Children should own up for their actions and not pass on the blame for their bad decisions to parents!

Rithu Dravid

“I’ll be late for school again! Why didn’t you wake me up earlier?” – is the first thing Druvika tells her mother when she’s running late for school. Never that she got up late or forgot to set the alarm. The lack of acceptance that the fault lies within is shrugged off by many children, not only the young ones, and passed on to the parent. Addressing such problems proactively is a concern and taking up responsibility for one’s own actions should be something that must be inculcated in children.

Kids are growing amid a culture in which people no longer own their choices, words or actions — a culture in which there’s always someone to blame for their actions. From sibling aggravations at home to classroom conflict at school, kids increasingly take less responsibility for their actions and find themselves growing into young adults who fail in the workplace because they are unable to correct their course.

Vismaya, 22, feels that since she is a single girl child her parents are overprotective. As a result of this she lacks confidence and the ability to face life independently and says “ If my parents were less protective and paranoid about me, I would have been more confident and bolder to face life and I would have had the ability to stand up for myself in any situation.”

From a parent’s perspective, Arshiya, a mother of two says, ”Don’t blame your parents for the way your life has turned out to be and teach your children the same.” She feels involving children in decision making or by taking their suggestions for as many things as one can, helps. “Be it shopping or involving them while placing an order at the restaurant, choosing furniture for home or deciding on which co-curricular activity they would like to enrol for, ask them too’” she says. Although as a parent you may think the child is not old or mature enough to be involved in decision-making, do consult and discuss the pros and cons with them. This will make the child feel valued and give him/ her a sense of responsibility she concludes.

Dr. Kannan Gireesh, psychiatrist, founder and CEO of Live Life Education, has worked extensively on child behaviour and disorders in children. says he: “First and foremost we need to understand that the child’s world is different from the world of their parents. Parents themselves provide electronic gadgets to their children and they become addicted to it and build their own artificial world, particularly in the last two years. So suddenly when you restrict kids from doing so you become their enemy.”

The era of confronting them and the expectation of a positive reaction has changed or probably ended. Right now parents need to build a newer way of interacting with children and looking at things from their perspective also. Dr Gireesh says: “The world of children has a lot of ups and downs, happiness and sadness, and of different things that are constricted together, irrespective of any age group -- a child or a teenager.”

He shares a personal incident by saying his daughter at the age of 10, starts speaking fluent Korean because of the Korean music band BTS that she likes and everyone has started liking that band in every school which is an issue. The world has changed and it has started to evolve into a different generation totally and parents need to understand and connect.

He adds: “There cannot be a fruit without a seed, so if the seed of a bad behaviour has been sown the child learns such behaviour from his environment, which could be from places, things ,people ,events or even from a digital medium.”

To bring any changes is first to accept and get awareness of the situation following which, parents need to connect with children and understand the issue. “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. If the child is wrong don’t bring the entire roof down for small things. You need to choose your own battles, and slowly and steadily start to build on the relationship,” says Dr Gireesh.

One thing that people often forget is that parents are human beings too and they may very well have been victims of their own parents and the environment they grew up in.