Parenting is not same for all the parents

By – M.R. Lalu
Parenting in India has always been a great tradition. A route map drawn for the kids through good virtues and practices. Indian families have always been structurally strong and well fastened with all the members contributing to the welfare of the kids. Joint families to nuclear families, our journey has been consistent and evolutionary. Parents in most of the Indian families prefer to have one or maximum two kids these days. Fifty years ago, we were a society with more than six children playing in the courtyard of almost every Indian family. Parenting has always been a subject of discourse by academia and there were researches on ways to better parenting in societies across the globe time and again. This is mainly due to the changes that take place in a world of innovations and inventions and challenges. Involvement by the parents in the life of children was seen to be an effort to strengthen their aptitude to conduct themselves as a good social being. Unbiased care, compassionate attention, valuable guidance and firm protection are what parenting is basically built on; the necessary nourishment of a sapling to grow into a huge, gigantic tree. With a strong family structure that existed for generations, Indian parenting was an example for the rest of the world. Though economically backward, families in the villages still firmly hold on to values that they believe are true and essential. Passing them from generation to generation they preserved.    We are a country of diverse traditions and every tradition offers different ways of upbringing with variety of practices and customs. When a child is born, the first connection that he establishes is with his mother and mothers are regarded with great respect.
What makes parenting a challenging task? Mostly the parents of today struggle to find ways to guide their children through the advancement of a digital age. The present generation of kids are completely unaware of the difficulties that the generation of their parents faced in the process of growing up. Parents, stepping into modernity with smartphones and social media, find parenting a more challenging task today than it was 40 years ago. Majority of parents in developed countries feel it as a tough and unfulfilled task. Conclusions of surveys reveal that a significant number of parents find no time to systematically guide their children due to personal preoccupations or digital involvement. Number of parents regretting not being productive to their kids due to busy personal schedules is increasing. Most of the parents live with a generalized sense of anxiety around their lovely kids. Though India has traditional value systems, slowly it is making a shift in the direction of modernity as what the western countries have already been to. Increasing number of broken families, the world over, societies are facing complex parental problems that are inevitable and unsolvable. In India too higgledy-piggledy family relationships with disruptive parenting is gaining momentum, but comparatively in a slow pace. Values that cement relationships in families become nonexistent. A meaningful parent child relationship is the foundation of the building of life of every child. Diverse practices rooting in the same value system, India has traditionally been giving importance to strengthen the families.
From instilling vitalizing values to help them fix a better career choice to everything, parents ensure their interference. Affluence enjoyed at a young age should not distract the child from learning the essential human values such as love, compassion and honesty. Some surveys reveal the fact that lower income parents with school going children are more susceptible as they have less options to manage their kids at home than the affluent parents with affordable after school activities for their kids. In the villages, kids after school, find recreational games to spend their time, as availability of digital devices is less in comparison with urban areas. Deteriorating family atmosphere normally leads the children to various behavioral anomalies. Giving too much freedom to children can be harmful as it is the case with setting up an overprotective environment.  Despite being busy, it is important for the parents to identify their responsibility in the total upbringing of their children. Forceful guidance and consistent interference may not help the child to make his own positive propositions on education and life. Therefore, too much aggressive involvement in children’s affairs may turn things topsy turvy. Whereas, frequent interaction with the teachers on the child’s behavioral and academic improvement is necessary.
Parents must ensure that they are enabling their kids to cope up with a world of technical advancement creatively. Happy family life leads to happy parenting or vice versa. According to some surveys, parents from more than a dozen countries prefer to keep happiness as their ultimate objective. However, for most of the Indian parents, happiness was one of the goals that they thought was important. To tolerate disobedience is what most of the parents find difficult. Since every child is different in intelligence and understanding, comparing one child with the other on intelligence lines is unnecessary. Can a child be judged based on his classroom performance? The answer is no. A child in himself, is a world of tremendous potentialities and he is a compendium of unexplored intellectual possibilities. Therefore, judgement of any kind on the efficiency of a child will be indefensible. Parents usually become judgmental mainly because of their poor analysis of children’s intelligence. To define success by their perceived standards and enforcing it on their children, to persevere for what the parent thought was right, would bring undesirable outcomes. Taking decisions on behalf of children is good. But parents should make adequate consultations with children with regard to their interest of pursuit, if not, such parental interventions may backfire in future. Every child is born with a special purpose to fulfill. Parents need to accept their children as what they are. Everybody is supposed to look at the world from different angles. Therefore, to give an instruction on what to do and what not to do to a teenager should be done after mature thinking. When it comes to collective responsibility, both father and mother in consultation with the teachers can bring about creative positive changes in the lives of the children.