Rules for kids – and moms and dads too!

My mother is the undisputed queen of the no-rules style of parenting (which I mentioned in my last column). With her, it wasn’t so much a conscious parenting decision as an inherent personality thing. She has tremendous faith in human beings. And honestly feels that given a decent home, nice role models, and lots of love, kids will behave themselves and grow up into perfectly proper, successful adults. You never ever need to shout at them or discipline them. They just know what is right and will do all it takes to keep their parents happy. Needless to say, my mum’s sense of filial duty runs deep enough to reach the earth’s core. Mine barely reaches the floor below my bed.

Mum’s approach to parenting emerges from her personal beliefs. Be fair to employees, be super-generous and loving to your children, your relatives, and they’ll all be fair and kind back to you. I can now safely say that everyone in my mum’s life – from her employees and maids, to a few of her relatives and certainly both her kids – has worked hard to prove her entirely wrong.

So when it comes to parenting, I go with the lay-down-some-rules school of thought – for us and our kids. But like most parents today I find it hard to do actually lay down the rules. Unlike parents before us, we are – I suspect – a bit insecure about our love. We are richer, busier and more distracted by shopping, social networks and personal gadgets. That’s probably why we are constantly searching for ways to prove to our kids that we love them.

We tend to overcompensate, over-stimulate, over-school the child, while indulging their every whim, and refusing to give them reality checks. I know of parents who work 12-hour-days and return to sleeping kids, only to rush them to malls on weekends and go mad buying clothes and toys. Going to the park and tossing a ball seem so uncool somehow.

In another form of over-compensation, helicoptering mums rush their kids from class to class, trying to channel their own ambitions into their offspring. This parental greed often needs a little bribery. My daughter’s friend has figured out that every time he is selected for an extra-curricular activity, his delighted mum will hand him stuff ranging from money for a treat to an iPad. And then her anxiety starts: ‘What if he is dropped because he doesn’t practice?’ He’s six, and willful, and refuses to practice at home. Crisis! More prizes, gifts and punishments are dangled over his head because – interested or not – succeed he must. After all, it’s mom-vs-mom, and the kids are canon fodder. Sadly, by giving him these ‘rewards’, she’s actually depriving her kid of the joy of taking part simply for the love of it.

Last week, a mum asked me my favourite question (and if you’ve been following this column, you’ll get the joke): ‘My child doesn’t read; what to do?’ I replied carefully, in words of two syllables each, explaining the hows and whys of reading and developing an interest in it in children. At the end of half an hour, with me telling the lady all about literacy techniques and the need to patiently read to children, her eyes had glazed over.

I stopped speaking for a bit and waited. I knew what would follow. ‘So… Do you take classes for this?’ No, I said, I don’t, because it’s important that parents read to their kids. She smiles suddenly – inspiration has struck, no doubt. ‘Do you know of anyone – say a college student – who could come home and read to my kid?’ Since I didn’t, the conversation winds up with smiles and pointless thanks.

Being a parent is hard work. Being a half-way decent parent – someone who gives their child a grounded upbringing, doesn’t pressure them, and is kind and yet firm with them – is harder still.

Here’s hoping most of us make the cut!

Forgive us our sins!

As a parent, there’s just one thing I’m totally certain of: no matter what you do, you’re wrong. You’re either too strict, or too lenient, or too nice or too nasty, too loving or too emotionally reserved. There’s more good news: you’ll only realize the complete error of your ways about 15 years from now, when you look back with hindsight, and see all the things you did that you shouldn’t have. Don’t ask me to prove this – I just know it the way a flower knows when to bloom, or the way we know that every year, come monsoon, Mumbai’s roads will feel like the surface of the moon.

You always start off with the hope of becoming your ideal of the best-ever parent – the best-pal parent, the pushiest parent, the most-free-spirited parent, etc. I aspired to be a combination of the parents I had plus the sort of parents I wished I had. After seven years of trying, I can freely admit to absolute, humbling failure. I had a wonderful role model in my mother, but turns out I’ve all her few faults and none of her virtues.

One of the things I know I’d love to give my child is the sense of freedom that my mum instinctively gave me. The feeling of total acceptance was the best thing about growing up in my family. I don’t remember mum ever laying down the rules or yelling at us (though her mother – my grandmum – more than made up for that).

But growing up with very few rules unfortunately leaves you unequipped for the harsher realities of life and work. So my totally inspired and unique plan was to raise my child with all the love and freedom my mum gave, plus a sense of discipline.

It didn’t quite work out. Turns out that I have my grandmother’s hissy tongue and temper, and her need for discipline, plus my own inherent laziness and indiscipline. And while I refuse to push my kid hard to succeed, I don’t have my mum’s true sense of laissez-faire either. I do however have her high levels of maternal anxiety. As Himmesh Reshammiya once said: It’s Complicated.

As parents are we very different from our own? I think we spoil our kids more – we are wealthier, busier, and it’s easier to buy toys than to give kids time. In 15 or 20 years this will come back and bite us on our butts for sure. Our parents were also a lot more secure about their feelings for us. Whether they were beating us up or spoiling us silly, they did it with the firm conviction that they knew what was right. Or maybe it just seems that way now. Perhaps each generation of parents has to re-learn the skills of passing on the rules of living.

Sometimes parents succeed and raise happy, well-adjusted people, and sometimes, they fail. I remember reading Philip Larkin’s (1922-1985) poem This Be the Verse, and going saucer-eyed at the eff word in it. I didn’t really get it then. Now, with a little more perspective on what it is like to be both a parent and a child, I do.

In three very tight stanzas, Larkin spells out his bitterness:

They **** you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

The poem becomes kinder towards parents in the second stanza – after all, he writes, they were screwed up by their parents too. The solution? Stop having kids and deepening the ‘coastal shelf’ of misery. It doesn’t work, of course, because nature’s urge to multiply is stronger than good poetry!

Sometimes I think the greatest lesson we can teach our children is how to be kind – so that when they grow up, they can look back at our mistakes with a large measure of forgiveness!

The Big Fat Indian Birthday

In the six-odd years that I have been chaperoning my kid to birthday parties, I’ve figured that party-wise, there are broadly two kinds of city parents: those who work on their kids’ birthday parties with the same determination that soldier-ants take to gathering food, and those who, like the grasshopper in the folktale, simply outsource the stress.

The soldier-ant-type of parent (mostly the mother) frets, plans and slogs for the birthday party, tearing out her hair and getting irritable bowel syndrome on the evening before. Fathers are usually assistant-sloggers, perfect for random running around and sacrificing their pollution-weakened lungs to blow clusters of balloons.

The grasshopper-type parent, meanwhile, hands it all over to a new breed of professional – the event manager. Mum and dad make a few phone calls, sign a few cheques, and go for a film or a pedicure. The event manager will take care of everything from food and ‘games’ to ‘décor’ and return gifts.

It’s weird, but both grasshoppers and soldier-ants take distinct pride in their ‘different’ parties. Stoically, the soldiers flaunt their small, home-made (everything from invites to the food and entertainment), parent-driven parties. The grasshoppers meanwhile take pride in the fact that their kids’ birthdays are large-scale, ‘exciting’ and more importantly, managed by the hired help. I’d like to state here that I’m a soldier-ant-mum, and I have my husband’s fatigued lungs to prove it.

Growing up in the ’70s, for us a birthday party meant paper plates, chips, a sandwich and a piece of lurid Mongini’s cake (unless your mum could bake). It meant money in an envelope which was pressed into the birthday kid’s hand, and went straight to his mum or dad. And it meant some noise, some Rasna, and ok-tata-bye-bye. It was held once every two or three years, when your folks felt they could afford a small do, and that you deserved a treat.

Welcome to the Noughties, to post-globalized India, where if it doesn’t hurt the wallet, it’s not just worth it. These days, even toddlers’ birthday parties are event managed, catered affairs, where excess is everything. Mummies making kids pass the parcel are actually a dying breed now – though the soldier-ants among us do try to hold on to this tradition desperately.

I’m quite an old birthday-party hand now, thanks to the kid. Five parties out of the ten we attend have one or more of the following:

1. a bouncy castle which teeters close to the sky and looks downright scary
2. glittery, eco-unfriendly, thermocol ‘princess’ banners featuring sundry Disney Princess/Spiderman/Ben 10 which are supposed to define the party’s theme
3. a young college-student-type who speaks with a weird accent straight out of an Andheri East call centre as the Master of Ceremonies – my daughter calls this person ‘the manager’
4. rehearsed performances by the birthday kid’s older sisters/cousins, featuring highly-sexualized Bollywood numbers – you cringe, but since the parents look at you like their child just ended world hunger, you nod and say, ‘Verrrry nice…’
5. a magic show (with frightened animals) + a tattoo artist + a caricaturist + a hair braider-and-colourer (sprays horrible chemical colours on your child’s head, but never mind)

Overall, it’s meant to feel like a carnival, a mindless motion of money and ‘enjoyment’ so that the birthday kid, her friends and their parents know exactly how much the hosts can spend. After the kids have run through the counters, it’s time for the ‘games’, sundry toe-curl-inducing competitions. Like ‘pick the dad with the biggest paunch’ or asking the father of the birthday kid to choose the best dancer among the assembled mummies. Sometimes the ‘manager’ makes the kids dance competitively, handing out prizes to 13-year-olds who shake it like Sheila.

At the party of a 4-year-old boy I attended, after professional clowns had romped on the stage and left, we were in for a hitherto unknown treat (the ‘clown item’ was new, but what followed made it seem common-place). The MC invited the headmaster of the child’s playschool to come up and ‘say a few words about the birthday boy’. Huh? The guests’ jaws dropped in unison. Listening to a speech in praise of someone who has just about stepped out of diapers was a mildly surreal experience.

Return gifts are serious business these days and can make or break a mum’s street cred. The event-managed do’s have piles of Disney bags, folders, water-bottles, tiffin-boxes and melamine-laced plates-and-spoon-sets. It comes as no surprise that every party has the same caboodle of plastic crap, made, no doubt, in the dark by-lanes of Shenzhen, China. And brought to you via Crawford Market.

In a perfect world, a birthday party would mean experiencing something new and life-changing. Learning about fish or butterflies, a trip to a farm, a nature walk or a fun session at the museum, or a craft activity at home. So that everyone, adults and kids alike, could celebrate the milestone in a memorable way. Till that happens, let’s at least work towards less wasteful, more conscious and aware birthday parties. It’s a dirty job, but some-mum’s got to do it!

i love chembur

If you don’t know Chembur, then praising it is a bit like trying to sell you a date with an unattractive cousin purely on the basis of their wonderful personality. Because honestly, if you’ve lived here – however briefly – you’re bound to love Chembur’s tree-lined roads, its few remaining old Goan bungalows, and its still-extant sense of neighbourhood.

But if you’ve never lived here you’re likely to get caught up in small details like the atomic reactor close by, near the Turbhe (Trombay) Hills; fertilizer factories and refineries around us; and the noxious dumping ground further north in Deonar. All very bad for health, I’ve heard, but like others who live here, I prefer the blissful path of denial. Because seriously, if an atom is split behind a verdant hill and I don’t hear it, it’s not anything to go nuclear about, is it?

Unlike the atomic reactor, the Deonar Dumping Ground definitely makes its presence felt – especially if you’re downwind. In fact, garbage is why the city first laid railway lines to Chembur in 1906, bringing its refuse into Deonar, and with it, the start of construction. Goan Catholics came here between the late ’20s and the ’30s, followed by the Sindhis in the ’40s and South Indians in the ’60s. Hemmed in by the new middle-class colonies, Chembur’s original villages retracted shyly, and only a few still survive as gaothans. Each of these parts – the Marathi, the South Indian, the Sindhi and the Goan – has a distinctive ethos. It’s wonderful to walk through the localities and get a sense of what it must feel like to live among people who eat, drink and pray like each other.

But you mustn’t think of Chembur as a bucolic hick-town. We’ve been groped by glamour in our day. Raj Kapoor built the RK Studio here in 1950, and between the ’60s to the ’80s, stars like Ashok Kumar, Nalini Jaiwant, Shivji-ke-filmi-avtar Trilok Kapoor, the redoubtable Kishore Sahu, and lovable Dhumal lived here. Shilpa Shetty was my junior in school (though I personally have no recollection of this, but hey, that was many surgeries ago!) and so, they tell me, was Vidya Balan . Anil Kapoor and Shankar Mahadevan attended the boys’ school across the ground.

Neighbourhood gems:

Food at the Station: The market at Chembur Station has a powerful pull. Probably because it’s actually a foodcourt disguised as a shopping haven. Satguru Pavbhaji makes the stuff piping hot and you wash it down with sweet, cold mosambi juice. Exactly the balm you need after you’ve dodged cars, hawkers, and people’s elbows to buy veggies. A particularly tasty Mumbaiyya version of bhel puri, made in spectacularly smelly environs, can be had at Gupta Bhel. Across the road, after the sun sets, the mutta dosai works some egg magic on the dosa theme. At Hotel Saroj, the Sweet Nazis will order you to queue up for their yummy faraal, and no talking in the line back there.

Sindhi camp: Morarji Desai, it is said, first looked at the rolling greens of the military-owned Chembur Camp area and decreed that it should be used to house Sindhi refugees. Slowly, houses, schools and eateries mushroomed on the stretch outside the Golf Club. Sindhi Camp’s ‘food mile’ is the culinary expression of a nostalgic community, and everyone’s invited to eat the chaats at Jhama and Sindh Paani Puri House, and the kheema and paya at King’s or Sobhraj. The man at the counter in Jhama is stern, but ask nicely, and he might tell you that Raj Kapoor often took their gulab jamuns to Russia.

Mallu joints: Built in the ’60s for the employees of Burmah Shell, the buildings of ‘Shell Colony’ didn’t meet the company’s standards. So the flats were sold in the open market to working-class families – mostly Malayalee. With time, some phenomenal Mallu eating joints grew around the area – like ‘Jose’ under the railway bridge, which served marvelous shark-fin curry and hot jeera water (it’s shut now). Pradeep near Sawan Bazaar makes a phenomenal beef fry, and at Sunny’s (opposite ‘Hot Baby’ Rasila Bar) fish is conjured into a mean ‘meen curry’.

Soul watch: In Chembur you could pray up a multi-faith storm. Apart from the many dargahs and the Turbhe mosque (one of the city’s oldest), Chembur has the stately OLPS Church and many Syrian Christian churches. The most interesting among its temples is the 400-year-old Bhoolingeshwara Temple near the Fine Arts Hall. It is chief among Chembur’s six or seven gaondevs, village temples which once stood at the ‘borders’ of the smaller villages here. Chembraayi, the gaondevi of Chembur, a shapeless stone form, wears a benign smile and presides over us from a ceramic-tiled room in Charai village, Sindhi Camp.

Green memories: Though Chembur’s tree cover has reduced dramatically of late, it still has many trees, and trees mean birds. All over Deonar and Chembur, you can sit in your balcony and see golden orioles, crow pheasants, magpie robbins, red-vented bulbuls and owls. Industrial development around Mahul has meant that not too many residential buildings came up there, leaving the mangroves for aquatic birds. Take a fishing boat from the Mahul Jetty to get up close and personal with Mumbai’s annual pink visitors, the flamingos.

Of sleeping... and swearing!

The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest
And the creatures who crawl, run and creep.
I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bull***t. Stop lying.
Lie the **** down, my darling, and sleep…

Not my lines, but lord, how I wish they were. Novelist Adam Mansbach, exhausted with trying to get his daughter Vivien to sleep, wrote the longish, cathartic poem Go the F*** to Sleep. While it rhymes like a children’s picture book and is drawn by Ricardo Cortés to look like one, it is not to be read out to your child. Not unless you want her to grow up with the vocabulary of a truck driver. Because this best-selling ‘children’s book for adults’ generously uses the F-word about kids’ reluctance to fall asleep.

I can see your raised eyebrows from here. The thing is, till you have tried to put a reluctant child to sleep, you have NO IDEA how tough it is. Most young parents learn – the slow, hard, humbling way – that kids have their own body clocks. It takes you two years or so to recognize this and officially give up hope. You may have dinner plates to wash or a cure for cancer to invent or your limbs may be falling off from sheer exhaustion. But baby refuses to shut shop till she wants to. There are still has so many toes and fingers to play with, and so much of your hair to pull. It’s enough to make you want a village to raise your child with!

Sleep patterns vary. Some kids sleep at 8 pm and wake up shiny-faced at 6 am. Some young debauches bounce off the walls till 12 am and then crash, only to come around at about 10 am the next day. Mine sleeps late and wakes up early. At 11.45 pm, when my eyelids start to close in the middle of some story she is telling me, she pulls them apart so I can pay her more attention. At an obscene 6.45 am, she’s up again (only on holidays), having remembered something she forgot to tell me last night.

Sleep deprivation, I have realized, is a fairly refined device of torture. A friend’s mother who had two kids in quick succession spent the next few years waking up at night for this one’s feeds and that one’s pee. She thought she would never ever sleep again, that her life would pass by in a miasma of tired sleeplessness. Or what Mansbach calls ‘…the frustration of being in a room with a kid and feeling like you may actually never leave that room again...’ Imagine, then, having twins or triplets.

As they grow, the exploration is more verbal. My kid isn’t obsessed with her toes any more; she is asking questions. How did cavemen have babies – there were no doctors to cut their tummies open, no? Why we have skin? Why are kids mean in class? Why are you mean to me? Can I be an actress? A dancer? Do taps need electricity? I know that the kind thing to do is to retire early, giving her the time to talk through her day. But life has this way of making bharta out of my best intentions, and invariably bedtime is fraught with a tug-of-war between my ‘Go-to-sleep!’ and her ‘Amma-one-last-thing!’

One of our unforgettable bedtime discussions featured this question: what are fathers for? To look after you, I reply, yours feeds and bathes you, no? Frustrated, she sits up. No, I mean before that – the mummy carries the baby inside her stomach. What is the daddy for? So she’s talking biology, I’m talking sociology. And to save myself time, I’m being thick too.

God knows I’m not shy of discussing anatomy. But at that time of the night, sleep and chores tugging at my mind, I want to, like Mansbach, be the bad parent and say, ‘Go the **** to sleep!’

Drop me a postcard!

Described as the ‘Best British Children’s Literature Blog’, Playingbythebook.net is written by Zoe Toft, a 37-year-old mother from the UK. A trained linguist and a self-confessed lover of dictionaries, Toft reviews picture books that she reads with her children. Interestingly, each review is accompanied by an activity inspired by the book. When Toft reviewed my book Nonie’s Magic Quilt, for instance, she merged it with making a quilt for her daughter.

Toft came up with an unusual idea last year. “My kids and I love receiving ‘proper’ mail,” she says. “There were many online postcard swaps, but none that the kids could participate in. So I thought up a swap where every postcard would include a children’s book recommendation, because sharing a favourite book is a great way of making a connection.”

The swap is structured so that each family sends cards to five families across the world. In turn, they receive cards from five other. The postcard can be printed or drawn, with a book recommendation. Effectively, ten books are talked about, and ten families find a window into each other’s lives.

Toft’s first postcard swap brought together over 250 families. “The toughest part is pairing up people, making sure everyone receives families from five different countries, with children of similar ages. The reward is hearing about the little connections they make. I don’t want to make the world any smaller, but I think it’s important we feel connected to each other.”

During the swap, Toft ‘met’ many people, including Sandhya L., a writer for Saffrontree.com, an Indian children’s-book-review site. Sandhya’s family sent cards to the UK, US, Singapore and Spain. Her daughter “was delighted to receive letters addressed to her. One came from the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean! In these days of instant communication, it was exciting to get post.”

Another new friend was homeschooling mom Bronwyn Lavery of Christchurch, New Zealand. Lavery set up a world map, marking the locations of families her kids connected with. “I told them about the distances each card would travel. We loved sharing our favourite books and searched for books that were recommended.”

When Christchurch had a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in April 2011, Toft got in touch with Lavery and heard that many families had lost their homes. Together, they paired families around the world with those in Christchurch, and, “Thanks to the kindness of strangers, we sent 565 books into welfare centres and care packages as well, so that the families would have something to enjoy as they rebuilt their lives.”

To find out more about the International Postcard Swap for Families and to participate, go to http://www.playingbythebook.net/?p=12489 (short url:
http://bit.ly/he4Q1Q) Or email zoe.toft@kuvik.net. The last date to register is May 17.

Vive La Différence

If you’re marrying someone from another ethnic group in India, two things could happen. Either your parents never talk to you again, or if they are nice, normal people, they will mutter hopeful homilies like, ‘Children of inter-caste-marriages are always very clever…’ Luckily, by the time everyone learns of the actual difficulties of living with differences, it’s way too late. As a Malayalee married to a Gujarati, I could tell you a bit about this.

We Mallus believe that drinking hot water boiled with jeera, dhania or sunth in summer actually cools the body down. Anyone wanting to drink ice-cold-water is morally weak – and asking for a sore throat. When we got married, for the longest time, our fridge saw a silent battle. He would put in water bottles to cool, I would take them out. My mum is still bewildered when my husband blanches at the Malayalee summer cooler: hot, pale-yellow, jeera-infused water.

This is probably because he comes from sunny Kathiawad. Where drinking cold water feels like a minor religious experience. My mother-in-law tosses ice-chunks into a large vessel of water and everyone drinks it. Shuddering with guilty joy, so do I.

Likewise, breakfast in a Mallu house is serious business. Idli, dosha, upma, appam, etc. In a Gujju house, breakfast is the time you kill, munching homemade naasta, because lunch – delicious hing-and-gur-tinged – is around the corner. When the sun sets, you want to eat light, and it’s time for a ‘prograam’. A bhel, bhajiya, dhokla or paani-puri no prograam. I watch awe-struck as the elderly polish off homemade fried snacks for dinner. If I gave a Mallu father-in-law bhajiyas for a meal, he’d probably go for the world plate-flinging record. Stuffing my face, I worried about being able to conjure up similar snacks when the in-laws visited us in Mumbai. Obviously, a square meal just wouldn’t do.

Then there are the specific-food-group-related hysterias. Featuring – in our case – rice and proteins. Mallus like their proteins killed, cooked in kilos of cokennut and served with red rice. To most Gujjus, proteins = dals, and dal is eaten not with rice – which is starchy, somewhat debauched – but with wheat.

We found all of it funny – till baby arrived. Then battles-lines were drawn. Rice versus wheat. Oil baths versus just baths. Ragi versus rava. Dal-paani versus rice-paani. Green bananas versus yellow bananas. Picking-a-name-off-the-top-of-your-head versus naming by rashi. Rubbing a stick of scented herbs with a bit of gold inside it and giving the baby a drop of the paste (Mallu colic cure) versus fainting at the suggestion (Gujju reaction).

And food-group snobbery again. My mother-in-law implored, ‘Dal is the best protein, no need for non-veg! At least don’t give her pig-meat!’ My mom enquired, ‘Just when do you plan to start fish-chicken for this child?’ Meanwhile, the fruit of my womb calmly refused Mallu staples like chicken, fish, steamed yellow bananas, jackfruit and rice kanji. She seemed predisposed to sev-gaanthiya, pasta, paneer, pijja, noodles, and still needs her daily Gujju staple: dal-bhaat-shaak-rotli.

Growing older makes you hanker for the ways of your childhood. It makes you want to reclaim some of the future for the past, by teaching your kids things you picked up unconsciously from your parents. I sometimes imagine a family where everybody drinks warm jeera-water and enjoys dried-fish pickle. My husband would probably like a wife who makes chhunda in summer and methi theplas in winter. However, despite our occasional longings for the familiar, it is with the unknown, the different, that we are charting a course. It’s a bit rocky, but it’s fun too.

Our mixed-up Gujyalee or Mallurati kid will, hopefully, find her own path through the minefield of her parents’ combined nostalgias. If she ever marries, though, I hope she goes all out on a limb. Brings home a son-in-law who grew up eating whale blubber or pickled goat intestines. The more different the better, I say.

In the long-forgotten past, I worked in a publishing house. With actual adults, politics, a cafeteria, and real gossip. But before I start weeping at those fond memories, let me move on to the one that inspired this article. Colouring books. Full of perfect, pre-drawn pictures, colouring books were our main money-spinners, and their status as such was sacrosanct.

Once, feeling a bit wild – or unwell maybe – I suggested doing an open-ended sort of art-and-activity book for children. Not the kind where the kid colours a smiling mouse, but one where she is encouraged to apply her mind as well. So you have, say, a tiger with a thought bubble, and the child has to figure out – and doodle – what the tiger might want to eat. Shooting Nazar-suraksha-kavach-type rays of condescension my way, the boss said, ‘Why parents buy activity and colouring books? So that children will do timepass. Not so that children will ask them what to draw.’ Point noted. I shut my gob.

Ten years later, working with kids has shown me that art can and should be seen only as a method of self-expression in children. Any adult intervention should be at the level of acting as a facilitator or trigger – and nothing more. To take joy in colours and explore materials should be the primary focus, rather than acquiring the ‘skills’ associated with making perfect pictures. Skill-based art classes – madly popular right now – teach kids 4 to 6-years-old how to draw and colour ‘well’. They come out making pretty pictures no doubt, but their natural and delightful uninhibitedness is pretty much ironed out of them.

Say the words ‘colouring books’ to my mild-mannered artist husband and he breaks into a tandav and threatens to rip your head off. These seemingly-innocent books – or the spawn of Satan as he calls them – meet two key parental desires: perfection in the child’s ‘performance’, and secondly, quiet engagement, or ‘timepass’. But the books leave no room for open-endedness, imagination and self-expression. They also pass on a subtle signal to kids: drawing is grown-up’s work, and should not be attempted by you. You should just colour. Neatly and within the lines.

So as a toddler, our kid was only given paper, paints, water and brushes. She messed around like Jackson Pollock on steroids. Skills, her father said, could be taught later. We were entirely smug about this till she returned bawling one day from pre-school. Colouring a printed picture within the lines had her flummoxed. Given colours and paper, she scribbled, rubbed, crushed, had fun. Unlike most kids in her class, she had never seen a colouring book and didn’t know that you couldn’t – at 4 – let your crayons stray.

It took a long time for that particular penny to drop. Colouring within the lines may be an artistically pointless pursuit, but to educationists, colouring with fat crayons is a good way to teach children better finger-control. Sighing at our over-reaction, we went out and bought colouring books. Gradually – with her kind teacher’s help – our child ‘caught up’ with her friends. Humble pie is delicious when the alternative is a teary child.

Now that she’s older, like others her age she draws stuff and builds stories around it. Silly, strange vignettes that probably pop into the head as the hands move (and her artistic tantrums are part of the package too, her friends’ mothers tell me). We’ve also discovered the Japanese artist Taro Gomi’s delightful doodling books. Open-ended and thought-provoking, they don’t just make time pass, they make it fly like Rajnikant on 3G.

It’s cruelly ironic that though we don’t send her to art tuitions, she shamelessly picks up colouring tips like shading from the art-tuition-going-kids at school. As an adult she’ll probably write about her kanjoos, oppressive parents who wouldn’t send her to art class at 4 and how deprived she felt about it.
Too bad. We’ll survive that, I hope!

Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which I reviewed some weeks back, is causing a sharp intake of breath among educationists everywhere. The book is about her life as an over-ambitious parent, and what disturbed me, personally, is that she is not the only hysterically ambitious parent out there.

Whether it’s Ms Chua in America, or Mrs Rao in Matunga, pushing kids to ‘reach their potential’ begins much earlier these days. Moms I meet at school look at me like I just crawled in from under a particularly grimy rock when I tell them that my 6-year-old has only just begun to learn basketball and music. I can see their antennae quivering: Neglectful Mom Alert!

One mom has been ‘showing’ her kid books of maths tables from the time he was 3; put him in Abacus classes by 4; ‘piano’ or keyboard classes (yes, it’s not just the humble ‘Casio’ anymore) by 4.5; and of course, chess by 5. Another, the mom of a 7-year-old musically gifted child, takes him for Hindustani, Carnatic, and ‘piano’ classes on alternative days, after he’s done seven hours at school. Being excessively liberal, she says, ‘If he finds it too much, I have told him to tell me.’ Yeah, right. See, kids live to please the adults in their lives. Practically everything is acceptable because they don’t know of alternatives. That’s why we, as parents, need to calm the heck down.

Among the favoured classes these days are ‘phonetics’ (doesn’t matter that the term is wrongly used), grammar, tuition, dance, music, Abacus, Vedic Maths, story-telling, creativity, taekwondo and chess. Having shoved their clueless kids into strangers’ homes, mummies enjoy a bit of that precious commodity – free time. And they’ve earned it by paying to have their kids ‘build their potential’ and ‘increase their confidence’, no? It doesn’t matter that being pressurized to do too much early in life can actually lead to anxiety and diffidence in kids.

Increasingly, psychologists tell us that unstructured time – when children hang about with friends or figure out ways to engage themselves – is important. Between school hours and various classes, what about this generation’s unstructured time? Most of us grew up with time which we were allowed to cheerfully waste. Turns out, that ‘wasted’ time – when we could do what we liked – is actually an important tool to de-stress and to build creativity.

The real risk with parents who ‘work so hard’ is that they start expecting rewards. If Aryaman doesn’t make the building aunties swoon at a ‘society function’, then why did we send him to all those Hindustani Music classes, yaar? And if he does sweep ’em off their feet, then, you know, how about Indian Idol next? Alarmingly, The Guardian’s Terri Apter notes that over-parented kids often grow up to be ‘compliant and devious’, ‘obsessed with grades and lacking interest in their subjects’.

Every generation gets the sort of writing on education which reflects its beliefs and aspirations. Maria Montessori, Rabindranath Tagore, Waldorf Steiner, Aurobindo, Gijubhai Badheka and others propagated a humanistic, benevolent approach to learning. The 70s had John Holt, who advocated rights for the young and homeschooling. It would be truly sad but telling if Amy Chua – who slaps and stresses-out her kids – were to write our generation’s educational classic!

Parenting is a bit of a power trip, and the nicest parents are those who don’t abuse the power they have over their kids’ lives. Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which I reviewed for this paper a couple of weeks back, is a memoir of her life as an over-ambitious parent. The book’s causing a sharp intake of breath globally, but what disturbed me, personally, is that Chua is not the only hysterical parent out there.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed reading the book, and I’m all for the reassurance and discipline that structure can give a child’s life. Heck, I even admired Chua’s take on western parenting, which, she says assumes fragility in the child; unlike the Asian style which assumes strength, and pushes the child to ‘succeed’. Nothing, she shreiks, is fun till you get good at it. So she pushes her two children to master the piano and the violin. At 3 years, when one defies her, she throws her out into the snow (and then begs her to come back). The older one goes on to play at the Carnegie Hall at 15, but used to, as a child, bite the piano’s legs out of stress.
I have a problem with parental ambition – you know, the sort where you try to fulfill your own dreams and make good your failures in life via your kids’ deeds. The moms I meet at school think that ours is a clear-cut case of parental neglect. One tells me that she has been ‘showing’ her kid was books of maths tables from the time he was 3; put him in Abacus classes by 4; keyboard classes (strangely, it’s called ‘piano’ these days) by 4.5; and of course, chess by 5. Another, the mom of a 7-year-old musically gifted child, takes him for Hindustani, Carnatic, and ‘piano’ classes on alternative days, after spending seven hours at school. I stop myself from saying, ‘What? No chess?’ and gawk when she adds, ‘If he finds it too much, I have told him to tell me.’ Yeah, right. See, kids live to please the adults who care for them. Practically everything is acceptable because they don’t know of an alternative. Which is why it’s crucial that we, as parents, calm the heck down.
Parents push young kids into ‘phonetics’, grammar, tuition, dance, music, Abacus, Vedic Maths, story-telling, taekwondo and chess these days, believing that they are ‘building their potential’ and ‘increasing their confidence’. In reality, being pressurized to do too much and to perform, can actually lead to anxiety early in life. More importantly, between school and the classes, what about precious, unstructured time? You know, play, for instance, where you interact with real human beings your own age and figure out the ways of the world? Increasingly, psychologists tell us that free, unstructured time – where you simply let children figure out ways to engage themselves – is one of the best gifts you can give your child. And if you think back, that’s how most of us grew up.
The real risk with parents who ‘do so much’ is that at some point they start expecting rewards for their ‘efforts’. Rewards mean certificates and public praise. And if those aren’t forthcoming, then the whole experience becomes a terrible pressure point. This happens to Chua’s daughter who gives up the violin after a final melt-down. The Guardian’s Terri Apter notes that over-parented children often grow up to be ‘compliant and devious’, ‘obsessed with grades and lacking interest in their subjects’.
The flip side of Chua’s nothing-is-fun-till-you’re-good-at-it principle, is simple: ‘You learn better when you’re having fun doing so’. Some of the joy of being a parent comes from discovering your child’s strengths – and weaknesses – as she grows up. Not from squeezing the last drop of energy and excitement out of him in the pursuit of some hidden talent!
A lesson indeed, for all of us post-globalization, aspirational, wanna-be-Tiger-Parents.