‘Let It Be’ And More Parenting Lessons From The Pandemic
Indian parents, who measure everything in terms of success/failure, need to change their evaluation paradigm, writes Priya Ramani.
I hope I’m not jinxing anything by writing this but, this week my child went back to school.
She has been at home for nearly two years now – her school was among the most cautious in Karnataka, opening its doors only occasionally for a weekly trip back. The children were sent home a couple of weeks after Indian migrant workers began the long walk to their homes, thousands of kilometres from the cities in which they worked, many making the gruelling journey without food.
In these two years, Indians have battled poverty, unemployment, abuse, hunger, grief, and divisiveness as their country morphed into a more toxic, harder-to-survive version of itself.
At 11, my daughter has just been introduced to the Constitution in her history class, even as she bears witness to the erosion of constitutional values around her. Thanks to everything she’s seen and heard these past two years, she knows that no matter what the preamble says, justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity are not equally applicable to all citizens. That’s probably been her biggest learning through this time.
I know they’re limited by the syllabus but it’s time our children’s teachers stopped talking about caste like it is something that existed only in the time before Christ was born. At least back then there was euphoria around the birth of Buddhism, a religion whose teachings spread in the language of the people and one that was followed by both kings and their subjects. In 2022, the hierarchies seem hopelessly entrenched.
Most of our children got a few lessons in grief these past two years. They lost loved ones, had to give up meeting friends, and were forced to abandon the games/sports they loved to play. Their learning worlds shrunk to the size of their screens though, unlike most Indian children, at least they had a screen, easy access to the internet, and even a room to study.
A young student attends an online class at her home in Mumbai, on Oct. 24, 2020. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)
Some lucky children got pets to snuggle with as parents relaxed the rules during the pandemic. In addition to adopting an abandoned ginger kitten, my daughter practised compassion in her daily interactions and voluntary work with the street dogs in our neighbourhood.
Deepti Menon, a programme manager with an IT firm, says she learned to pick her battles and “let it be”. “I stopped insisting my first grader finish her classwork in class. I also learned that she will answer what she wants to and it may not always be right.”
Now more than ever, says Deepika Mogilishetty, mother of two teenage girls, it’s time to be kinder to ourselves and others.
“School systems needs support and teachers need holding. The judging attitude of Indian middle-class parents is harming our kids more than doing good,” she says, adding that privileged parents need to be braver about sending their children back to school.
Indian parents, who measure everything in terms of success and failure, need to change their evaluation paradigm.
School girls wear maks in Gurgaon (Photograph: PTI)
“Stop acting as if the last two years didn't impact our kids,” says Mogilishetty, who works at the intersection of access, learning, technology and social change. “Allow each child to pick up from where they can. Don’t expect everyone to dust off and run.”
Family time hit a record high as we were forced to interact 24/7 with each other. “School and friends are usually a refuge from the tightness of home, and vice versa,” says journalist Sandhya Menon, a mother of two teenagers. But even though everyone got on each other’s nerves it was okay. Children learned that “just because you fight doesn't mean you don't love or can’t be kind”.
Menon says one of the takeaways from this time was that she talked about everything from the money crunch and feeling stressed to PMS and missed homework deadlines. “Constant and consistent communication on where we are as a family at the moment,” she says. “Talk it through and work with them instead of laying down the law.”
A woman works at a laptop computer on the floor of a bedroom as a child sits alongside reading a book, in Bern, Switzerland, on Aug. 22, 2020. (Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg)
As I learned to write through chaos, with my little girl seeking my attention every few minutes, she learned to be okay with being bored. I said yes more frequently and she became more accepting of my nos.
She made me bed tea and breakfast, I massaged her limbs every night. I enjoyed her seeking me out as much as I felt frustrated about not having enough space to work. She often called me mean, but grabbed any opportunity to wrap herself around me. Our screams reverberated through the house, our pyaar was exchanged silently. We stopped looking for reasons to order ice cream.
In the pre-Covid world, I used to be the kind of parent who would worry about how to engage her child for two months in the summer holidays. Now I’m not fazed by the fact that in seven weeks, the school will close for the summer.
PS: Looks like I did jinx it because after the joy of physical school that lasted exactly one day, school was shut again due to the harassment of hijab-wearing students by Hindu extremists in educational institutions across Karnataka.
Priya Ramani is a Bengaluru-based journalist and is on the editorial board of Article-14.com.
The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.
