In my fifteen years as a parent educator facilitating parenting workshops, I have been awestruck by the similarity in the goals that parent...
In my fifteen years as a parent educator facilitating parenting workshops, I have been awestruck by the similarity in the goals that parents have for their children. Our workshop participants represent the wide diversity of Indian culture – different religions, class, caste, languages, food preferences, dress. Despite these differences, they always have one common vision – to raise their children to be “compassionate and caring human beings”, in nurturing and peaceful environments.
All parents have dreams for their children to feel safe, to belong, to be respected and to be treated with consideration, whether at home, in school or by the larger society. In these workshops, parents have shared the pain they have felt when their children have been bullied, name-called, stigmatised or ostracised by their peers, or even by their teachers and caregivers.
These sentiments resonate deeply for me, more so in the challenging times we now face. The question that keeps me awake at night is this – Despite a shared vision amongst parents, who constitute a significantly large proportion of our society, to have peaceful and caring communities, why are we are living through a meteoric rise in hate and insensitivity? Something just does not add up.
I thought a good place...
