Journey of Parenthood

Today I went to drop my kids to schools, when in elevator my 3 year old daughter waved goodbye to her grandmother and said that she will be back home soon. May be she felt that these words would be assurance for her grandmother, who would be waiting to receive her back from her school.

Kids think feel process the information and react even before we think they would and they grow up before we even realize it. This makes me often think of what is it to parent a child? I see many people reading parenting books and creating equations to discipline their children. I am not an ardent believer of these parenting books and I feel every child is unique and requires a champion in their life to mentor them. How a child behaves or in fact how all us behave is the combination of factors like “our past life habits, our peer groups, our family and our society in large”. Even though all these factors play a role, researches have indicated that parents and the environment at home can be the major influencer of their personality.

These day I see so many couples fighting and when asked what they feel their kids would think about that, they respond by saying that they don’t fight in front of their kids. But they fail to acknowledge that Kids catch these subtle vibrations at home very quickly and develop their own negative mental prototypes which can emerge unknowingly as a negative emotion in the later part of their lives. Many a time parents are too exhausted to even talk to kids about how was their day? It is believed that because of this kids are more intellectually advanced but more emotionally vulnerable these days. These emotionally weak and vulnerable kids grow up in to adults and enter in to relationships with other emotionally vulnerable human beings, and then the problem in relationships emerges. Both being emotionally weak are constantly expecting love, respect understanding from each other and neither of them will be in the state to give the positive energy to other. This results in fights to get energy fulfillment by depleting other person of energy. When that doesn’t sustain for long these emotionally vulnerable individuals start looking for external sources to get the momentary contentment. External sources could be through addictions or through new relationships hoping to get some positive energy from yet another emotionally vulnerable person.

To a greater extent this can be controlled if kids are groomed to become emotionally healthy starting from their childhood. To do that parents need to be emotionally healthy because child primarily learns from what it sees rather than what is being taught. So it becomes imperative for us as parents to understand ourselves and grow emotionally so that we can play a role of that champion mentor in our child’s life. It is not a mantra, an equation or a tactic but a life skill that is a...... constant evolving journey.