A Fresh Start

ABOUT TWO YEARS ago, Firstcry, the kidswear retailer, launched a video campaign called ‘Fussy is Fantastic’, featuring several moms “fussing” about their children—swatting at mosquitoes in a public park, carrying a blender to a restaurant to blitz up fresh fruit, and insisting their child pick up a balled-up piece of paper thrown on the floor. The onlookers—strangers, house­hold staff and family members alike—scowl at the mothers and think they are being unreasonable, even “adamant”, “rude”, and “a public nuisance”. “We have raised children too,” one grand­mother remarks to herself. The moms are unfazed by the stares of disapproval, clearly signalling that they are in control. The video, while patriarchal, is obviously meant to be empowering. By placing the mother squarely at the centre of all the action, it not only signals the shift in Indian styles of parenting over the years from being family-led to parent-led, but also posits that the modern mother is ‘fussy’, or keenly aware of, the way she wants to raise her child. In other words, In­dian parents today are consciously articulating their own parenting style, rejecting traditional advice from well-meaning members of the family and risking alienating their own mothers in the process.

It takes a village, it used to be said, to raise a child. “The word parenting has no equivalent in Indian lan­guages. Raising children is a collective activity. Even if joint households are not so common in urban India, we are joined in our ideas, our belief systems, and in the way our relationships pan out. The central ethos of family in India is one of connectedness, and so, couples raising their children in so-called nuclear families have varying degrees of dependence on family members,” says Mila Tuli, professor of Human Development and Childhood Studies, University of Delhi. Be that as it may, young parents, as the Firstcry video suggests, are slowly but surely rebelling against their families to raise their children in ways they see fit. And so, mod­ern Indian parenting is fraught with dichotomies—to spoon feed children or to practise baby-led weaning with its attendant anxieties and messes, to be permis­sive or to take the stick-if-the-carrot-does-not-work approach, to programme every minute of their days with horse riding, coding and art history or to believe they are capable of creating their own play.

“As if there wasn’t enough reading material on par­enting, there is now an avalanche of advice on Instagram from momfluencers who make it look so easy,” says Anita Vohra, 35, a Faridabad-based mother of two boys, three and six years old. “You can intuitively find your own parenting way, or follow an ism, but what’s important—and what I see increasingly around me today—is that you pause and think, and take decisions mindful­ly.” While most modern parents don’t subscribe to beating their children, even if that was the uncontested norm a few decades ago, only some go a step further and wonder if children don’t deserve the same respect as adults, Vohra points out. “Can they understand our emotions and thoughts even if they don’t have the same vocabulary as us? Would they benefit from having a certain degree of autonomy —choosing what to read or eat or wear, for instance? It’s when I started asking these questions that I became more comfortable in my role as a parent,” says Vohra, an architect.

As many Indian parents come to the realisation that their view of children is cultural, societal and often unconscious, they start thinking from the ground up or adopt one of the popular mindful parenting approaches. A believer in the gentle parenting method, Vohra thinks it is important to construct an emotionally secure world for her children by modelling behaviour, being empathetic and holding space for discussion. This does not mean she does not have house rules—“no junk food, no eating on the couch, and cleaning up after oneself”—or “healthy boundaries” as they are called in parenting lingo. But she wasn’t always a mindful par­ent. When she found herself terribly out of her depth with her first child, British childcare expert Gina Ford’s old-and-trusted way of introducing a method to the madness of early caregiving came to her rescue. It is a blueprint that puts the parent and the child on a rigorous feeding and napping schedule but promises ‘happy’ outcomes for both in a few months. If Ford prohibits you to share your bed—or your room—with your baby and suggests you allow it to cry it out for up to 12 minutes at night to inculcate ‘healthy and independent sleep habits’, American paediatric sleep expert Richard Ferber’s 1985 book on the subject reinforces the importance of ‘self-soothing’ in infants, allowing the parent to check in periodically on a crying baby at night but not to pick them up. Vohra sleep-trained her first child at 10 months. “We both slept well, or so I thought, until I watched footage from the babycam that showed him sitting up at night but not crying, knowing no one was coming. It broke my heart. That’s when I started researching gentle parenting,” Vohra says. The Ford­ian way, she says, may have initially appealed to her because she was used to an authoritarian, oppressive parent-child relationship as a child herself.

At the heart of progressive parenting approaches is a radical shift in perspective—from rearing children as trophies, projects or legacy to viewing them as indi­viduals. It is not a new one, however. Working in early 20th-century Italy, Maria Montessori came up with a revolutionary educational method that viewed the child as an independent and curious entity, capable of making choices. For Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) who established a founda­tion that runs many alternative schools across India, disciplining a child is repression, and there can be no affection or genuine cooperation between those who are in power and those who are subject to power. Many modern parents have in fact come to gentler ways of parenting by rejecting the lack of agency they themselves experienced as children, both at home and at school. “The argument our parents would brandish—that we turned out okay—simply does not fly,” says Lakshmi Rammohan, a mother of two and co-founder of Earthlings, an alternative preschool in north Bengaluru. “Many of us have needed interventions and therapy as adults because of the way we were brought up, even if our parents had our best interests in mind.”

Rammohan and Anuradha Nambiar are seated on child-size furniture in the ‘viewing room’ on the upper floor of a bungalow they have converted into a beautiful barefoot space for children— and for thoughtful experiments in early learning. “Earthlings is an extension of our personal gentle parenting effort and practice,” says Nambiar, mom to an eight-year-old. Gentle parenting prioritises the connection between parents and children, and relies on empathy, understanding and respect to raise confident and capable adults. The idea is that children’s emotional well-being depends on know­ing that they are loved unconditionally, and that they never have to work for acceptance. Studies have shown that children with a secure attachment history are more likely to develop a greater sense of self-agency, better emotional regulation, higher self-esteem, and better coping under stress, among other things.

CONNECTION, COMMUNICATION AND consistency are the three pillars of the gentle parenting way. “Parents generally like to warn children of consequences, so when my daughter asks me why there are no consequences—meaning punishment—to her actions, I tell her there are natural conse­quences. When she chose to visit a friend who was down with a fever, she too fell sick—on the eve of her birthday party, an event she was obviously looking forward to. She had to accept the fact that it was because of her actions that we now had to cancel the party,” Nambiar says, exuding a certain cool competence. For Rammohan, gentle parenting means never bargaining with her children or giving in to unreasonable demands. “Gentle parenting is wrongly equated to permissive parenting. It is anything but. If my daughter stays out playing too long in the evening, she simply loses out on the limited screentime she is allowed. We use the same concept at school. If a child takes a long time to finish a meal, we don’t urge them to hurry up. But the child learns that they are missing out on other activities in that time,” Rammohan says.

Gentle parenting is in fact an offshoot of ‘attachment parent­ing’, a theory proposed by William and Martha Sears in the 1980s and described as “the natural, biological, intuitive and spontane­ous behavior of mothers who rely on their instincts, sixth sense, inner wisdom or common sense”. While somewhat dated, the ‘attachment parenting’ concept is back in vogue in the West, despite critiques emerging of the self-sacrifice it demands of the mother, not only evoking feelings of guilt and failure in her but also seeking to limit her role to that of a stay-at-home caregiver. Rammohan disagrees with the notion that gentle parenting pre­supposes a stay-at-home mom. “I find it is easier to be consistent as a parent when I do not have to be the primary caregiver staying at home 24×7. It is the quality of the time you spend with your child that counts. My children know what to expect from me, and therefore, they are secure in that knowledge,” she says.

Preschools that follow Montessori and other alternative peda­gogies have mushroomed across India over the past few years, inspiring parents coming from ‘mainstream’ parenting styles that foist dozens of ‘hobbies’ on children to take a hard look at what the young are capable of, how they learn, and what is—often un­fairly—expected of them. Parents also turn to parenting coaches, family therapists and other parents for advice on how to deal with meltdowns, mood swings and food strikes. As a new member of a peer support group for moms, I followed with interest the thread of responses to a mother who was disheartened by the apparent lack of empathy in her five-year-old. She is in bed sick and her son is insistent that she attend to his needs, despite the fact that her husband and she are equal parents. She is not only frustrated by this behaviour, but also concerned about “developing EQ”, even venturing the theory that he may have inherited the low EQ of some of the members of her extended family. Minutes after her post on the WhatsApp group—a paid one, costing `1,200 a year— moms wade in to reassure her that her son may just be attempting to reconnect with her at a time when she possibly appears physi­cally and emotionally distant. One quotes her own mother’s belief that girls are more sensitive than boys, which someone promptly debunks. Another mother, who is later revealed to be a parent coach, offers some context to help the sick mom frame her response to her child’s behaviour. Empa­thy, she explains, is a function of the brain integrat­ing, and that happens only around six years of age. When their primary caregiver is stressed or unwell, children sense it and either have fierce meltdowns or cling with ferocity, she says—it is simply their way of asking if they can continue leaning on us in safety. The post is ‘hearted’ by several moms for whom it has possibly been an important takeaway.

“As parents, we are always looking for answers,” says Prachi Pendurkar, mom to eight-year-old twins, paediatric sleep coach and lactation con­sultant. After her own rough start at parenting, Pendurkar set out to collate resources for new moms who felt all alone and without direction. She founded Snugbub as a structured workshop on babywearing and it organically blossomed into a community of now-more-than-1,000 mothers who have benefited from and contributed to one another’s parenting journeys. “In a city like Ben­galuru where there is a large migrant population, community can often be what empowers you to question if what is common practice is normal, and to take a fresh look at things—using force on children, for instance, or bottle-training them, or forcing them to sleep in cribs because it’s com­mon practice in America,” says the 36-year-old. Pendurkar and her husband, a work-from-home chartered accountant, are unschooling their children and have moved out of the city to live in Chikka Tirupati, which is 40 km away. For Pendurkar, it is extremely important to be transparent with her children. “They need to feel you are all one team. The moment you say you are small and I am big, they stop trusting you. Take, for instance, a situation where you need to work and they want to go to the park. Instead of saying no, or ordering them to do something else, you can have an open conversation about each other’s needs at the moment. You can say, you want to go play but I have a call. Now we can go to the park later, or I can try to reschedule my call. Let us see what works out.”

When Navi Mumbai-based Geetimollika Kalita, now 35, had a child five years ago, she was sure she wanted to do it all from scratch. She quit her job as a brand manager and started reading child psychology. “I have always been sceptical of institutional approaches to learning and traditional ways of parenting. My mother wanted me to be competitive and exposed me to various sports and activities, and while that has made me excel at many things I still wonder about my passion and purpose. By unschool­ing my son, letting him learn from his mistakes and giving him a solid mental health foundation, I am hoping to give him the confidence to find his feet in the world.” In a departure from modern, competitive parenting, people like Kalita are hoping to raise a generation of kids who may be able to find meaning and fulfilment early in their lives.

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