Parent Child Relations- A Lesson From My First Day At School

All of us have an interesting story to tell about our schools in general and the first day in the school. My first day at school was also unique in a sense. Indeed for sometime after I started my education it was a terrible time I had till I settled down. By this I don’t mean that I started getting excellent grades but just accepting that education was an inevitable responsibility that I must take up.

I was born in India in a very average family with just enough money to survive and get all the basic needs. The town where I was born was very small but beautiful, because it had rivers surrounding it with in a few miles radius. The land is so fertile that you just throw a seed and it will become a beautiful tree and give you fruits. It had no rail connection those days, no power either but plenty of well water, lots of sun shine, cool breeze coming off the green fields, fresh and unpolluted and lots  of coconut, and other fruit trees along the road side. On one side of the road is the canal and the other side are the green fields and fruit trees. Believe me, it is not Kerala of India which I am describing but another equally beautiful place which can match the Booker Prize winner Arundati Roy’s "Gods own Country" easily. To reach this place you need to take a boat that has a torn sail and moves on the shiny waves of the river soaking in the golden rays of the morning sun.

I come from a large family, which was very common those days, because people believed that kids are God given and could be assets. Poor guys, little did they know the disappointments they had to face later. I had two brothers and four sisters. Being at the other end of the family I had so many bosses over me which I did not enjoy so much, but there was not much I could do because I was already “positioned” like that. The age gap between me and my first brother was very large, so he went away for higher education to the cities. He set a bad example to all of us by standing first in the class all the time and coming out with top grades. Ultimately he made it to the top, a big position in the Government after competitive exams in India, and some Harvard education .This made him the bench mark for every one especially the boys, as in India the boys were expected in those days to look after the family after the father retires.

The gap between me and the second brother was not much. He was about two years older than I was and we sometimes   did things together but really did not get along so well. There was the sibling problem, the love hate stuff. (To my misfortune he too turned out to be like the first one, but I did not give him much respect and I think he resented that).

There were not that many good pre-schools and nursery or Kindergartens in the town. So my father decided that he would get us a tutor and admit us into the 6^th class directly after taking an entrance exam.

It was time for my second brother to go to 6^th so he gave an entrance exam in one of the big reputed government schools and got admitted. The process was much simpler and there was not so much competition like today (Today in India the school admission is tougher than Graduate education and one needs to register names as soon as a kid is born!).

So, my second brother too started going to school and that made me very lonely at home, no one to play with and no one to fight with and taunt a little. This is where it really starts.

I decided that I should also go to school and started using my “pester power”. I really did not know that school means a gruel with the teachers. I thought it is just fun and I should go away like my brother and play all day.

Unable to bear with my tenacity my father took me to another school and applied for age exemption to the board. Since the rules were a bit liberal it was possible that I could take the so called entrance, which I passed easily (any one would) and joined the school.

Let there be no mistake, I was not a child prodigy.

Now my real problems started, there was fear about going to a different place and meeting all these new guys most of them being older than I am, I being under aged and tiny. Since I asked for this I had no choice but to take my bag and go.

I went and sat in the class, no teacher came and told us what to do, so just sit some place on some bench and listen to the teacher who came later and started teaching. Most teachers I thought were tough those days. Though they mean well, they were harsh and demanding. Their philosophy seemed to be that the tougher you are the better teacher you would be considered and it is good for the kids.

It was the second session on the first day and the language teacher (Hindi, which is not my mother tongue) came and started teaching some alphabets of Hindi and also started asking questions. Questions on the first day ?; even today I can’t just digest that, what a cruel man !. He started at the other end of my row and as expected no one was able to answer. His response was the most practiced one in those days. He grabbed his shopping bag,( an old jute made bag at least 24 inches wide and 48 inches long which I assume he carried daily to do all the grocery needs that his wife would tell him to bring on his way back from school. Now that I think about it, and taking a wild guess, If he forgets even one item she asked him to get he probably was punished severely too. That would be a good way to rationalize his attitude towards us) and started hitting the guys.

He was repeating this process. I started staring in terror. This is something I had never expected and experienced. He was approaching fast and seemed like a soldier with an AK 47 (or a terrorist in the new language) , his speed got me to tremble and his face like the glowing sun of the mid day in Sahara is something I can never forget.

I did not know the answers either, so I had only two choices-one is to take this punishment and the second is to flee. My little brain did not have the capacity to think of the future and its consequences.What it was sure of was that to act quick and to avoid this humiliation. So I screamed in fear, got up on the table , jumped down and ran away from the class and the school !. I stopped only at my home to be greeted in surprise by my mom. She wondered why I was home in school time. I described to her what had happened in the school but she did not say anything. She just carried on with her work as if she did not even hear me.

If it happened today, the parents would pamper the child with some candies and gifts, scold the teacher in presence of the kid, complain to the principal and perhaps even threaten to get the teacher thrown out. But nothing of that sort happened those days, the parents thought that the teachers had right to punish the child and the child must take it in the interest of his/her education and future.

What else can you expect?, the next day on, I would refuse to go to school, cry a lot or get taken to school by one of my older sisters who was going to another school and get dropped at my school Since there were no school buses and the town being small we just walked to school. After my sister drops me at school and proceeds to her school I would run home. Later this was not working out because my mother would not like it, so I started going with my sister to her school and sat there whole day. This process went on for a few months and finally some how after that teacher promised not to hit I slowly got adjusted to that school.

The next year I was transferred to the same school where my brother and sister were studying and again by my fate or mistake I was put in a section where I was the only boy and all others were girls. All girls would surround me in the breaks and tease me which I did not enjoy at that time. The school putting me in that section had something to do with the choice of my second language and optional math. Just to avoid this I changed over to Sanskrit and optional mathematics and finally landed in my brothers section. I was then his class mate which I think he hated , but tries to brush it off like a bad dream.

I was not an extraordinarily bright guy, but, I did not do badly at all, studied in India and US, I got an MS, MBA and Ph.D , held some decent positions traveled around the globe and worked in few other countries.

I must thank my parents for not deciding that I was good for nothing guy and giving up on me and my education. I am able to live a decent life because of their tolerance. They must have had some anxious days, perhaps anxious years worrying about me, because in India, those days without education there was no existence for average families like ours.

If this sounds like autobiography I am sorry, but excuse me. My intention is not to tire you with my personal details but given an account of what a kid goes through, and more than that, help the parents that are over stressed and over burdened with the nuances of the competitive world and suffer from anxiety about their child and its future.

Many couples are now scared to have a child, even one, as it is a lot of responsibility. But. Must we then thank our parents for not thinking that way?

That is a personal matter, but if we have one we need to be careful in making judgment. I would say bringing up a child is a skill that we need to learn, rather make conscious attempt to do active learning for the sake of the kid.

A child goes through adjustment problems in schools and the environment. The bullying and crime make it worse today. Therefore, it is very important that the parent child relationship is very strong to share ideas and experiences.If parent intimacy and tolerance are missing a child gets into frustration and takes up alternate paths.

Often a Parent can end up jumping to conclusions and giving up hope on the kids before they are actually ready to blossom. There is a difference in the taste of the fruit that is ripened artificially with gases and the fruit that ripens on the tree where it was a flower and then a fruit

Chats with child are important, and they must happen from the beginning. Let them talk about their school, what they did the whole day. Let them talk and we listen. One can not get close to a child after many years of being a total stranger. It has to happen gradually, only the type of relationship changes from being a father and mother to a friend to a companion.Unfortunately today the kids and the parents live in the same house but can be strangers to each other. This needs to be avoided completely.