Good parenting leads to confident kids

TIPS ON PARENTING

The other day, my wife and I attended a combined farewell party thrown by two parents to bid farewell to their sons who were going abroad for further studies. Both the boys were around sixteen.

In a large gathering I tend to gravitate towards the youngsters. The reason is simple. It helps me stay contextual. I am cheesed off with the ‘in our days’ homilies that I hear from grownups.

My belief is that in our days, we did not achieve a fourth of what today’s generation has achieved at their age.  I would rather spend time with the present and not the past.

So like I said, I homed onto the two departing boys who had been allowed to sip some beer as a farewell celebration. I asked them both how they felt about leaving their homes for further studies. 

Their diametrically opposite responses to the same question surprised me.  One responded: “Of course I will miss my home and the family, but then I also know that I can’t afford to miss such a great opportunity”  The other said:  “I want to get the hell out of here. Who wants to stay stuck in this rut”  My counsellor button got switched on automatically and I reflected on the two differing responses.

When some of us counsellors discuss our cases, we find that a vast majority of adults who come to us, when regressed to their early years, give us leads to something that demolished their self-esteem in the process of growing up. When sufficient rapport has been built between the counsellors and the counselees, they begin to pour out their cups of woes about how they were criticised, compared and sometimes condemned for what they had said or done.

One counsellor narrated the case of a young man of twenty whose self-esteem was so low that he would switch over to the opposite side of the pavement when he saw someone approaching him, fearing that strangers would laugh at him. He wouldn’t ask for directions if he was confused because he feared people’s ridicule and reactions.  He developed these insecurities because, in childhood, he had been called a sissy and compared with his sister as she displayed more confidence.  That scar reflected on his withdrawn, under-confident personality.

This may be the time to state something that is important but sadly neglected — parenting. Show me one profession, where you can get a job without formal training. No one will hire a person even as an assistant if he or she does not know what a word document or excel is, or if he can’t handle an email.

Can one become a doctor without passing out  from a medical college? No way. But we can take upon ourselves the important role of parenting without any inputs. Of course, we know parenting. We know it because we saw our parents do it.  We take that model as our model, however faulty it might be.  As someone succinctly pointed out, we are victims of victims.  Our parents were victims of poor or indifferent parenting. We perpetuate the same model and produce more of the same and the cycle carries on.
 
Recently, we counsellors went to a school to meet the principal with a suggestion that we would like to conduct a workshop on parenting. The response we got was patently lukewarm. The principal said that parents were so busy these days that he didn’t think they would be able to find time for the whole-day workshop. Could we give them an abridged version of say, two hours, he queried.

Let me cite another case that came up.  Here is a young man who had begun to believe that the world owed him everything.  If he demanded a branded T-shirt or an upmarket motorbike, it had to be produced immediately. He would even leave a note for parents saying that he expected the job to be done when he came back from school.  He compelled his parents to change their home because his friends lived in bigger homes in upmarket locations.

When we went to the early days of the boy, this is what came out. T he parents, out of love, but equally out of ignorance, gave in to all his demands.  Gradually, the youngster kept raising the bar and the parents did not know how to deal with him. Soon, he thought that everything he wished for was his entitlement. In psychological terms, parents were engulfing the son.

They would even get up and find a spoon for him if he so wished. Although the son was brought for counselling, the parents, in more than one way, needed help to deal with the son who behaved like a dictator.

Another behaviour that shows up in the form of low self-esteem is what is termed as abandonment. It develops like this.  Say, the father is reading his morning newspaper and his five-year-old daughter begins to tell him about something that happened in her school. The father continues to read the paper and the daughter, not getting total attention, stops narrating her story. The father, continuing to read the newspaper says, “Carry on, I am listening to you”. 

The child was hoping to get the father’s total attention but what she received was indifference.  A few more behavioural treatments like this and the girl comes to see herself as a person of low self-worth and grows up with that feeling. Have you met some adults who are like doormats on which everyone can walk over? This is how they were treated when they were children — condemned, compared, criticised or abandoned.

You might think that it is too farfetched for something that happened decades back, to play up at the age of forty or fifty.  Let me emphasise that the scars of childhood hurts rarely heal, unless helped through the process of counselling.

The difference between a well adjusted, grounded, confident and self assured young person and the opposite is that the former would have been brought up with love, affection and attention and the other may have missed receiving the same.

It is said that parents ought to provide unconditional love up to the age of five and then nurture their children with boundaries of behaviour clearly drawn, and be consistent in implementing the code of conduct.  This approach is recommended until the age of adolescence when parenting becomes a totally different ball game. This is the age when ‘good’ children suddenly become ‘bad’.  Why? That is a subject that is so important that it needs a special treatment.

I know free advice is fatal but if I were to risk my neck out, I would say this unhesitatingly to parents: Don’t go about living with the myth that you know about parenting until you invest some time to learn parenting skills or until you become grandparents, by which time it will be too late.