The befuddled brand PARENT The confusions are myriad and the lines to follow refuse to fade. Branded private school’s admissions are always oversubscribed. Nifty and Sensex do give a breather but the admission rush at schools gives no respite. Parents choose a first-rate school. The brand value matters. Schools choose the best students. It is you scratch my back and I will yours. A good school is a choice made to keep the child among bright students and a group of well-connected parents. Also to provide a conducive atmosphere for the students to achieve heights in life and form a pattern to grow every day. This is one part of it. Once the admission process is over. There sets in a mutual understanding. Don’t pressurize the students which lead to doing not pressurize your wards. The competition of who wins the ’cool parent award’ commences. This is about granting your children the license to be a free bird and permitting them to fly in the skies of innocent childhood without a hook. Though the rush for private tutors, home tutors, and study help groups rises with every new academic year. The sets of cool parents keep the kids running from one private tuition to the other which is in addition to the 5-6 hours of school. This comes with the comfort of chauffeur driven cars and fills- in a meal for them. This behavior is a contrast. One side it does support the popular notion of bringing up a child is a costly affair in today’s world. On the other side, it also supports the need for a hefty family income to provide an all-round development to the kids. For them, the all-round development quotient is measured with the number of different extracurricular and subject help classes the child attends. ”No doubt this has lead to a high Intelligence quotient among the students but the emotional quotient is touching a low, ”shared Miss Deepa Rathore, Clinical psychologist, Ripon Hospital Shimla. Compensating the absence of parents with money has lead to a limited or no child-parent time. The rationed timings which the children and parents get are overpowered by the new age companions which are the television, I pads etc. Therefore, the children these days have a problem bonding with the peer group. They bond only to compete which is negative on the humanitarian value index. It is the survival of the fittest among the parents and the children, though they all pretend to be cool. Rathore, shared, ” We have noticed that the emotional quotient of the children these days are going low. The irony is that the parents are very well educated but they have no time to help their children in studies. They compensate time with money. This leads to depression, aggression, stubbornness and at times it also leads to shifting their dependence on drugs in children ” She suggested that a minimum of two quality time meals should be taken by the family together. This time should be off the electronics for all the family members.”We suggest quality time with parents, as till the age of ten children learn through modeling. It means that they replicate what they see.” The children need time with their parents. The school curriculum can be made easy by sharing experiences and learning while they grow. The treasure of being a parent is the time that they spend with their children rather than how much money they spend on them. The term cool parents will follow after the parents come to terms with being parents and not just counselors in their children’s life.]]>
