Growing up with the child

There was a time, not long ago, when the parent sent his child to school and relaxed. Perhaps, he/she too poured knowledge into the child. But gone are those times when there was a one-way flow of knowledge from parent to child. Now it is both ways.

Social values and expectations drive the new curriculum. The child is busy with modern subjects and the parent’s nostalgic recounting of great literature makes no sense to the child whose language skills are ignored by the system. The child’s dabbling with the laptop or the iPad keeps the parent away. The native language, with enormous literary tomes of great writers is fading away in history in our own living memory.

Valmiki, the great poet said, ‘this great story of Rama will live as long as the mountains and rivers live’. This statement is ironically becoming true. Neither the mountains nor the great works of literature are able to resist the depredations of modern times. The great works which illustrated innumerable social situations and gave emotional strength to our parents, lie unknown.

A middle ground has to be found and the effort has to be made by the parents only. An educated parent is not merely the financer for the child’s education, but he/she needs to be a monitor of the emotional growth of the child.

How to ensure emotional and ethical growth? The parents have to identify institutions, such as Chinmaya or Ramakrishna missions where teachers tell stories which can build up an ethical personality. We are hearing about ethical quotients nowadays. This EQ can be created by a professional teacher. The parents may or may not be equipped to do this.

A good trick to build up the habit of reading is to make the child a member of the library and borrow books.

Also, every house should keep about a hundred good books, including children’s classics. Initially the parents can read the books aloud and create the habit of reading. Do not force him to read but allow curiosity to prompt the child to look into those books. Gradually, the standard of the books can grow, and the parent has to merely read such books so that the child too, sometime would develop interest in them.

An old Sanskrit verse says, ‘treat the child like a king till he is five; treat him like a servant for the next ten years and when the child is sixteen, treat him as friend’. Maybe we may not agree with the exact number of years, but it is needed that the child should be treated as a friend right from the tenth year, considering the maturity levels in the modern age. It is actually a battle of wits; not a battle to win, but a battle to grow together and build a mature bond.

A new problem is faced by parents in the western countries. A recent report in the UK schools showed that there is bullying of students of one social group by students of another group. In fact, there are two types of bullying – academic bullying through syllabus, and physical bullying by shaming the religion. The academic bullying is a design by certain vested interests to shame the Indian culture. A study of texts by Indian parents has shown distorted interpretation of texts to ridicule Indian culture. Physical bullying in the UK was by children who are trained by parents to do so.

But challenges have a positive impact. We see that most parents are unaware of our own tradition or texts. Shaming or bullying children is making some parents rush to various missions to know about our own tradition. A time has come when the parent is finding it essential to grow up, regain what he has lost because of disconnect with our tradition. The parents must equip themselves with adequate knowledge to answer the questions of children. Only by growing, the parents can ensure that the child grows up with self-confidence.

In our tradition, the teacher and the student used to say this Upanishadic line together – saha viryam karavavahai’, which means, ‘let us together make our knowledge stronger’.

(Writer is former DGP,

Andhra Pradesh)