GROOMING THE CHILD

 1   GROOMING THE CHILD

Children delight elders and demand attention by play, cry, mischief, pranks and every other expression known and unknown to us.  They are tender and require being handled with utmost care. The care suggested includes nutrition, health and habituation. In our zeal to keep the child nourished, some of us overstep and offer a variety in food which may not be conducive for the upkeep of child health. The ability of the child to draw attention gets entrenched and keeps expanding as [s]he grows. Our bondage to the kid overpowers our faculties of enforcing control. We readily give up or relax in our bid to keep the child happy. Children amplify their skills of drawing and sustaining attention to the level of ‘here and now’ for all their demands- food, dress, toys, play time, watching items on TV and so on. They know our break point better than ourselves and keep pressing the demand till we concede. Not bad, if we pamper the child in the early child hood. But, at some point, the child has to recognize that nothing comes for the asking except by justification. It is our duty to impart basic discipline without imposing our decision. It is a task indeed. Necessarily, a paced control has to be in place; it is best done by the practice of ‘reward for effort and recognition for performance’. When the child seeks a favour, advise him or her to do a certain work like keeping his /her desk tidy, carry out a home work or some such relating to the child. Better we do not engage children for our work. Such an approach infuses the idea of ‘my work’ into the child.

Once the child gets to know ‘my’ work, [s]he understands the need to finish the pending items before seeking a facility or favour. In due course, the parents must inculcate the ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ by explaining the broad basis of those. Over a time, the boy or girl understands the family traditions, behavioural patterns and also identifies the feasibility of an action under his or her domestic conditions.

 2   SPARE SOME TIME FOR THE CHILD                             

Of late, a trend of leaving the child fully to his or her routine pervades our society; i.e., parents deem it enough to feed the children and entrust them to school care for the best part of the day. The trend has its root in the present-day situation of both parents being ‘employed’. For reasonable living, financial well being is a must. Under the dispensation, compounded by nuclear family, children are under ‘non-parental care’ for the best part of the day. Being so, their outlooks get shaped by most influences other than those of the parent. Slowly, the parent-child relationship is tending towards sharing a roof with very little by way of emotional bondage. I do not suggest that there is ‘detachment’ on either side. But, definitely, there is an eerie silence at home, imposed by mere exchange of words and acts of discharging moral obligations to and from children. Largely, it is due to non-interactive hours every day except on holidays when all members of the family stay at the same place and time. This robs the children of their legitimate demand of ‘enjoying’ parental affection, care and guidance. With the nuclear family arrangement in place, children do not have ‘domestic’ interactions of the yester decade’s grand-parental grooming. Gradually, children get trained to be aloof, self dependent and are left ‘high and dry’ to face situations unexpected.

Bewildered by unexpected ‘temptations’, children fall prey to the designs of the cunning. The psychological limitation is, the kids have not been appropriately ‘tuned’ to distinguish the bad and good, as they get very little time to interact with the parents. Left to the care of persons who have no emotional bondage to the child, there is a tendency to accept what comes by. At a later point in life of the boy or girl, it is impossible to impose restrictions or induct values. Therefore, parents must spend more time with the child to make him/her recognize that parents show genuine affection which others cannot to the same degree. It is the best exercise to groom kids from childhood on, instead of trying changes mid-course.

K. R