Let’s go back to some hands-off parenting, please

Window Seat

Your daughter’s board exams begin tomorrow, and you get a call from a classmate who you last met 15 years ago, is leaving for the US in two days and is asking to meet up for a leisure lunch.

If you go, it will take away three hours from the day — will you? Or will you say “What! How can I even think of stepping out?”

I would go, and without guilt.

This year, I am peddling a kind of parenting that’s worth trying. Especially if you are an HP -- Helicopter Parent – a term used for those who hover around their child. An HP may think she or he is, in fact, an IP – Involved Parent. But there is a wafer-thin line between Involvement and Interference. The former can give a young one a feeling of confidence, the latter can totally crush her independence. In trying to be a good mother or father, are you harming, rather than helping, your child?

To be fair, some amount of hand-holding is necessary when children are growing up. To get them to know bad from good, to learn tasks, to initiate them into how the world works, as you have seen it. But after you have taught how to cross the t and do addition-subtraction in school homework, it is okay to step off and just be around. That’s when a child’s own thinking and problem-solving skills kick in, learning begins. The problem is when the parent ends up doing the homework herself!

This gradually grows to more work for the parent, and then comes along that stress-inducer of modern schooling called ‘Project Work’. Gone are the days when you got away with drawing the planets of the solar system wonkily on a thick white sheet. Today’s project work is often a grand piece of art, no less than a trophy -- for the parents who have done it ‘oh so perfectly’. Else, you have to live with looking dull on the parents’ WhatsApp group. In the world of online classes, teachers are no longer left alone with their students. The taught are not just the tiny tots; moms, dads, grandmoms are always ‘Present, Miss’ even while the video is on mute.

Compare this ever-present parent-set to the generation before. Joint families, some 5-6 kids per home, and women busy with never-ending chores meant that children grew up on their own, with optimal parental absence. “We were never inside the house in the first place. If it wasn’t at school, we would be found on some tree branch laughing, yelling, fighting,” says my mother. Everyone fed, bathed, chided someone’s children. There was neither fussing over, no making separate dishes.

Today’s generation has to live with over-attention. What they are watching, what they are not reading, who they are friends with – is all on parental surveillance, like that CCTV outside the apartment lift. Parents can’t be blamed either; “the world is not how good it used to be”.

So, when I, used to doing solo train journeys from my father’s postings across India since I was a pre-teen, sent my son of 10 by the local Bengaluru bus to meet his grandmom 10 km away, it was an act of bravery. When he went to the hostel for graduation, his roommate’s mother would call him thrice a day, starting 6 am, “Did the alarm ring? Gulp down some milk before class, ok?”

We take our kids to holidays only in sanitised resorts, water anywhere is only from a mineral water bottle. A cab driver told me three years ago how at peak-time “A row of huge, fancy cars with only one little kid in the back seat”, held up traffic outside a school we were passing. Maids do the room-cleaning, machines do their laundry, mothers do every other work – while the young emperors and empresses grow up overprotected, under-skilled.

Career mums have it hard as if they are not good-enough moms if the children want to slack off. But do we want the crown of a perfect parent more than the joy of raising a well-adjusted young person?

In 2022, my tip to parents is to twist a line from a Salman Khan film: Do your children a favour -- do not do them any favour.