The Right Upbringing: Child Care and Family Shaping
Mona Mehra, a Professional Speaker on Family, Child Upbringing and Gender equality, brings forth Child Upbringing Sutras and problem solving through positive thinking !
Some Childcare Situations And mishaps most parents Face:
“My daughter was 6 years and was left with the maid. She feeds her biscuits in the afternoon when she is back from school and makes no effort to make her eat healthy. Her health is suffering’
‘My 5-year-old son has started to use expletives in his talks. I saw my full-time maid with whom I leave my child, using the same words’
‘My daughter is so listless and non-communicative when I come back that she refuses to come to me. She does not bond with me. The maid does not play or communicate with her and watches T.V whole day’
These were some of the anguished cries of mothers that I heard in Pune.
In 2007, I had to move with my husband from Delhi to Pune and I moved from a Joint to a nuclear family. My daughter was 3 years old, going to start school. Although it was an exhilarating feeling to be independent and now make my own home and do things my own way, slowly the realization dawned that it is no mean feat. I had been a career woman and my child were taken care by in –laws in my absence, and running the household was never my responsibility. Getting 3 meals in my hand with tiffin packed and clean clothes and not to worry about my child was something that I took for granted.
As a career woman, reaching Pune, I joined an organization and kept my daughter in a crèche. Initially I was emotional at the thought of keeping my child in the crèche but since she was fine with it, I was also fine. But one incident changed my life forever. There was an incident in the crèche where my daughter was playing with another child in the crèche in the first-floor bed in dormitory. The child fell down and broke her tooth and there was blood all around. This incident was told to me by my daughter 5 years later that she was blamed for the incident. As I recall, the effect was such that she refused to go to crèche and she would wrap herself around my feet when I used to go to work and would cry incessantly. Her heart rendering cries would make me fall weak in my knees and I took her to a psychologist who said that she is under trauma and needs care. I left my job to take care of her.
As I cared for her and started to make my home, I started interacting with other mothers around. I had to take her to birthday parties of other kids and I came across mothers who told me stories of their children’s traumas and their own fight to get them in the right track or take care of them. Being with them I realized one thing in common – the fight each one faced every day when they were asked- ‘what do you do?’ This question is so difficult of answer as I have struggled with it so much because it is only asking about livelihood and as a mother you are bothered about living, loving and bringing up a child who is the future generation. There is no answer as there is no money outcome there and it is what everyone asks and a mother has no answer. The sheer disrespect and disregard the mothers faced was astounding.
Slowly, I started looking for answers. Why? And it took me years to find the answers.
We accept work only when done for money. I guess some people some decades ago decided to call work as work only when done for money without thinking through things. But then nobody ever did anything for money in a Home. So how does a Home exist?
Right upbringing requires us to be around the child, bond with them, show them the right path and communicate with them. Children follow parents and it is from whom they learn everything in the initial years. The right upbringing takes time and every person has a different situation. Some have families around, some do not and everyone has a different pace of working. This policy renders a mother useless and she does not have the right to bring up her own child as she does not do it for money but it will become work if she does the same for neighbor for money.
Voices for Happy Homes is our campaign about building happy Homes. We all start with a Home and ironically the policies are such that home is not included in the productive category.
Any work done in a Home is called unproductive and the doer of the task will not get the credit for the work done and worse no recognition as well. Why? Because we accept work as work only when done for money and nobody ever did anything for money in a Home.
We are a group of people trying to highlight the anomaly in the system. We do interviews, panels, discussions, webinars, speeches to showcase multiple dimensions of working simultaneously in a home. We talk about different aspects of work in a Home, Skill building, learning that transpire in a home which are known under the names of parenting, upbringing, leadership etc.
We believe that as much as paid work is important which is about livelihood, jobs and business so is a home important which is about unpaid work, nevertheless Work. Work can never be about only paid work. We believe in a holistic and integrated way of life where physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects are all important and work in tandem with each other.
Author: Mona Mehra
Founder – ‘Voice for happy homes’. & ‘Vision Search’
(More info about the author may be obtained from her FB link)