Spread the love


My best advice is:-
Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often

I recently spoke with psychologist at NIMHANS, Bangalore, who studies child-rearing in village level societies around Bangalore during his research practices on child rearing…
He explained to me that children in our village level societies….. spend lots of time with their parents — they tag along throughout the day and often help with tasks like foraging — but they are rarely the main object of their parents’ attention. Sometimes bored, sometimes engaged, these kids spend much of their time observing adults doing adult things.
Parents in contemporary industrialized societies often take the opposite approach. In the precious time when we’re not working, we place our children at the center of our attention, consciously engaging and entertaining them. We drive them around to sports practice and music lessons, where they are observed and monitored by adults, rather than the other way around. We value “quality time” over quantity of time. We feel guilty when we have to drag our children along with us to take care of boring adult business.
This intensive, often frantic style of parenting requires a lot more effort than the style than our psychologist observe……. He described , he found that ….. thinking about village level parents…..
Last month when I read the books that describe….warning that many parents are stressed to their breaking point. There are plenty of reasons for this worrisome state of affairs. One is that we don’t ignore our children often enough.
The modern style of parenting is not just exhausting for adults; it is also based on assumptions about what children need to thrive that are not supported by evidence from our evolutionary past. For most of human history, people had lots of kids, and children hung out in intergenerational social groups in which they were not heavily supervised. Your average benign-neglect day care is probably closer to the historical experience of child care than that of a kid who spends the day alone with a doting parent.
Of course, just because a parenting style is ancient doesn’t make it good. But human beings have spent about 90 percent of our collective time on Earth as village level parents…., and our brains and bodies evolved and adapted to suit that lifestyle. Village level parents….. and their…cultures tell us something important about how children are primed to learn.
A parenting style that took its cue from those village level parents….. would insist that one of the best things parents can do — for ourselves as well as for our children — is to go about our own lives and tote our children along. You might call it mindful under parenting.
Children learn not only from direct instruction, but also from watching and modeling what other people around them do, whether it’s foraging for village level agricultural practices, changing a tire or unwinding with friends after a long day of work. From a young age, that kind of observation begins to equip children for adulthood.
More important, following adults around gives children the tremendous gift of learning to tolerate boredom, which fosters patience, resourcefulness and creativity. Dr P K Samantaray,
MBBS, MD (PSYCHIATRY),
From AIIMS, NEW DELHI
EX Principal Chief Medical Director, Indian Railways
Professor and HOD , Psychiatry,
Jagjivan Ram Hospital, Mumbai.
8779760237
7400052972
samantaraypk@gmail.com

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *