PARENTING: A SKILL

Every dream of a parent is for their children to listen to them and talk to them about everything. This was the case back when there were plenty of children in one home, and there was a role for every child. One was studious, one was helpful, one was naughty but cute, one was the troublemaker, one was the leader and to manage them all, there was the eldest. Those days are long gone now. In India, we don’t know whether we have an unspoken “one child policy”, but the recent years has only seen nuclear families grow.

We might think that having one or two children would be easy instead of having 8 or 10. But children are children, and given the recent technologies, they are drifting far away from having real relationship with their parents.

Parents find it difficult to know what is going on in the children’s mind and what they might need. Western influence plays a very important in the current scenario. The practice of giving them a separate room, having minimum intervention in their life does not work in an orthodox country like India. Children, though expect, the same treatment as west, because they had been cocooned for so long.

There has been so many cases where the argument between children and parents go as far as to going to counselling and a third person intervention because there is no trust between each other. There can be many reasons for the tiff, but some of them can be predicted.

The world is not as it was before, we can’t believe any person enough to send our children alone to the market or the shop. Parents having one or two children are afraid of letting them out alone. This might work, until the children start thinking for themselves and understand that they are being restricted. They demand to go out along, have fun with their friends, go shopping and be independent overall.

This is where the argument begins. It is not that the parents don’t believe in their kids, it is just they are afraid of the world. Teenagers being themselves don’t want any of them to control them and they want to be “cool” before their friends. This might cause a misunderstanding. They cannot easily understand the parent’s real concern and just think that they are being left out.

The best way is to sit and have a conversation. Both sides needs to talk out what they are feeling and come to a common ground and some arrangements. Almost all of the teenage “problems” that parents say can be solved through conversation. Kids need someone to talk to freely and if it is their parents, then well and good. Some parents maintain their ego, not all parents though, and wait for the kids to talk to them first and fail to understand that teenage kids are uncomfortable in sharing their feelings in fear that they might be judged.

It isn’t all about teenage kids though. Even parents of toddlers try so much to give their kids everything, compete with the society that they forget what their child really need. No one can blame them too, because they are expected to be portrayed like that and if not they’re not good parents. All the parents need to remember that as far as they tend to the needs of the children sufficiently and the children prosper under their care, they are doing a good job, and there is no such thing as a “bad” parent if you’re trying hard. Good luck!!