What should Parenting in the 21st century be like?

Out of all the 7 billion people in the world, If you could have a tremendous influence over the upbringing of a single soul, how would you feel? Well, it may seem a little scary and nerve-racking. But hey on the bright side, doesn’t it almost seem like a superpower? Well, this superpower is called parenting.

Image source: dnaindia.com

Now you might wonder, as someone who hasn’t even received a voter ID, who am I to talk about parenting? Well then let me ask you, who would you ask for the feedback of a commercial product- the seller or the customer? If you couldn’t process the analogy there, you may read it again.

They say the most important part of learning is unlearning. As a parent, as much as you would love the authority over your child, one thing a lot of parents might assume is the authority over his thought process as well. Some parents forget that their child will grow up into a whole individual himself, with his own thoughts, beliefs, sexuality, opinions, dreams and perspective. What a parent should focus on is not shaping their belief system but more on their value system.
Because opinions might change, it’s the values that stay.

Childhood is the most important phase of a person’s life. It affects and shapes what is called the subconscious mind. We perform 95% of our daily activities through our subconscious mind. I hope that makes you realise how significant it is.

It is scientifically proven that your childhood experiences deeply affect your adult relationships. Therefore, parenting should not be something that comes about randomly. Parents should invest a substantial amount of time and thought into it.

According to the great Chanakya, treat your kid like a darling for the first five years. That’s important to make them feel safe and loved. For the next five years, scold them. This is the time when they trust you and you must chide them to teach them discipline.

Now the next few years, treat them like a friend. Adolescence comes with a feeling of Independence. I feel adolescents should be given space to do things that parents might consider wrong or even “stupid”. When you learn by making the mistake yourself, it adds to your maturity and teaches you far more than how much you would have learnt through a moral lecture by your parents. Plus, this is the only time we can make the stupidest blunders and get away with it.

Following this might make the pipe dream of most parents come true, which is to become your grown-up kids' best friend.

Well as much as I might have made it sound like a herculean task involving strategies it is also a beautiful journey to enjoy bestowing lovely moments you will cherish forever 🌠

I would like to leave you with a parting thought – “There are two things we should give our children- one is roots and the other is wings”. 

CHASE THE REAL YOU

You:  “The fear of being judged? Me? No way!”

Also you, one second later:  Which picture should I post? This colour or that one? How do I look? This hairstyle or that one? This way or that way?

You acted in a particular manner in that party because you feared that the person x might judge you for what you do. You didn’t express or even in fact switched your opinion in that debate because you feared being judged based on what you think. You changed your dress at the last moment when you got to know that the person x would also be present.

I think almost all of us experience or may have experienced situations like these, you believe me or not. The fear of judgment has been and continues to haunt all of us in some form or the other and keeps us from being proud and happy about who and how we are. But have you ever thought how good or bad that ‘duplicate’ behavior of yours, due to the fear of judgment is?

That particular behavior of yours mostly brings out the best possible version of you. So, why do you behave in the best possible way in front of the person x? Substantially, because that person is important to you and you want the person to hold a good opinion about you.

Okay, so now I want you to pause for a minute and imagine yourself behaving all the time, like you do when that person x is in front of you. Pause, imagine yourself that way and please answer to yourself. If you meet another person, who behaves exactly like the (new) you do, would you love meeting him/her? Do you like your (new) self and do you crave to see yourself like that all the time? Does the mere thought of others reading your (new) mind make you happy (or does it scare you)? Is this person who you just imagined yourself is who you want to be?

I expect your answers to be typically affirmative.

Okay, so it is now that I come to the main issue: right now, you are not who you want to be and that you aren’t living the best possible version of yourself. So here comes the big question: How can we live the best version of ourselves? Positing is very easy but the question mark comes when we try to execute it, because we simply do not and just get on with our lives. I firmly believe that we need to grow as a person, each day. We need to learn and draw our own conclusions from our own experiences, mistakes and failures. That is how you are supposed to grow as an individual to achieve your endeavor of living the best version of yourself. Nothing would come to you readymade, it is you who has to understand and infer many realities of life, yourself. And that’s where the beauty in living lies.

I believe that to bring out the best of you, you first of all need to be yourself. Do not lose your uniqueness. You are as unique as a human fingerprint. Remember, there is no one like you in this whole wide world. There is no one in the entire world who thinks the way you do. There is no one who loves singing or dancing or writing or running or travelling, the way you do. Everyone has a distinctive and a singular purpose of living here, which makes all of us so special and it is only our uniqueness which sets each one of us apart. Otherwise we are all as similar and indistinguishable as every single drop of water.

Whenever someone asks you arguably the most philosophically deep question - “who are you?” you try to answer as to how you stand different from others and how you are better than others some way or the other. I believe that it is only our uniqueness that ideally defines who we really are. So, never lose your specialty, which is essentially your uniqueness.

At the same time, I strongly believe in the ideology “Stop just being yourself and start creating yourself”.

Creating yourself, I think this is where the true essence of growing up as a person lies. Let me give you an example. We all have experienced such situations in our lives when we see a person and we instinctively realize- ’this is how I want to be’. For instance, whenever i see a person with good oratory skills, I instantly feel that, that is the way I want to be. But, at the same time I know that I am not extraordinarily good at it. When you talk about your passion, many people may demotivate you by saying that they have never seen you excel in it or that they don’t find you inclined towards it. But this is exactly what I am opposing. What I am trying to say is that if you have a passion, you don’t have to initially and inherently be the best at it. You have got to mould yourself into the best. And that is what I mean when I say ‘creating yourself’.

For example, Sachin Tendulkar wasn’t born as a cricketer. He was passionate about it, brave enough to pursue it and determined to be the best at it. So primarily, all you need is the passion, the fervor to pursue it and a yearning to be the best at it. But, no achievement in life is going to come your way easily. To become the best, you must develop the boldness and an intentional will to hustle, bustle, slip, fall and still have the mettle to stand on your feet again.  

I hope that I have been able to thoroughly justify my perspective that the beauty is not only in being who you are, but also in creating yourself into who you want to be.  This will not only set you free from the shackles which hinder your beautiful and treasurous ride towards living the best of yourself but will also help you overlook the judgment of others and help you realize your own potential and your true worth in this world.

 

It is this way that you can create yourself into a person, you yourself will be proud of. You can create yourself into a person as per your aspirations and how you wish to see yourself and not according to the person x who was (or maybe is still) judging you. So, now that we are back to square one, I hope that after reading through this, you’ll start living, if not the best, at least a better version of yourself.  

      

Thank you.

-          Akshit

LIVE YOUR LEGEND

India. What comes to your mind on hearing the word ‘India’? The mammoth population? Our vivid histories and diverse cultures? Or maybe the monstrously increasing number of graduates we produce. Our festivals? Or our countless successful space hauls? So basically, nothing, yet everything! No wonder its better known as- Incredible India. Although I have been talking about the diversity of India, I am here to speak about something else, something extremely ironical to the diversity of Indian society, something that really moves me - The unfortunate absurdity of Indians over a sheer narrow range of career paths for the youth. India is one of the countries which produce the most number of engineering graduates in a year. However the country's always lingering at the bottom of the innovation index. Why is this happening? The question has bugged me for a while now.

Despite boasting about being the most diverse country in the world, the way the minds of the Indian students are squeezed to try out a paltry number of professions they can contribute in, KILLS ME. It really does! As soon as a student enters grade 9 or 10, the one question that students are arguably asked the most number of times is that what they aspire to become when they grow up. How can you expect a 14 year old, to come up with a firm answer as to what he would love to when he would be 30. Our interests are as short lived as a knee jerk reaction and you expect a mere teenager to find his areas of interests for life! Is it that easy? If, by any logic it was, students going to Kota wouldn’t commit suicide if they really loved what they studied. If it was that easy, people won’t back out after cracking an IIT, as many of them do! But, I do believe that one can acquire a broad sense of his/her passions provided he/she is supported by a lot of assistance, 360 degree awareness, and a mind free from all the shackles of the Indian society. When you grow up in India, you have a whole lot of career options: you can become a mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer, an aeronautical engineer, an electrical engineer, a civil engineer, an automobile engineer, a sound engineer, computer science engineering OR you can also do wonders as – a family disappointment. Ouch, that hurts. Doesn’t it?  :’)

Also, at this point I would like to make it clear that I am not against engineering, at all. I believe it’s definitely a very interesting career, for those who find it interesting. There is a lot to learn and to explore, for those who want to learn and for those who want to explore. Because, when you want something, it is then that you start giving in more than what you are even capable of! And we can’t even imagine the potential of improvement in each and every field, if everyone starts doing what they want to do, which almost seems to me as impractical, keeping in mind our present situation.

Well, I have myself been a culprit of this infliction, though I don’t blame anyone for it, but I guess that’s the way our society works (Even though it is bizarre). I had enrolled in one of the most decorated institutes of India, which prepares students for the IIT-JEE exam – FIITJEE. I was really excited and motivated as I went to the first class, but little did I know that all the motivation and excitement would fade away so quickly. It didn’t take me much time to realize how the lectures started getting boring and I realized that I didn’t gel. As I starting thinking what was wrong with me, I looked what happened around me which assured me that I wasn’t alone. Students around me focused more on memorizing the algorithms, the short tricks, the tough questions then and there, rather than focusing on the concepts and beauty of some of the most exploitable subjects like physics and chemistry. But nobody gave it a second thought as to if they were really interested in pursuing engineering for the next 40 years of their life. The class seemed to be like the means to an end, light at the end of a 2 year long tunnel as if after all the blood, sweat, and tears, all we could look forward to was a mere college!  And I realized all the motivation was mock up.

I even started thinking what is it, that makes so many students run towards engineering careers, blindfoldedly. I started asking my classmates, what makes them take up engineering, but it was seldom that I found an answer even close to the periphery of logic and rationality. Some answers that I found related to the handsome package that many think, it offers. They legit said that they weren’t fascinated by engineering or innovation as their passion, but the high salary it offers as they blindly presumed, it does. But the reality is the average salary for the engineering students of IIT, Bombay is not more than 11 lakh. Even the IITians aren’t able to live up to their families' fat pay package dreams, forget about others. One of the most hilarious reasons for selecting engineering that I have ever heard is the hope to settle abroad. The reality however is that the passport is just used as an address proof by most of these aspirants, lying in some old briefcase, as single as Salman Khan.  

Isn’t all this so obvious? The population of Switzerland equals the number of engineers we produce. The supply of engineering in India graduates is almost double the demand. Even then, with all the blood, sweat, chaos, tragedy, death, we have been able to produce 6 noble laureates in science, 6. After independence, industrial demand increased and there was a need of engineers but now, after 70 years, the freshness of engineering is almost obsolete. Now, with the population as an asset and good education, one out of every six Indians has a chance to excel in each and every field, you name it!  So, do we need to really stick to one profession, instead of exploring and discovering new options?

Another misconception prevalent is the way the entrance examinations of a few courses are equated with the career of a student. For instance, if a person clears the JEE exam, he/she will become a successful engineer but if he doesn’t, then living is a waste of time (almost literally). If this was true then Satya Nadela, a graduate of the Manipal institute of technology, would not have become the CEO of Microsoft and hundreds of IITians wouldn’t have been rendered unemployed. 

Even, the parents are thumbed under the societal pressure, while choosing a career for their children. After all, if the boy doesn’t pursue engineering, 'log kya kahenge?'. For instance, the pleasure with which a father tells others about his child pursuing engineering is over the top, relative to that when he tells about his child pursuing photography. Nobody, in fact pays attention to what the child may really want. When a child comes from school, most of the parents ask how many marks the child had scored, rather than asking if he even learnt something new, something fascinating, something which makes him ponder, at school. Remember my classmates, trying to memorize everything in the class? They are the product of this system for the so called ‘education’. The system has been and sadly, continues to be highly examination oriented.  Your worth is decided by a chronological list of mere numbers in descending order. One of the main reasons for it is the culture of public shaming/praising on marks. Is this all we deserve? Why it is even called an education system!? Examination system is what it really is. I am not against examinations but the sky high value given to marks and only to the marks obtained by a student is what bothers me. The whole point of our system is not in assessing his strengths/weaknesses but to certify him as pass or fail.  So, the people who are excelling in their respective fields (who aren’t many in number) are the doing wonders, despite the education system and not because of it.

Remember how I became the culprit of the way our society works? That’s because of the way we have been educated. We very well know how to score the highest marks but, we don’t know what creativity is. We have no idea what it really means. Most students don’t. And so, we can’t even analyze what we are creative at, which makes the process of choosing a career even more cumbersome and confusing for students. And as a result, all we can think of, at the end of the day is: engineering, our savior. With 28 Olympic medals, all that the second most populated country in the world can think of is- engineering. And if something revolutionary doesn’t happen soon, we Indians will continue to do engineering first and then figure out what to do in life.

 

Committing mistakes is something which is treated as an offence in our current education system.  Each time a teacher asks a question in the class, all the students start squirming and cringing in their seats, glancing at each other. There are some students who ask even if the question is in their syllabus. Why does this happen? Because we aren’t allowed to make a mistake! And if by chance a student, not “properly grilled” by this education system (if you know what I mean) answers the question and gets it wrong, what everyone else does is to start laughing or frowning, including the teacher. When answer sheets are checked in schools and the students question the reason marks are cut, the most common replies from the teachers are- “Go read the textbook and then come to me” or ‘the marking is strict”. This is literally hilarious. Even the teachers’ rush towards marks, rather than explaining to the students what the concept was, which the student got wrong. We learn not by doing everything right, but by committing mistakes and that is what makes us creative and that’s what makes us humans, in a broader sense. 

Do not take  your life lightly. Be creative, be brave, learn new things, meet new people, learn to carve out your own niche, figure out what makes you happy and do everything you can, to find what you are actually made for, and most importantly, GO DO IT!  

You might not be good at one thing but you will definitely be better at three others. So, in the end, I would just reiterate my whole talk by this quote from Albert Einstein “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Thank you for paying heed. I am obliged.

- Akshit

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