Many urban parents in India are very anxious about their kids’ studies, and so am I. Most of us primarily go through similar stages of experiments as shown below:

Stage-1: Initially we start by assuming that we should not pressure our kids to study and give them free hand to relax and learn. We then start vilifying other parents who send their kids to school specializes on academics. It is the stage when we exclaim with pride, “Oh no, I don’t want my kid to go through such a burnout. My kid can’t take it!”

Stage-2: After several years on stage -1 we then start comparing the academic performance of our kid with the others. We slowly start to realize that our kids are performing poorly on academics in comparison to those we mocked! Here comes the backlash of our ideology against the outcome we see in front of our eyes! We are a bit devastated and feel like a sore loser! And then we behave like a lion humiliated and retracting from an earlier ideological standpoint!

Stage-3: From our so-called failures we now energise our efforts to win back the lost ground and compete with the next door kid! So, moving back to academics and moving back to the same “rigorous rote learning” scheme of things without any reconciliation effort or exploration!

Overall in these stages, aren’t we putting our own ambition above all and trying to earn some brownie points by shooting off our kids shoulder?

Most undemocratic, unreasonable and sad part of this whole process is that there is no conversation of sorts with the kid, with any educational experts or some child specialists! More sadly there are not much efforts from us to explore in educating ourselves on the very concept called Education! No, we even go one step further in owning the child’s whole existence just because we gave birth to her/him! We give ourselves all sorts of certificates to be an educationist, child specialist or what not! Things go totally out of hand when we give free hand to all kind of relations & friends to interfere in our child’s growth and upbringing!

Honestly speaking, in this whole experiment, two things that get grossly misunderstood are Education and Parenting! We rarely put any effort whatsoever to understand the very concepts, unlearn our ignorance and even safeguard our little ones from all the chaos that get into their life like an average parent! And behaving like every other average parents(repeating the same mistakes) doesn’t yield extraordinary results for sure! With such a degree of insensitivity & ignorance we as parents ultimately fail our kids! Overtime as a parent, we lose their trust, love and respect! And no one is happy at the end! Thanks for reading @rakshitmca

Dedication: This article is dedicated to people like Dr. Bhooshan Shukla, social scientist Dipankar Gupta etc. for writing on topics that make our society a better place to live!