I work in a hospital set up and on account of the role that I have I end up working with a lot of children and their parents.
One day as I sat waiting in my OPD for my first-time visitor, a 11 year old male child who had sought an appointment for himself, I wondered what it could be that he would want to discuss with me. The bigger factor was what could be the reason that he himself sought an appointment and not his parent or guardian. I wondered is there a parent? And when he walked into my chamber I got all my answers. His parents were busy. They have hectic work lives on account of the positions they hold in their organizations and that made it impossible for them to accompany him or even take an appointment for him.
This may sound like an extreme case or one where the parents were probably too self-centered in their perspective but it does highlight the fact that parenting in the modern day is most definitely a challenge. We have seen our parents struggle and now we ourselves struggle with our new found status of parenthood. The struggle then existed on account of the the fact that it needed parents to act and behave in a way that shapes the child's growth and development - emotional, psychological, cognitive, behavioral - in the best way possible, enabling their success later in life. And these days it gets compounded on account of the lives we lead, the stark need to balance multiple roles and also to take care of multiple factors that act as an interface and interact with our child's growth and development, impacting it in a variety of ways.
Where The Challenge Lies
The modern day parents face a significant challenge on account of various factors. These relate not just to their own selves but also to the environment that surrounds us and the facilities that are available to us. For anyone who is trying to parent a child these days, it is not just about what you do or say, but also about the child absorbs from the environment around him or her which has an impact and needs to be monitored. At the same time, as a parent it is important to be involved with the life of one's child and doing that is not always an easy task and the older children grow, the more difficult it becomes to keep up with them.
In the face of such situations we frequently turn to experts, because our own parents no longer stay with us to guide us and well, even if they have something to say, we feel they probably don't understand the basics of being a parent and maybe come from Mars to suggest what they do. It pains to see that things that were once easy and manageable have become so difficult. And to top off all the problems that come in the way of being a parent, we also tend to have our own expectations from our children which tend to complicate matters, for, frequently we forget that this is not about us. Being a parent is not about the parent...it is about our children - a fact that we many a times forget because we end up making it about our own selves.
What We Need To Do
Parenting is most definitely a challenge. The need of the hour is to face it head on and to develop mechanisms that counteract these challenges in the most effective and efficient way. Some of the things that we need to take care include spending more time with our children, time that is not polluted by work and other things we need to take care of and time that is exclusively directed towards talking and sharing with our child. It is important to talk about things, to talk about the things that happen around us, to talk about the things that they end up seeing around them and also to talk about the things that they may not understand because of their age.
Ensuring that there are open channels of communication is probably one of the first, most important steps in being a parent. And along with that it is essential that we act as sieves through whom they can filter the information that impinges upon their world so they absorb the right things and reject the incorrect ones. All of this requires us to strike a balance. We can not make work, our professions, our social lives the prominent aspects around which we revolve. We need to do the things that we need to or want to, yet at the same time we need to ensure that we balance it out with the parenting that needs to be done as well.
Being a parent is a responsibility for we shape the future of a child who becomes a member of the society in which we live and helps it progress. Ensuring that we are giving the right inputs is of the utmost importance, but the foremost step to doing that is recognizing the road blocks that we may face and the hurdles we would have to overcome.
One day as I sat waiting in my OPD for my first-time visitor, a 11 year old male child who had sought an appointment for himself, I wondered what it could be that he would want to discuss with me. The bigger factor was what could be the reason that he himself sought an appointment and not his parent or guardian. I wondered is there a parent? And when he walked into my chamber I got all my answers. His parents were busy. They have hectic work lives on account of the positions they hold in their organizations and that made it impossible for them to accompany him or even take an appointment for him.
This may sound like an extreme case or one where the parents were probably too self-centered in their perspective but it does highlight the fact that parenting in the modern day is most definitely a challenge. We have seen our parents struggle and now we ourselves struggle with our new found status of parenthood. The struggle then existed on account of the the fact that it needed parents to act and behave in a way that shapes the child's growth and development - emotional, psychological, cognitive, behavioral - in the best way possible, enabling their success later in life. And these days it gets compounded on account of the lives we lead, the stark need to balance multiple roles and also to take care of multiple factors that act as an interface and interact with our child's growth and development, impacting it in a variety of ways.
Where The Challenge Lies
The modern day parents face a significant challenge on account of various factors. These relate not just to their own selves but also to the environment that surrounds us and the facilities that are available to us. For anyone who is trying to parent a child these days, it is not just about what you do or say, but also about the child absorbs from the environment around him or her which has an impact and needs to be monitored. At the same time, as a parent it is important to be involved with the life of one's child and doing that is not always an easy task and the older children grow, the more difficult it becomes to keep up with them.
In the face of such situations we frequently turn to experts, because our own parents no longer stay with us to guide us and well, even if they have something to say, we feel they probably don't understand the basics of being a parent and maybe come from Mars to suggest what they do. It pains to see that things that were once easy and manageable have become so difficult. And to top off all the problems that come in the way of being a parent, we also tend to have our own expectations from our children which tend to complicate matters, for, frequently we forget that this is not about us. Being a parent is not about the parent...it is about our children - a fact that we many a times forget because we end up making it about our own selves.
What We Need To Do
Parenting is most definitely a challenge. The need of the hour is to face it head on and to develop mechanisms that counteract these challenges in the most effective and efficient way. Some of the things that we need to take care include spending more time with our children, time that is not polluted by work and other things we need to take care of and time that is exclusively directed towards talking and sharing with our child. It is important to talk about things, to talk about the things that happen around us, to talk about the things that they end up seeing around them and also to talk about the things that they may not understand because of their age.
Ensuring that there are open channels of communication is probably one of the first, most important steps in being a parent. And along with that it is essential that we act as sieves through whom they can filter the information that impinges upon their world so they absorb the right things and reject the incorrect ones. All of this requires us to strike a balance. We can not make work, our professions, our social lives the prominent aspects around which we revolve. We need to do the things that we need to or want to, yet at the same time we need to ensure that we balance it out with the parenting that needs to be done as well.
Being a parent is a responsibility for we shape the future of a child who becomes a member of the society in which we live and helps it progress. Ensuring that we are giving the right inputs is of the utmost importance, but the foremost step to doing that is recognizing the road blocks that we may face and the hurdles we would have to overcome.
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