Children - Handle with care!

The recent incident where a 14-year-old student stabbed his teacher to death in a classroom shook me. What is happening to our children? Where are we going wrong? A lot has been written on this issue since that day. There were very good articles by teachers, parents and others in The Hindu during the week following that black day.
When we try to revolt and change one concept, it has a string effect and does a lot of damage to so many other things that we may realize too late! We shifted base from rural places to urban places. We came out of large extended families and starting living with just our parents and our children. Many of us have shifted out of this system too and started living only with our children, that too only until they turn adults! Our grandparents had dozens of children, while our parents limited their families to three, four and five children. We restricted the number to just two children but many of us these days have just one child. Our lifestyle has changed a lot. From a set-up, when the entire family of 15-20 members sat on the floor and purely home-made food was served by loving elders, we have reached a stage, where each of us take a bite of some stored food (most of the time, tinned food), after heating it in the microwave oven. Many children of today have never tasted many delicious food items that our grandmothers cooked on firewood stove after lengthy procedures of picking, roasting, grinding, steaming, cutting and so on! It was a pleasure for the women of those times to cook delicious food for the entire family and serve everybody sumptuously. I never heard my grandmother crib or complain any time, though today looking back, many of us think she might have suffered in the kitchen for most of the day!
Whether women then were taken for granted, subdued and suppressed – that is an entirely different issue to be discussed separately. But large extended families were a lot more supportive emotionally, physically, financially and socially to all the members. The senior citizens and children lived in secure homes with so many people to attend on them. Today senior citizens are either leading lonely, sick lives in their large urban homes or driven to live in senior citizen homes under the control of an NGO, while children too lead lonely lives in posh homes, while their parents are away on work or stealthily seek the company of wrong persons for emotional support! Prof.L.S.Seshagiri Rao once said that each word that we use has its own history and has evolved due to some practices. Thus when the practice goes, the word too loses its meaning or importance. Thus today’s children can never understand what ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sisterhood’ really means, because they do not have own sisters or brothers. They will never know the real fun in ‘sharing’, because they need not share anything with anybody. ‘Nieces’ and ‘nephews’ will become terms of the past for them. Similarly, ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’! They would never know what it is like to experience the unconditional love of grandparents, for they never live with them. They find them ‘interfering’ and ‘boring’, even during the short spans of time that they visit them.
The result of all this is a total change in the attitudes of the children. They have become intolerant, restless and hasty. They are very intelligent and smart but many a time, they are misguided and directionless. In our days, our parents felt they were responsible for the welfare and well-being of all children and not just their own children. So, if they find any child committing any mistake, they took the liberty of correcting him and the child too took that in the right spirit. Today, we cannot correct our own children, let alone other children! How disgusting it is to live in a family, where the husband and wife live on a weak link of marriage that can be broken at the drop of the hat and the parents and children have to behave with utmost care with each other, lest the children run away from home or commit suicide or turn back and murder the parents! What is a family, where the husband has no liberty to just relax and do what he wants on one evening, the wife has no liberty to demand participation from her husband on some day when she is tired, the parents have no liberty to admonish their little son or daughter for anything and the children have no liberty to share all their woes with their parents, fearing admonishment! In our days, our grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins had all these liberties!
My parents taught me to indulge in only those things that I was not ashamed of or afraid of proclaiming to my own conscience. There ends the matter! They never gave us long lectures on how we should lead our lives. They just took us as partners and led their lives in a way that we could emulate. We got no private time with parents. Everything was public in a family. We discussed about our days during our dinner time when all of us ate together. Even if we had committed some mistake and knew that we would be admonished, we were not afraid and would share our experience at the dinner table. Our parents too reacted with restraint and just warned us then and there, without waiting for some opportune private moment. There ended the episode. We both forgot that issue and carried on. We never felt ashamed of being warned or scolded by any elder, let alone our own parents, in front of others, for we felt they had the authority and responsibility to do so. Everything was made to seem very simple and handled very efficiently. Forget about serious offenders like alcoholics or drug addicts! All the others led simple lives with no great expectation. When we all get together even today, we discuss with fun of the experiences of the naughtier ones amongst us, who got caught by elders or teachers and punished.
Everything has changed today. I cannot scold or spank a child, even if he is behaving in an unruly manner and causing damage to expensive property or self, just to divert his attention in order to stop him immediately. No parent wishes to hurt his own offspring badly, unless he is a lunatic or a drunkard or a psychologically disturbed person. I heard of a helpless father, who has been separated from his family in the U.S., only because he spanked his 10-year-old son for some misdemeanor. It is sad that we need laws to lead our personal lives inside our homes. Of course we need laws to protect the helpless from abnormal human behavior but if we have to think of a law every moment of our life, how easy would that be? What happened to our natural skills of parenting, which we have imbibed from our forefathers? Were they all wrong? Are we all spoilt? Are we utter failures? Where to draw the line? Life has become most complicated today, though technology claims to have made our lives very easy!

Sudha Narasimhachar