Professor in the Department of Clinical Psychology and a consultant at the unit, adds that "role stress" has seen a phenomenal rise in the last 20 years, as joint families — where hordes of aunts and elder siblings looked after younger children — are fast disappearing. A highly competitive world, coupled with parents who have more money than time, adds to parental stress and anxiety. It could be more acute if they are reacting to the way they themselves were parented, with "my child should get what I didn't" being an overriding factor, says Dr. Shoba. So they clamour to give their child "the best" of everything.
Needless to say the parents expect "the best" from the child (be it in terms her emotional bonding with them or her academic performance) in return of all "bests" they have showered on her. Both Dr. Shoba and Dr. Uma would like to underline that overzealous parenting can also interfere with a child's ability for decision-making, independent thought, problem-solving and evaluation. The exact manner in which a child reacts, though, depends much on the child's personality. A child placid by nature, for instance, would react very differently from one that is boisterous. A child obedient in the earlier years might even turn rebellious during adolescence.
Is there some way one can guard against turning into an OOP? Taking a few leaps back in years and returning to the joint family system isn't practical, as Dr. Hoskote points out. But what we could do, says Dr. Shoba, is to "introspect our parenting styles". Adds Dr. Uma: "We advise parents to relax. They are often not giving a child opportunities to learn in their anxiety that they might do something wrong." It's equally important, Dr. Uma says, to rethink the whole system that drives parents towards over-involvement. Take, for instance, the projects children are expected to do in high-end schools. "They are so complex and driven by such a sense of competition that children end up taking more than `help' from parents!"
She contrasts it to a small exercise that the late Shivarama Karanth, the Jnanpith Award-winning Kannada writer who experimented with and wrote about just everything under the sun, gave a set of young students. He writes in his essay Shikshana matu Naanu (Education and I) that he set a group of children free in village and asked them to get him various colours of soil. Says Dr. Uma: "He writes that some children came back with 20-odd colours of soil, surprising even him." Children are unlikely to have been as enterprising if parent had been following them, offering helpful hints. As Tim Gill, in his article in The Guardian says, if there's one thing today's children desperately need, it's some "benign neglect".
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
|
