End of innocence

My neighbors’ son, Sanu, is just three years old; he goes to play school. Three days vacation is guaranteed every week. People at home do not emphasis much anyway because the play school doesn’t teach kids much; a child is sent to a play school just so that he could get used to it as he will have go to school in future too. When I am talking with Sanu, often times I wonder what I was like when I was three years old; I was nothing next to this kid. He rides on his e-bike; in fact he runs it to its highest speed. He even showed me his mother’s smart phone and smartly explained its features to me.

Our ancestress used to compare the kids under the age of five with gods. Looking at today’s five-year-old, one cannot help but wonder if gods are like this. In today’s date, children do not have that innocence in them; they do not have that childishness in their monkey business. They only want to wear the clothes of their choice; they go to school after saying what they want in their lunchbox.

Are today’s children becoming fatheaded and spleenful? Kids that love smart phones; that insist on driving cars and bikes, who use the TV remote better than their mother or grandmother… are those kids really glorious? Their parents are nervous all the time with one tension or another. Today, they get in accidents when they are driving before the age of getting a driving license, and that too when they are drinking beer that costs more than their pocket money could allow. The global trade of smartphones, video games, and inattentiveness has forced the kids to grow before their age. The songs and dance steps that seem inappropriate to us, they dance on them with ease. Liberal, relaxed, and a childhood full of innocence, now seems like a thing of the past.

Today there is so much in the corporate lifestyle from which we need to keep our children’s away from and controlling ourselves is equally necessary too. Today, information tends to confuse terror in front of them. You must be wondering where are our children going with this, what's the solution. Then respectable moms and dads, your children are tangled in your long list of expectations; along with better smart phone, big cars and foreign trips, you want kids that are smart and sharp minded. And to get that you have them wrapped up in school, tuition, homework, exams/competitions, other activities, television, internet... entangled in the endless list today kids are as busy as we are.

Today the kids live under the increasing pressure of their parents’ unreasoned and meaningless expectations and the fear of failing them. The result is a growing depression in children; at such small age they are getting diseases of the old ones (eye glasses, diabetes, gray hair, the girls continue to get early menstruation, obesity in children increases). Many times parents put so much pressure to bring them in advertising, TV series, movies and also expecting them to succeed, which ends up as the child starting to behave like an adult. Don’t impose you incomplete ambitions on your children; that I did not become a hero or heroine, but I will make my kid a celebrity, that we have lived so poorly but we will give the children all that they need (even if they can live without all those stuff). Parents compensate for not spending much time with their children by giving them pocket money and other materialistic features. Many times to show off their prosperity, parents makes spectacle of their children.

Let the children grow up with their innocence. And to make sure that the innocence remains there, you have to change the surrounding. Let them play in mud, let them dance in the rain, let them jump around, let them be persistent but don’t make them stubborn. Let them learn according to their age and interests; don’t make them a robot of your choice.