Parenting


Will Durant describes a parent’s take on a baby just born in Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God:
“See him, the newborn, dirty but marvelous, ridiculous in actuality, infinite in possibility, capable of that ultimate miracle— growth. Can you conceive it— that this queer bundle of sound and pain will come to know love, anxiety, prayer, suffering, creation, metaphysics, death?”

Then, as the kid starts growing up, the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do aspect of parenting kicks in:
“He learns by imitation, though his parents think he learns by sermons. They teach him gentleness, and beat him; they teach him mildness of speech, and shout at him; they teach him a Stoic apathy to finance, and quarrel before him about the division of their income; they teach him honesty, and answer his most profound questions with lies.”

And then we try and give them things and experiences that we didn’t get but believe would do them good. And so we make them learn swimming (it’s easy now when you’re a kid, we say) and wall climbing with harnesses (face and overcome your fears before you become too old).

And as Indians, we enroll them for Olympiad exams. Not with the intent of pushing them hard to win (not yet anyway), we tell ourselves, but to expose them to analytical reasoning and multiple choice tests.

However well-intended we may be, our kids almost always perceive things the way Calvin puts it, even if they can’t put it as well:
Well ok, if I’m being honest, then yes, there’s a little bit of what Calvin accuses too behind a lot of things we do as parents…

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarMay 24, 2019 at 9:58 AM

    Good point made! As usual Calvin can say it with a punch, followed by our smiles!! :-)

    Patenting has its ambiguities and imponderables no doubt, but parenting is an experience worth going through. It is both joyous in its own way and it has an inscrutable component of educating oneself in whatever ways. Those could be the major "pros" part of it; in general, one gives less importance to the "cons" part, because progeny is Nature's biological core issue and parents are by and large programmed to accept both the detailing and the difficulties of parenting.

    On the whole, life gives us the opportunity to feel the free-going goodness of being a child and the joy of being a parent. As a believer, I say, "Thank you God!"

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