Mothering Today - Changes and Challenges

Mothering Today – Changes and Challenges
‘Mother’ is a very holy word. A child’s first letter in almost all languages of the world is ‘ma’ and hence in most of the languages mother is denoted by a word starting with this sound. ‘Amma’, ‘Maa’, ‘Mom’, ‘Mayi’ and so on. A child’s first human contact is with the mother (of course after the brief time that a doctor helps the mother deliver the child). The child spends the maximum time with the mother during the first few months and also during the first few years.
When I was looking for a play home to admit my 3-year-old daughter, my uncle told me, ‘a child has to spend the first six years with the mother at home. What’s the great hurry? There is some meaning in fixing the age of a child to be admitted into class one at six. It is at home that a child feels secure and learns a lot during these years’.
I could not afford the luxury of keeping my daughter at home, as I was a working mother and had to rejoin duty when my daughter was just 3 months old. Thus I had to find some way of keeping her engaged for at least a few years during the day to help the caretaker, i.e., my mother in my case.
Mothering during my mother’s time was very different. I stayed home until I was six years old and my mother shared a lot of her experiences with me, though I was 13 years younger to her. I learnt a lot during this time, which stays etched in my mind till today. She treated me as her friend. Since she did not go out to work, she spent all the time bringing me up with care. When my siblings were born, I helped my mother by taking care of them and also in running errands for my mother. As the eldest daughter, very soon in my life, I had to take the responsibility of sharing the chores of the family with my parents like shopping, cleaning, gardening, baby-sitting, tutoring, etc. All this helped a lot in building my own personality and maturing as a responsible adult. My parents hid no problem of the family from me. I knew my parents’ limitations as far as financial demands were concerned. I knew how my father was sending away a major portion of his income to his parents and was running our family within the balance on a tight-rope walk. Hence, I have never ever demanded anything from my parents or ever felt bad that I did not get anything. I was contented with whatever they did for me, for I knew they did their best within their capacity.
My parents brought us up with a lot of love but reprimanded us whenever we made mistakes. They never physically beat us but they definitely disciplined us orally. Not just our parents, parents of our friends too exercised their rights as elders and disciplined us whenever the need arose. Our parents had no qualms about that, because they too took that liberty in case of my friends. Likewise, our teachers too infused values in us. They did reprimand us when the occasion arose. For instance, once when my teacher came to know that I had commented negatively about her marking, presuming that she was biased towards someone, she spent one whole hour advising me how I should not make such presumptions and build pre-conceived notions about people. Parents of naughty children gave the liberty of even spanking the children, to the teachers, for they thought that the children could be better disciplined at schools.
Things have really changed a lot over all these years. Mothering is no more a natural skill. There are too many interventions from the media, from other cultures and from books. Children are exposed to too many factors very early in their lives. First of all children often grow in nuclear families. Many families have just one child, unlike in our days when we were three, four, five or even more. Single children are pampered a lot, especially if both the parents are employed and the children have to stay in care-centres. They are very protected and never allowed to experience any kind of discomfort, mostly because the parents have hefty pay packets and they feel they can fill the gap that is created by their absence at home with materialistic possessions. Every house is full of varieties of toys, while in our childhood, we hardly had a skipping rope and a ball! Many families have a full-time help to take care of the child.
Yet, with all this, children do not enjoy as much as we all did in our childhood and very often turn out into very arrogant, stubborn and snobbish brats. Recently, a two-year-old child made such a ruckus over a particular trouser that he wanted to wear, which was wet, that the mother had to forgo attending a wedding in the family! As per the present system, children are not supposed to be disciplined using force of any kind. Children have become very sensitive and intolerant. Other than their parents, they cannot take comments from any other elder, be they their own grandparents or uncles or aunts or teachers!
Most of the mothers are employed in demanding jobs and are able to spend hardly a few wakeful hours with the child. Many of them employed in the IT industry or medical field are not fully free even at home. They have to answer calls or attend video conferences. The child is therefore pampered with hi-fi gadgets for company. Since the mother has limited time, she meets all the demands of the child, without analyzing whether they are reasonable. Thus the child can never take a ‘no’ for an answer. As a child, the demands do not seem ‘big’ or dangerous but as soon as the child steps into teenage, the demands get bigger and sometimes dangerous that the parents have to refuse. But, it is too late now. The children have already grown to expect all their demands to be met and when they hear a ‘no’ for the first time, they are shocked and react very seriously. Teenage suicides are on the increase. A small failure in an exam can also not be taken by a child lightly. If not, the children revolt and leave home. They get into bad company and stray away.
If a child crosses all these stages safely and settles down in a good job, we cannot relax. We see so many well educated youth committing murders or suicides unable to bear the disappointment in their love or career life. Today’s mother cannot or does not teach sharing to her children, as very often she has only one child and even if there are two, she has enough to meet the needs of both the children without any limit. It is a real challenge for the mother because she has very little time and means to infuse good values in her child. In our days, there were other elders in the family or neighbourhood to help mothers. But these days, families are not extended and neighbours mind their business. There are too many dangers in letting others interfere in our children’s lives, because we hear of so many cases of child abuse. The teachers too have changed their ways of handling children, because today’s sensitive children are too conscious about their ego and cannot receive any negative comments from anybody.
Thus the changes in our life-style have resulted in these challenges in parenting. The kind of exposure that today’s child gets is unlimited and we, as parents lag behind them in many ways. Thus if a mother tries to discipline a four-year-old with mild spanking, he may call the police and report of being abused. Today’s child will not blindly accept his parents’ advice as golden, as we did in our days. Even if we did not like anything that our parents advised, we did not answer back or question them. We accepted their words though with dissatisfaction. Much later in life, we analysed such situations and felt they were right, though.
Right from feeding, clothing, schooling, health care and everything about a child, things have become very complicated these days. We were all admitted to schools nearby. That was the only criteria. Our parents did not worry too much about our career and future and took life as it came. But today, parents do a lot of research to put their children to schools. Parents get so tensed about the progress of their children, the courses that they take and their achievements. In the bargain, the children too get tensed up.
Our parents treated many small ailments like common colds and fever with home medicines but today because of advanced medical facilities and so many new diseases, nothing is treated lightly. We ate whatever our parents fed us with love. My mother cooked whatever she felt was the best for us and for the budget of the family, hardly thinking about the ‘balanced diet’ concept! The food used to be tasty and fresh. We hardly ate out and thus had no option but to eat well when fed. But today, children get exposed to so much outside food so early in their lives that they get fussy and choosy. Mothers with limited time thus are forced to feed junk food most often, as that is what will comfort their adamant children!
I dread mothering my children in today’s world!
Sudha Narasimhachar