Independence – The Double Edged Sword!

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!