Even when I sit in my seat of a professional parenting blogger, helping out hundreds of parents everyday, giving guidelines on child care and self motivating moms to dream bigger, I sometimes feel that I am not as good as my mother when it comes to parenting. I think everyone of us has or have had this feeling at least once that we are not as good a mom as our mother is.
An incident throwing light to this happened last time when I went for the Christmas vacation in my hometown.
One day Anshika asked whether she can join her elder cousins in the game of football. I know she won’t be able to cope with them who are sort of a pro in this game and the result will be a big tantrum for not even getting to even touch the ball while playing. So I asked her to play with her younger cousins.
Seeing this my mom says,” This is the problem with the modern parents. They will make the kids do only things that they are sure the kid can win or they can make the kids win. Let her play, if she can’t score a goal let her cry and then play again.“
What Amma said has a point to it. We the so-called millennial parents are not ready to see our kids fail in anything. And if they fail we either behave as though the world has crumbled or we try to console the kid with some gifts or sweets so that the impact of failure doesn’t affect his/her emotional well-being. We never teach them to face failure, learn from it and rise from failure. The flaws of modern parenting!!
So I couldn’t agree more with my mom and I let Anshika play football.
She has a good 10 minutes play. Comes back crying as expected. But my mom pushes and motivates her to join the game back.
Goes back and after half an hour comes back with soiled clothes, messy hair and an attitude as though she is the Messi!! Note that she couldn’t even do a single pass properly or have the ball for even a few seconds, but she enjoyed playing as a team.
But I was happy that I let her do something she was not good at or I feared she was not good at. The messy hair or the soiled clothes didn’t bother me because sometimes Daag Acche Hein!!
As my mom pointed out let us understand that failures no matter bitter are the phases of learning experiences for our kid’s future. Even in failure a child can learn grit, resilience or learn something new about himself that helps him overcome failure and succeed in life.
If we become the torchbearers of ‘accepting failure as a learning curve’, we thereby help to mold our children’s life experience of trying and learning.
The same mantra is what Surf excel is trying to imbibe into the millennial parents. Their beautiful campaign of #Haarkoharao by Surf excel which went live from this year’s Children’s Day is based on a single line – “Sometimes you succeed; sometimes you learn i.e. there is no failure, only learning.
It’s time we ask ourselves, ‘who taught our kids to fear failure?’. Why is it that we pass on our fear of failure to our kids? Lets teach our kids to accept and face failure and not make a big fuss about it just as my mom pointed out.
Kids don’t fear failure, until we tell them to. From now, let’s change the conversation about failure with our kids.
Let our kids fail to learn and learn to fail! Let’s join our hands with Surf excel’s #Haarkoharao.
1 Comment
Your mother was right. We should let children be themselves.