Article for Bethlehem Matrimonial - May 2018
Many years back when an aunt
of mine came home from US for vacation, she made an observation about the
families there. I was quite surprised to learn that kids over there are
encouraged or many a times even forced to move out of their parents’ home by
the time they attain certain age, say 18 years, sometimes even younger. They
need to find their own way of living by getting into smaller jobs first and
later with the education they obtain, learn to stand on their own feet. Once
they are ready and find a suitable partner, they will decide on having a family.
I for sure found it quite
hard to digest this as a concept at that time, since in India, staying with
your parents was quite normal even after you get married. In the past we even
had multiple families staying together under the same roof in an arrangement
fondly named joint family system.
There are good and bad about
both the arrangements. While the American method makes the kids more
independent from early ages, the Indian way provides a well-supported
infrastructure of a family which may prove helpful in different phases of life.
While the Indian approach
seemed to have worked very well for many decades, the more recent changes in the
design of families demand a rethinking of this structure. The number of
siblings compared to yesteryears’ generation have come down, leading to a
reduction in number of families. My dad and mom both have a family of eight
siblings whereas I’ve just one brother. This is the case with most of my
cousins where the maximum number of siblings they have is three. When it came
to the next generation the trend is not too different with few exception where
there are more than three kids in a family.
In addition, the area of
education have seen a whole lot of new avenues opening up. It is quite common
now for children to go far away from their parents’ home for higher education. They
start to lead an independent life and decisions big or small are made many a
times all by themselves.
All these and more I believe have
led to a need to adopt a hybrid approach to the previous Indian method for families.
As a society, Indians are designed to be quite a close-knit unit. Hence it is
essential to design an approach where both independence as well as family
bonding are addressed.
It is quite natural for
parents to be patronizing their children. For parents, a child will always
remain as one, how much ever older he or she become. This is genetically
designed and can never be changed. Hence it is important for parents to realize
that the longer they keep the children under their wings lesser empowered they’ll
be. It is important to let go, even if it is emotionally painful.
For young adults especially
the ones who are ready to start a family or who started one recently, it is
important to learn and handle situations independently. The more you are
dependent on your parents the less efficient you will be in handling a family
all by yourself. It may seem ironic how our parents achieved this capability
all the while being with their parents. The secret of their success lay in the
sheer numbers in the family. Just because of the multitude of numbers in
families in the past, parents really didn’t have dedicated time to focus on every
child. That naturally led to children handling responsibilities independently making
them better human beings.
The culture we have in India
is such an enriched one that we should reap the benefits that our forefathers
have sowed with their lives. Having said that it is equally important to learn
to go with the stride so that we don’t fall behind the rest of the world with
respect to becoming better human beings.
It is a huge cultural stir
and it is quite important that you don’t get drowned in this change. The secret
here is to embrace the change by knowing when you can swim against the current
and have a safe base to return to in case you get carried away by the current.
That’s where parents and children need to agree on a common set terms of how to
handle this double edged sword to make best use of the virtue of independence.
Take care and God bless!
