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How do you raise imaginative and confident kids in today’s structured and somewhat overprotective parenting standards?
How do you raise imaginative and confident kids in today’s structured and somewhat overprotective parenting standards? Are all our efforts towards providing the best to our kids not doing them well?
Helicopter parenting is the most common parenting style, yet its negative impacts are the least talked about. Helicopter parenting involves excessive involvement and interference by parents in their child’s life.
Yes, there is so much structure in everything we do today, including parenting! There are set ways to do nearly everything, and parenting blogs ensure that we stick to those!
Going back to my childhood, I think apart from the necessities of food, clothing, shelter and education, my parents never stressed about anything else. If they are in the mood for swim classes, the kid goes for it, else not. There were no set rules to upbringing.
Every kid had a different childhood, and I guess that is how normal would be. Now, the ease, rather an over ease of communication and sharing of ideas has led to most of us relying on information we get, to set our patterns of parenting.
Availability of different ideas and learning from them is not a bad thing; however, over-reliance on them is killing our imagination and individuality; and in turn, we risk raising kids used to so much structure, putting their imagination at stake.
I guess the thinking was more along the lines of ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ and people would rely on their neighbours or community, in general, to make sure kids basically stayed safe.
Now that we are drifting further away from that, we have started to doubt whether our kids would really be safe in this big bad world.
But you know, kids these days, they rarely have to rely on themselves. Once they are ‘supervised’, they know where to turn to for anything they need. Still, the world itself is different from what it was.
I have this crazy idea that as we become more and more dependent on technology and the virtual world, that’s where our eventual ‘community’ will lie, and all of this debate will be moot.
Whoa. That’s way too futuristic!
Well unless we colonize Mars, in which case we might be going back to the whole ‘village’ and ‘community’ setting all over again. How did we get from raising kids to Mars? Anyway, too much of anything is bad!
Being aware of the events taking place in your child’s life, knowing what they are feeling, and wanting them to be safe at all times is only a normal feeling for a parent. However, as Mark Twain said, “Too much of anything is bad.”
Over involvement in your child’s life can reduce their confidence in themselves, increase their anxiety levels, and negatively impacts their social behaviour as well.
Though the intentions of parents remain pure, it’s important for them and their children that they adopt a middle ground.
Image source: Deepak Sethi via Getty Images, free and edited on Canva pro
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Neena was the sole caregiver of Amma and though one would think that Amma was dependent on her, Neena felt otherwise.
Neena inhaled the aroma that emanated from the pan and took a deep breath. The aroma of cumin interspersed with butter transported her back to the modest kitchen in her native village. She could picture her father standing in the kitchen wearing his white crisp kurta as he made delectable concoctions for his only daughter.
Neena grew up in a home where both her parents worked together in tandem to keep the house up and running. She had a blissful childhood in her modest two-room house. The house was small but every nook and cranny gave her memories of a lifetime. Neena’s young heart imagined that her life would follow the same cheerful course. But how wrong she was!
When she was sixteen, the catastrophic clutches of destiny snatched away her parents. They passed away in a road accident and Neena was devastated. Relatives thronged her now gloomy house and soon it was decided that she should be married off.
Women today don’t want to be in a partnership that complicates their lives further. They need an equal partner with whom they can figure out life as a team, playing by each other’s strengths.
We all are familiar with that one annoying aunty who is more interested in our marital status than in the dessert counter at a wedding. But these aunties have somehow become obsolete now. Now they are replaced by men we have in our lives. Friends, family, and even work colleagues. It’s the men who are worried about why we are not saying yes to one among their clans. What is wrong with us? Aren’t we scared of dying alone? Like them?
A recent interaction with a guy friend of mine turned sour when he lectured me about how I would regret not getting married at the right time. He lectured that every event in our lives needs to be completed within a certain timeframe set by society else we are doomed. I wasn’t angry. I was just disappointed to realize that annoying aunties are rapidly doubling in our society. And they don’t just appear at weddings or family functions anymore. They are everywhere. They are the real pandemic.
Let’s examine this a little closer.
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