Parents must have candid conversations with children

Parenting is not a pushover anymore. In our times, parents didn’t ‘raise’ us. We just grew. Parents did what came naturally to them in their capacity as our guardians with no instruction manuals to follow, and we crossed growth milestones without serious red flags.

As the world began to display its plurality and the insecurities grew, a lot changed. Good parenting became an arduous goal. Raising successful children became a relentless pursuit, and in the process, there were more predicaments, for both parents and children.

A significant shift that I have seen in recent years is the way traditional boundaries in parent-child relationships have broken down. It was unimaginable for us to consider our parents our pals, but children now easily categorize them under the friendship tag. While this may be encouraging in parts, there are some vital areas that still need serious mending. Candid conversations being one. Children today aver that they ‘talk’ to their parents without restrain, but how deep are the conversations? How revealing and useful?

In my casual talks with young people, I have gathered that children are ‘cool’ about sharing daily events and activities from their school and college life with their parents but have a long way to go in expressing their true emotions. The bonhomie, more often than not, is superficial, with a majority of children choosing not to divulge their deepest fears and concerns, the inner turmoil caused by an unforgiving world, and the disturbances brought by their own biological changes.

They filter their emotions and present that which would please us and give us the smug satisfaction of having been good at our parenting job. But our children have a lot more bottled up inside than we can imagine, a lot that they themselves cannot comprehend and sort. And as parents and guardians, it is upon us to offer them a space to be what they inherently are by building equations of trust and understanding.

A majority of children have fixed notions about their parents and adults, which range from adults being annoying to prying to over-bearing. Instead of establishing ourselves as confidants in whom they can seek recourse to their problems, we in our eagerness to carve out prototypes of perfection, have become their mere conscience keepers.

Many children confess that they refrain from baring their hearts to their parents for the fear of being judged and reprimanded. I know youngsters who have endured bullying at school or were abused and didn’t summon the courage to divulge it to their parents.

Such experiences can cause severe mental disturbances which parents miss to see until it is very late.

- Asha Iyer Kumar is a Dubai-based author and children’s life-writing coach