has been written in the light of a Class 12 boy (High School Senior) who was left to bleed to death in the car park of an upmarket residential building in Calcutta. There are all kinds of versions/explanations/reasons doing the rounds but the bald fact is that the lad is dead...
Parents, teachers---in fact all the adults who make up a child's world---really need to become more savvy about all that is happening in the world their kids are growing up in. More knowledgeable and better informed. 'Am working so hard to make life for the family comfortable' or 'demands of housework' are not shields to hide behind any more. In fact, parents today have to ensure they are one step ahead and one step behind their kids. One step ahead means to be able to talk-and i mean really talk-with their kids in the contemporary language of social media, Pokemon, mobile phone jargon or whatever. And, one step behind to prop them when they falter as all kids do--no matter how 'adult' they think they are. This 'hum ko yeh sab modern cheez nahin maloom' (I don't know all these modern things) and 'hamare time mein....' (in my time...) and 'we want to give our kids what we never had' never ever ever works. As parents we have to be attuned to their world. After all they didn't create this world, they've landed in it. We can say that we, adults, too didn't create this environment--but we have age and experience on our side which kids don't. We need to help them with ways of dealing with and coping with the zillion confusing issues they encounter every day. That is....if we don't want another misguided lad being left to bleed to death in a parking lot...
We have to be interested in our young. Interested, not in an interfering kind of way, or an information-getting kind of way, or in an intrusive way, or a meddlesome way. Interested as opposed to either being friendly (our kids don't want us as friends but as adults they can communicate with) or authoritarian. Interested and respectful. But we have to talk with them person to person so that we know where they are going, who their friends are, what they are reading, what are they surfing on the net, how school/college is, what their interests are, what their future plans are.....generally everything about them. This would ease them into becoming responsible people. This would also help them to take decisions, and, if they botch up, they would know who they could call or fall back on. It would also prevent us adults from making inane statements like 'bachcha hai' (he/she is a kid)....conveniently making them bachchas when the law catches up, or worse, 'you know how these teenagers are...today's kids....!', and allow them to do whatever they want and go in whichever direction their unformed minds are led...
Being an adult in whose orbit there are kids is hard work.......with huge rewards.
Our kids are people in their own right, and need to be treated as such.