Growing up!

With so many of my friends on the cusp of becoming parents, I cannot help but reflect on how difficult parenting actually is. A child is a living, breathing thing a complex entity. Complex entities have a tendency to be chaotic and unpredictable. How do you deal with this chaos and how do you react and handle difficult situations and how do you work when so much emotion is clouding every small morsel of judgment you might have? It all sounds very daunting.

I believe the key like with any other relationship is communication. Without communication, I have seen parents and children drift so apart that they almost look like strangers who just live together. Communication is a two-way street and both parties have to be equally involved to make things work, but i believe very strongly that the onus of setting up the environment for conducive and productive communications lies squarely with the parents. Thats because this has to be done early in the child's life.

Most of the time this becomes impossible because parents tend to think of their children as things they own and control completely. "My son will do what i ask him without questioning", seems to be a statement which makes most parents overzealous with pride. You have to wonder if that is a seriously degrading comment on your child's intelligence or your assertion of total control over your children. This kind of almost dictatorial control can be achieved only through fear. Instilling fear in your children when they are young I assume is not very difficult. A good spanking or some serious emotional blackmailing will put the fear of God into any child. But fear brings with it one major drawback, it severs all channels of communication. There are only two things the child can do, either he is going to be this timid docile creature and treat every word you say as a command of God or he is simply going to rebel and do everything behind your back. What he chooses totally depends on the environment presented to him outside the house. Either which way if you set up a precedent of fear for your children, and your child even for a moment thinks he is scared of you, then the game is most definitely over. At that instance when he thought that, you have lost your children forever and they are not coming back.

You may not be a tyrannical parent but you could still decide that you would not talk to your children about specific so called taboo topics and just assume that your children have some how magically figured out the right thing to do. The most classic example of this is booze. Ask a parent, "does your son drink" and i will bet that most of the time you will hear "Absolutely not!". Complete and total denial. I am sure all of us have wondered at some time or another on such a comment, are our parents really so naive? I mean they ought to know at some point or another you did get pressured, bullied or plain tempted to pick up that glass of vodka and gulp it down.

I know that booze is there in the world and it can be bought easily. Sweeping it under the carpet is the most irresponsible thing ever. Booze can get my children into trouble. I would rather know where and when they are drinking rather than they drinking on the sly and debating whether or not they should call me if they end up in trouble. Denial does not seem to be the right answer, not at all. The answer definitely lies in education and communication, in an environment where there is not a blanket ban on alcohol but rather an advisory on its ill effects and how to manage it correctly. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying drinking should be encouraged in any way but a logical and clear discussion on alcohol with your children is not going to make them an alcoholic on the contrary, I believe that a rebellious child drinking behind your back is more likely to become one.

I enjoy my glass of wine and I have never had to make an excuse for it at home. I have a collection of spirits from all over the world and I am actually proud of it and it sits in a closet in my room. I can order a Mojito for myself, a glass of wine for my sister and a beer for my dad at a restaurant on a Sunday afternoon and not worry too much about it. I do think that this is a far better place to be in than sneaking out with friends and drinking irrationally with the fear of getting caught always hanging on your head. There is a mutual trust that has built up where my dad is confident of my ability to drink responsibly and I make sure that I don't shake that confidence in any way. I know that if I break it I will be the bigger loser, that itself is deterrent enough to make me say no after my third drink. Isn't this a far healthier relationship where things are in the open and people are generally sleeping better than a one based on lies and denial? Cheers dad!

Fear and denial are age old problems that parents seem to dealing with all the time but then the environment in which children live changes with every passing generation. What do you do with problems whose consequences are not known. The most glaring of these problems at least for our generation and the coming one seems to be with mobile phones and the Internet. Every teenager today is bought a mobile phone. In general, looking at a very global picture mobile phones make personal communication easy and effortless. But if you observe how your 16 year old cousin uses her phone even you will be surprised, let alone her parents. Try explaining to your mother how you can effectively fight with your girlfriend from the middle of crowded wedding reception with 160-byte snippets. The conversation will probably end when you say girlfriend but you get the idea of what i am trying to say. Or better still try explaining to your aunt the perils of putting a computer with a broadband connection in the same cousins bedroom. Both are seriously uphill tasks!

These are just genuine mistakes or simply unknowns which can end up causing a lot of issues at some point or another. So, what do you do as a parent? Do you not buy your children mobile phones or do you not get them an internet connections? For all its worth, these things expose your child to whole new world, a whole new sub-culture. Do you curtail this exposure or do you start spying on your children and start reading their mails and putting up key loggers on the PC? I don't think that either of them is a good option. I think the only solution is to be on your toes and make informed decisions and learn to deal with, understand and accept situations as they evolve. By accept, I mean that if your kid needs to use steganography to send out messages then there is something terribly wrong already even before the computer came in. I am sure the word invest i used in my last post is suddenly starting to make sense! It is a lot of difficult, hard work.

But i think, all this aside the most difficult aspect of parenting is learning to let go of your children. As your children grow and acquire knowledge and intelligence for themselves, your influence and control on their thinking reduces or at least it should reduce. Most parents find this concept very daunting and they would like their children to be in their sphere of influence for eternity. The idea seems to be that they can somehow protect their children from all pitfalls for time immemorial, which practically is not achievable. In my opinion, parents who accept this idea gracefully are the ones who make the difference and make life easier and productive for themselves and their children. Somewhere down the line you have to learn to stop saying "I know what is best for my child" and say "He knows what is best for himself" instead. That later statement is obviously difficult to make and it requires a lot of trust and respect both ways, though I am sure it is said with immense pride because for reasons more than one, it is vindication of your "work" as a good parent.


As, I look around me, I actually feel lucky to be where I am. I have had an exceptional childhood. I have never been denied anything, I have not been subjected to an environment of fear, I have had my independence and privacy, I have been able to do and achieve what I have aimed and wished for, not what was expected of me, my opinions are sought for and are respected and I don't have very many complaints. I am not saying that it has all been perfect and my parents have made no mistakes but overall considering how complex this whole game is and how difficult children can be, if I reach some point which is even half way to where my parents are today, I would consider it a job well done!