By: Suditi Jindal
I remember vividly when my daughter started crawling. She would embark upon her journey to explore her surroundings, as soon as I turned my head away. Within moments I would find a bit of torn newspaper in her hands and her mouth, an ordinary but potentially harmful, object like a pen in her grasp, or her trajectory directed towards the bucket of water for the floor mop.
My reflex would be to call out her name and shout an emphatic ‘no’ to her. Under my mistaken belief that she did not understand my language as she could not speak it yet, I would make a strong gesture with my arms and my face. My pitch would also be a few decibels higher, assuming her wordlessness to be her inability to hear and understand.
But, I was wrong. My daughter like all the other normal children was and is very perceptive. She was and is learning a lot by observing the people and things around her. There are numerous scientific studies to show that children grow exponentially within the first three years of their life. Furthermore, their early life experiences bear a great influence on their personality, attitude, and behaviour throughout their life. Hence as the primary care-giver, my interactions with my children were and are determining their future course of action and thinking. I was jolted out of my complacency. I could not get away by giving my daughter and my son a ready-made choice. I had to support them to explore, experience, and make their own choices.
I immediately corrected my habit to stop my daughter from hurting herself, by shouting out a ‘no’ to her. I would drop whatever I was doing and come to her side in a restrained yet observant manner. I would sit by her side or follow her while she satisfied her curiosity. However, I was quick to stop her from hurting herself. I would talk and explain to her, why it was a bad idea for her to continue doing whatever she was doing. It was easy for me to distract her when she was just an infant or even a toddler. But as she grew up, I had to reason at length with her the consequences of her choices. I would explain the results of all the options available to her, and she with her reasoning, nudged gently by mine, would decide which was a good choice and which a bad one. I never specified even this to her.
There were times when my daughter did not share with me all her decisions. This began happening when she moved out of my constant supervision. I had to devise a new strategy to help her make the right choice even in my absence. I did not help her with much enthusiasm and interest when she had come to a hasty decision and was unable to manage its consequences.
Once, she had volunteered to decorate the soft-board in her class all by herself and that too within a week. She had done this when she was ten years old. It was all in a bid to please her class teacher and to portray herself better than her classmates. I was not happy with her attitude to the whole situation. My daughter should not engage in an activity with some expectations in her mind. Furthermore, she should learn to be a team player and a sporting one at that. So when she announced to us, her decision, I gave a lukewarm response after finding out the whole truth of the matter. I let her slog through the ordeal for a few days with as little help as possible from my end. I then encouraged her to seek permission from her teacher to get help from other class-mates for the task.
The instances of her impulsive and erratic behaviour have gradually reduced, but her participation in new experiences has not. I like to believe that she has awakened to the benefits of a considered decision and consultation with others.
I on my part, have attained the peace of mind that my daughter will not have an anxious voice in her mind (in all probabilities, mine) shouting ‘no’, whenever she is about to do something new.