Mr. and Mrs Roy were highly educated with a good position in an MNC. They had a son called Rohan. The parents were very cautious about their child rearing practices. They aspired to be perfect parents. Inorder to achieve this herculean task, they read many books on parenting, child rearing practices, also discussed Rohan’s growth and development with their friends. Being the only son, Rohan got full attention from his parents and all his demands were fulfilled. This is how days passed by.
After Rohan embarked on his professional journey, things started falling apart. He was dissatisfied with his job profile. It was difficult for him to follow orders and suffered from superiority complex. He continuously felt that his potential was not given due recognition in the company. This was a continuous process. He kept quitting and his parents supported him considering it a temporary phase. He failed to hold on to any job. After this feeling of being a failure which persisted for quite some time, he started drifting into depression. This irked the parents and they started questioning themselves that where did they went wrong in rearing Rohan ?
On the other hand, the Kapoor’s have two children. Mr. and Mrs. Kapoor have always tried to treat the children equally. The children were always showered separate gifts to avoid fights over sharing. However, this led to the rise of discontent and jealousy among children. The siblings always felt that the other sibling got a better gift. Each felt that the other one was the favourite child. They expressed this verbally as well as through their behaviour.
In both the examples , the children hail from different family backgrounds and share a common factor. All the three children received special treatment from the parents, in lieu of the fact that the parents wanted to be PERFECT PARENTS. But in spite of all this none of the children were PERFECT in their ways of life. Why did this happen? Every parent tries to provide the best to their children. They want to fulfill all their dreams and make them happy and successful. Then, why is the number of unsatisfied parents and individuals, suffering from dissatisfaction and discontent on the rise.
When all the demands of a child get fulfilled, they start nurturing a feeling of uniqueness. They start feeling that they are different from others and so they deserve to be treated specially even after they grow up. The maturity of the mind set of an individual and the level to which individuals can respond positively to real life situations and crisis depends on the rearing of the parents.
In the scenarios cited, let us try to understand the parents’ psyche behind the scene. Some of the reasons why parents try hard to fulfill most of the demands of the children is that they may have been deprived of these luxuries and special attention when they were children themselves. This also stems to the rise of insecurity among parents of not being able to perform their roles as parents perfectly. On the flip side, when parents treat children as a special entity, they push the children to the brink of self-centredness. Children fail to grow with social skills and these reflect in their personal, social and professional relationships.
A stark difference has also been observed among the child rearing practices of the earlier generations and the contemporary ones. Earlier, children were not given special treatment apart from on their birthdays or may be on festival days. Adjustments and compromises were part of their lives. This helped them to stay in joint families have balance in life. With the rise in nuclear families, more and more parents are finding it difficult to inculcate these in their children’s system.
Parents need to be more patient and should not succumb to all the demands of the children. It is always not an ideal scenario where children will comply to these rules but in the long run, they will surely bless you for imparting these values to them which will strengthen their personalities and help them cope with the outside world.
Ms. Madhuri Gandhi
Psychologist
Parisar Asha