Today morning, as I was playing with my daughter while getting her ready for play-school, I realised that I hadn’t switched on the geyser for her bath. While doing so, I suddenly heard a loud noise from the living room and then another one with a little scream. Thinking that my daughter was hurt, I immediately rushed towards her and noticed that she was actually kicking the small plastic table meant for her. On being questioned, she said that while she was trying to sit on the table, she slipped and fell and that’s why she was punishing the table …”because she got hurt”.
As a parent, I would have ignored and gone ahead with my work but keeping today’s scenario of road rage in perspective, something ticked in my head. Don’t we as parents, indulge our child in various aspects of rage (which we find cute when they are toddlers) and shouldn’t we correct them early on.
Now you as a reader would ask me the “why” and “how” of the same. Imagine when your child falls down, what do you do. To make your child stop from crying, you say to that particular thing” Did you hit my kid?” (in a funny tone) which may divert your crying child’s attention and then maybe you stomp the floor. At least I have done this a lot of times and today I realised she did the same to the table. What have I taught her? That when you are hurt, irrespective of the situation and the fault, hit the thing. Tomorrow she will do it to a person. This thought hits you in the head…Right. It did to me. So then with great patience I sat down with her and tried to explain to her, “Baby it was a mistake that you used the table to sit. You shouldn’t be hitting it coz like you got hurt, it also did get hurt.” While she pretended to understand, I know it will take many more sessions to unlearn what I, as a parent, have been teaching her over and over again.
But then that’s what parenting is about …patience and loads of patience 🙂
-Kriti Joshi Pradhan
