Dear Sir,
I have registered my thoughts in reply to this, in 'kavithai' form, captioned 'vaarisugaLaik kaappOm'....(1 - 4)
Awaiting your comments, please. :typing:
Regards,
Raji Ram
Dear Raji,
thank you for your lovely verse, which tamil poorling like me, can only graze the beauty of this work. But then one need not be an artist to appreciate ‘Mona Lisa’, right?
It is said here in Canada, that parents start losing their influence on their children the minute they leave home to interact with the society. For most this can be assumed to be 6 years which is the school starting age, but for a significant number, it could be as little as 2 ½ when the daycare regimen begins.
Over the pre school years, I have seen my children coming from daycare, with good habits, intially focussed on certain types of hygiene, which we made slight at home. For example the habit of washing hands constantly, which resulted in the paper tissues being consumed at an alarming rate in our house. This is perhaps the simplest and most noncontroversial example of an outside influence on a young child. the list is indeed long and some of the inculcated values from daycare or school or friends, very questionable.
As the child progresses in school, more and influences are exposed and in the society where I live, it is accepted that by 16 the parental influence is zilch. Zero. Nada. Cipher. I would sometimes think, that this threshold age could be even 13 or 14, when the children reach the puberty stage, and start perhaps for the first time to ‘hide’ their thoughts and actions from the grownups.
The most difficult years for parents are the late teens onwards and this probably goes on, depending on the situation to about mid twenties, when the bonding process starts again, albeit somewhat shakily at first.
By this time, the children are adults, on their final cusp of studies or starting their career. The parents are tired of admonishments, worry and probably start ‘listening’ to their kids. This is a friends making process, getting to know each other as adults, with perhaps a deep held feeling that can burst out into squeels of joy or anger, depending on how much of the teen angst has been held back.
So given this as the general situation, how do we as parents can improve the odds of raising a well adjusted child. By well adjusted, I would like to think of a child, who is at peace with the society, can accept the ills and good in which she or he lives, able to steer through it with confidence and in turn, turn to a responsible and loving parent at the right time.
The situation is very difficult for our generation, though my role in raising children is now at the fag end. In order to prescribe rules, the parents need to know the society. Where folks like me are immigrants, we are strangers to the culture where we have chosen to raise our children. I figure the situation in india, though unlike that of the west, still poses a challenge, due the even faster pace of change in the Indian society.
You talk of internet, television, alcohol, and how managing the consumption of these by the parents would set an example and in turn this would turn to ‘respect’. I would presume the final end product would be one well brought up morally upright child, holding on to the morals and values passed down through the ages. I wish only it would be simple as that.
I think, the parents of today do not quite ‘know’ the sum total of the society in which they live. Or comfortable with it. This, I think, is not only due to the fast paced change, but also incursions of values and propagations of thoughts, which might be in direct conflict to one’s practices, and yet one is unable to control or restrict the flow of the same to one’s child or ward.
Periyar was banned in my house. All I need to, was to go to the street corner to hear his views. This was back in the 1960s. today, all one had to do, is to click a few buttons, and the entire periyar library has visited your home, unknown to you and probably will visit your home without your permission regularly, if your child so choses.
So you see raji, I think the parents of today, have severe handicaps – they themselves have issues to keep up with fast changing societal mores, and along with, unable to control the flow of ideas and thoughts, to their children.
Parents might come up with various ammunition to thwart these unwarranted invaders – one could be by banning alcohol, limiting TV or monitoring every website the child visits. A heavy dose of religious thought and practice, it is to be hoped, will also ensure that the child will only chose the straight and narrow path of virtue, as defined by the parent.
Will this work? I am not so sure. Some of the most confused youth that I have seen, have come from very strict and morally upright households. The more the stricture, the more it appears that they have problems adjusting to the society outside. The trick perhaps maybe is to find the right balance of the various tools that the parents can choose to effectively output a well balanced child.
If I knew how this could be done, I probably would have written a book and made a few millions myself. So, I have to confess that I do not know the right answer. I doubt whether there could be a ‘right’ single answer. probably, one could come up with a broad range of guidelines which may guide the parent and the child towards a mutually binding agreement, based on a mutually acceptable outcome.
I think all parents are flawed. Because as humans we are flawed and not one of us is perfect. That perfection we leave it to God. Children are quick to detect the flaws that define the parent. I am not talking of once a year whitewashing of rituals like avani avittam, but mundane acts on a day to day basis where our behaviour deviates from an ideal that we tend to preach, be it refusing a beggar or skipping a queue in a temple or bus stand. I think all of this forms in the mind of the child of a parent who follows a certain set of rules, with flaws and mistakes.
It may be the best for the parents to acknowledge their mistakes and flaws to their children,
the level and extent depending on the age and maturity of the child. For example, you do not confess an extra marital affair to a teenager, whereas it may be appropriate to a son or daughter about to get married. In the former instance, this might seem as a licence to imitate the parental behaviour, whereas in the latter, it may be heeded as timely caution and a reinforcement to the soon t o be committed marriage vows.
The biggest gift that a parent can earn from a child is the gift of intimacy. At each age as the child grows up, its definition and needs from a friend changes. This is probably the reason that as we grow, our friendship group changes – we grow out of some and seek others. So you can imagine how difficult it is for a parent to be contantly regarded by the child as an intimate. The parent has to metamorph insync with the child, and to most of us, busy as we are with an overburdened daily routine, to make the effort and successfully at that, to be the child’s best friend, may nigh well be an impossibility if not ifprobable, because we just plainly do not have the skillsets to entertain the various stages of our children, no matter how hard we try.
All we can do, is to define, what we hope, is a broad framework of criteria (I do not want to use the word ‘rules’) , which we hope will satisfy the emerging wants of a tween through teens to the twenties, constantly fine tuning it to fill the requirement of the particular age group. This is not easy, for parents will always be pushed to relax the guidelines, if not just scoffed at the very thought of ‘parental control’. The children always want to bend, if not necessarily break the ‘barrier’. Is it not at this instance, that we raise our voices, our canes and all the parental tools at our disposal, to ‘punish’ the miscreant. Do we ever wonder that we might be the root cause of the truancy? Probably not.
Raji, you might think that I am painting the parents and parenthood in black. Children do not come into this world of their own accord. They arrive here through the deliberate actions of their parents and give the parents sufficient warning and a fixed timeframe to prepare themselves for what probably is the most challenging role in their lives. Yet how many of us give a thought to preparing ourselves as parents – how to dispense with love, affection, hugs, warmth and above all how to earn that most elusive of all the gifts that a child could bestow, ie ‘their trust’.
I am yet to find a child who trusts her or his parent absolutely. They would anyday trust a friend more than their parent. Can we simply dismiss this as the act of a wayward seed?
Raji, I think, to bring a ‘well adjusted’ child must be the goal of every parent. For it is important that the child is at peace and in harmony with the society where it lives, interacts, and seeks education and eventually livelihood. Values and practices, which are in direct conflict to the society and its mores, can be tolerated within oneself to some extent, but it takes its toll. Somewhere there an adjustment needs to be made and this will be a constant changing process, because time does not stand still.
The India of today, to me, is perhaps the most exciting country on earth. Not only, as I see it, are we in the process of shedding age old prejudices, willingly or otherwise, but also we are going through the immense levelling process of an hierarchy with the Brahmins at the top and the dalits outside of it.
We as tambrams, have probably most to lose in terms of societal privileges, most of them unwritten and increasingly unacknowledged. We are the fallen idols and some of us break in the process, while others have managed to move along undented. So, us tambram parents have a even more difficult task re child rearing in a society that looks at us with anger and suspicion. Tambram parenting. We hear no end of it re the degeneration of our society and our own religious standards. Just today there is a lament of a parent at the inability of a father, at the inability of arranging vedic tutor for his nine year old son in Coimbatore. Whereas many other parents would not have the Vedas in their radar as part of their child’s education. Stepping through this, would the veda rich child be better adjusted to the society than the veda ignorant one? I don’t know.
I am also witnessing a significant group of angry young men in the forum – from what I gather unmarried, in their thirties, frustrated with the world at their inability to find a wife or a career which they had hoped. At some point in their lives, these too, it would be hoped, would be parents. What type of parents would these be, and what type of children would be the outcome? Would these youths learn from their experience and be wiser for it. Or would it fuel a certain set of values whose outcome would be a dysfunctional family because these are so out of tune with the beat of current India? Who knows?
Raji, I hope over this rather long and meandering essay, I have succeeded, atleast partly in my attempt, to explore the challenges of parenting and raising children. though this is not directly a point to point answer in terms of prescriptions to your essayed queries, this is the best I could do in terms of penning to words, the thoughts that your poem triggered.
As you can see, i am definitely not of the school, who thinks that parents have 'sacrificed' everything for their children, and when the time comes, it is the 'duty' of the children to 'take care of the parents'. i find life not so simple to define in such simple rules, for today's day to day living is far more complex i think, than our ancestors faced. the solutions of yester years, i feel, are no long practical. to shed tears over the past, is but a denial of today, and hence a failure to find a solution for tomorrow, however painful or sorrowful it may be.
Finally, how do we know that we succeeded as a parent. Probably not in our lifetime. The children are hard markers but very fair though. Personally, I shall be contented, if I atleast get a ‘pass’.
Thank You.
eep:
