Readers Write In #865: To slap or not to?

By Jeeva P

It was an electric switch that remained within the reach of a 3-year old. Everything that the 3-year-old craved for was just a flip away. Cocomelon, Kanmani Pappu, Vlad and Niki, Rowdy Baby, etc. He kept accessing it whenever he wanted to and no one batted an eyelid. His father once tried to switch the TV on for him only to withdraw his hand reflexively. There was probably a surge of electricity that shocked his finger and triggered the withdrawal. The next time he switched on the TV, it was fine. On the next ten or fifteen occasions on the next few days, when the father tried switching the TV on, there were similar occurrences – a sudden surge of electricity visiting the fingertip though the consequences were not very dangerous.

“Do not touch the switch going forward on your own!” The father warned the kid.

“Okay dad”. The child appeared very compliant.

One Sunday the next week, when the father was reading a book lying on the bed facing the TV, he noticed the 3-year-old bolting into the room with his 4-year-old playmate and switching on the TV on his own.

“Son, I have told you already not to switch the TV on on your own! ok?” The father warned.

“Sorry dad” The sorry had not drained the cheer from his face and the kid started searching for his latest Vlad and Niki episode.

****

Two electricians on multiple occasions tried to fix the switch but to no avail. A third senior, grey-haired electrician had given up.

“Sir, don’t let the kids near the switch. We don’t know where we are getting the surge from”, the electrician had warned the father.

The next day, the father noticed the kid operating the switch once again on his own.

“Son, this time I am warning you. The switch seems to shock the person who is touching it at times and we don’t know when that is happening exactly. The next time you switch on the TV yourself I will not be talking to you in this tone.” 

“Dad, what is a shock?”

“If you touch the switch, you might be thrown away from it and get yourself injured. I can’t explain to you how and why. Maybe I will tell you when you grow up.” The father was clearly worried.

****

Two days later, the kid was crying in the corner of the room and when his mother asked him why he replied, “Dad hit me”.

The mother rushed into the father’s room and demanded an explanation.

“I have told him multiple times not to touch that switch. He was not obeying. I had to slap him”, the father answered matter-of-factly.

“I understand.” There was a pause.

“But if we hit our kids, won’t they turn violent? Don’t they replicate how we adults behave?”, the mother shot back.

“There are certain things he might not understand at this age. Reasoning him out might not be possible. And this issue is very crucial. If the surge happens when he is operating it, you know what would happen to him”, the father was very sure of what he was saying.

“But then in the US, parents are not supposed to hit their kids.” the mother was not sure though.

“There are two things – we are parents which means we are human too. You can’t remain calm and sanguine all the time especially when something that is told repeatedly is not being followed. You will be forced to yell sometimes. If you yell, there are people who find fault with that too. They say if parents are aggressive, the kids too might inherit the same language and deploy it in other places. 

Now the other – here is an issue which is too crucial to be calm about. I tried to reason him out last time which did not work. Now I have slapped him which would have instilled a kind of fear in him and I hope he would learn from that. Had I responded without aggression this time, he might have repeated the act once again and we never know what would have happened then.”  the father explained.

For the next two years, the kid did not go near the switch at all. The father too had no reason to slap him again.

***

Last week I saw a post on my area’s local Facebook group from a parent who badly wanted to take his kid to Rajnikanth’s Coolie since she had been a big fan of the Monica song and had wanted to watch it on the big screen. He wanted to know the list of theatres which allow kids despite the ‘Adults Only’ rating and that his daughter might ‘kill’ him if he doesn’t comply with her wishes.

***

“Kids nowadays while they go out do not think they are with their parents. They think they have two meek slaves at their disposal”, this was Jeyamohan in an essay about his own experience while travelling overnight in a train.

***

Since many of our parents (at least mine) were strict, aggressive and financially not so well-placed, at least till a particular age, the name ‘father’ inspired a bit of fear in many of us (my dad was warm and cold-blooded as the occasion demanded. More on that on a different day). If I had wanted a TV video game that my neighbour-playmate refused to share with me, I knew better than to express it to my father. Video-games were luxuries in a family like mine and a request like that could conjure an angry stare from my father which was enough to haunt me for a whole day.

Our parents neither had money nor patience to explain why certain things were forbidden to us. As we grew up, we understood, as they too started warming up to us, opened themselves and started sharing their experiences with us. Their parents too, they added, were either too callous to care for them or if anything, remained perennially inaccessible to them. In their own worlds, our parents thought and continued to think with good reason too that they were better parents than their predecessors. 

But on the other hand, having endured a strict, insipid upbringing most of us did not want to replicate the same for our kids. Financially too, things got better as the early fruits of neoliberalism were there for us to pick. After a point, for want of a better word, the so-called ‘strict’ approach to parenting adopted by our parents was slowly being considered as outdated and even sometimes, ‘toxic’. Studies carried out on convicted criminals and psychopaths confirmed the fact that the root cause of all societal criminality lied in the way parents brought their kids up. We had already made our minds up not to be harsh on our kids and this finding easily seemed to vindicate the correctness of the approach. 

We stopped yelling at our kids because it was so uncool. We stopped reasoning our kids out of buying expensive toys of very little ‘real’ value since we had the means to buy them. We started feeding our kids junk food with dangerous levels of sugar and preservatives in them because we did not want to deny them what we had been denied ourselves. We started handing our smartphones to our kids whenever they were on the verge of breaking down for no reason at all.

What I sometimes do think, have we achieved in the process? 

Whenever I visit my shrink (he treats me without a fee because he was my schoolmate) he tells me he doesn’t have time to attend to me personally because the number of kids he needs to attend to are growing by the day. Most of them suffer from Attention-Deficit Disorders triggered by smartphone addiction. The next issue people like him seem to be worrying about is their absolute inability to handle difficult situations as they grow up and grow out of the cozy shelters of their homes. Their parents seem to have been too compliant to their demands during their formative years that when they reach an age where they have to step out and confront lives on their own, they are shocked and paralyzed to find so many parameters that are completely out of their control.

In the process of eliminating psychopaths, killers and rapists for the good of the society, in the pursuit of turning out to be better parents to our kids than our own, we seem to have created a horde of obese, impatient, unhappy, commodity-fetishistic and dangerously insecure children who despite their extraordinary natural gifts and acquired skills do not seem to have the ability to handle lives on their own.

Of course, I admit that I have generalized too much and that there are of course enormous achievers and emotionally mature young individuals too today who are better than many of the best people of our own generation, but the wrenching pain of having to share my seat with young, little children outside the consultation room of my shrink seems to fully justify my simplistic approach. 

***

Personally, I yell at my kid on two occasions – one, when he repeats an ‘offence’ beyond a particular allowed threshold even after instances of calm and patient lecturing on the dangers of perpetrating it and two, during emergencies like when you have to move your car from an overcrowded lane in the market to allow a repeatedly honking auto-driver who wants you out of his way or when I myself is in a state of mental disrepair or turmoil due to the many, unpredictable vicissitudes of modern day, capitalist life.

I admit that I am the father in the story that prologues this essay and the events depicted in it have been doctored in a way to suit the essay’s purpose and to project myself in a very wise and a prophetic light. I also want to admit that I too have handed my smartphone to my kid on certain unavoidable occasions, procured rich, sugary brownie cakes and ice-creams for his consumption at times to make him happy and bought him expensive toys whenever he had managed to secure top marks in some subjects. All of these events have taken place let me remind my reader on my own terms and not certainly this is very important, on those of his.

Anyway, let me not digress from what I had wanted to convey.

No approach to parenting is in my opinion completely outdated or uncool or wholly ‘toxic’ or potentially deleterious. Just because we have reached the physical age of a fully grown adult does not mean we have reached the same mental age as well. We are parents I admit but that doesn’t change the fact that we are children too who are still growing and figuring the world out for ourselves. We are prone to errors, mistakes and even blunders which is okay as long as we don’t commit them intentionally. And this means that let us not take parenting too seriously and not treat it as a science that has its own set of rules and standards that are set in stone. In fact, let us wake up to the fact that we are the first generation in India who are being exposed to a neoliberal. largely capitalist, consumerist society and that we have very little ready references from the lives of our parents and grandparents to handle the challenges of today since their lives were wholly different from those of our own. India was under feudalism for centuries together and capitalism percolated into our country very slowly under the British. People had a template for centuries together for parenting to follow since the society of those days was largely changeless and unevolving. 

Again, let this not distract us from the simultaneous fact that there are of course a few, very useful precedents to follow too from the lives of our parents. One among them is aggression which in my opinion is a very useful and a highly effective weapon when used with caution and moderation. I have slapped my kid on a few occasions (at spots in his body where the resultant harm is as minimal as possible) when it was absolutely necessary and no other method was effective as that in deterring him from ‘crime’. As years wore on, I scaled myself down to yelling and even further down to mere, angry stares. Again, let me remind my reader that I have mixed this with a fair amount of lecturing too and this approach you may not believe appears to have yielded rich dividends. Yes, it has been already more than two years since I had slapped him last! 

To sum up, I would be the first one to admit that I still have not come up with a one-size-fits all approach to parenting and that as years roll by, I would have to alter my strategy as newer developments and challenges crop up. All that I would tell my readers from my own experience is, listen to your instinct first. Just because there are Instagram influencers who are trying to create a rigid framework for modern parenting or YouTube speakers who threaten you of societal consequences if you swerve from the path of a particular type of parenting, doesn’t mean you need to tire yourself out in trying to be a parent. We have grown up in a conservative environment. We are moving into a rapidly changing one which might soon be resembling nothing we have been used to all these years. Our kids in addition appear to be far more intelligent, dynamic and more versatile than us. Our brains have been noticing, observing, processing all of this and evolving all along. So, our instincts might be more correct than what other people are trying to tell us about parenting. Let us not in the process of not hurting our kids at any cost or disappointing them in any way, suppress all our fundamental urges and instincts and burden ourselves into becoming saints and Samuthirkanis and Rajkirans. Parenting at the end of the day is only one part of our own precious lives and we as young parents deserve some lightness and fun too!!