Mumsofflaw: Your Child’s Life Ain’t Lego. Don’t Try To Build It.

At one point I thought I could become an excellent politician. And I remember going upto my dad and saying, “Baba can I become the prime minister of India?â€_x009d_ My dad almost choked on his tea and answered in the midst of a coughing bout, “No beta you are too honest for that!â€_x009d_ Crushed, but not wanting to give up I asked what’s honesty got to do with it Dad? He calmly replied, â€_x009d_You will have to manage the whole parliament, there’s no way you can keep your integrity intact and do that. There may be a situation where you will need to lie or ignore your conscience and do what is best only for you, and convince everyone that it is actually for their betterment, will you be able to that? Or there may be times when there are extremely important issues which you should deal with, like the uniform civil code, or unemployment or poverty or illiteracy but these won’t get you the vote banks, so you may have to come up with idiotic concepts and campaigns like selfies with whoever, or a large scale mopping and cleaning abhiyaan, and at times even embarrass the entire nation with heavy duty PDA towards other world leaders, doubt you can do all that!â€_x009d_ I thought long and hard and realised as always Baba was right. Thus, ended my political career.

Image Source: kidsthinkaboutit.com

Next day I woke up with a new idea! I caught hold of my brother and asked him what exactly are the requisites in order to become a high ranking government officer, the really cool kind. As politely as he could he told me that one needed to be extremely intelligent and an expert mathematician to even think of this. And intelligence apart, he said one also needed to know how to completely disregard concepts like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘environment friendly’. He explained that I would have to be good at identifying lush green plots of land or clear blue water bodies and ruin them in the name of development.

Confident that my mom will help me, I went to her and said, “Aai, I’ve decided to step into Bollywoodâ€_x009d_ and pat came my mums reply, she said “I think you are very pretty but I’m your mom, so my opinion doesn’t count, Bollywood is more of a public platform you see! And beauty apart, you will also need to get rid of your rational thinking to have any hope of signing even half a movie ever which requires you to break into a jig every time the director doesn’t know what to do next with the slim story. Maybe you can become a critic, but then again we raised you to be open minded and aware, so I doubt you can do that!â€_x009d_ I walked away wondering did my mom just tell me I don’t look good enough?!

Image Source: papyrus.greenville.edu

Irritated, I thought I will sort my own life and promised myself that someday I will find my calling! It felt like, what my family was telling me was that since I’m an average girl who does not really excel academically (or in the looks department), I can’t do anything. But as time went by I realised that they were only nudging me towards a vocation which highlighted my strengths. Isn’t that what parenting is all about? All of us grew up in homes which were ‘no pressure’ zones, where not only did our parents recognise our strengths and weaknesses, they also taught us to accept our weaknesses and nurtured our strengths.

Completely opposite to what we are doing today. Every child has to excel in everything that we, the parents want. A child’s natural aptitude is of no value. Every parent wants a prodigal child. No wonder kids today are growing into crazy stressed out and emotionally challenged adults. Suicides, depression, substance abuse, all of these seem to be the effects of our lopsided education system and over ambitious tiger moms are not helping!

Sad isn’t it. There is a world full of opportunities for our young ones, and yet all we want for them is ‘first class’. From the minute they are born, we raise them only to be successful. While success isn’t bad, what about happiness, contentment, joy, positivity? Where did all these life changing elements go? No wonder the world is going mad!

One life, love it, live it, don’t build it! It isn’t Lego you see!

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