A TROUBLING THOUGHT

In my teaching career I have got the opportunity to interact with students and probe into their psyche, sometimes successfully, and sometimes unsuccessfully.
I am shocked to realize that today’s children, or rather adolescents, think or behave in a way strikingly different from the way we used to in our teens. The one thing that stands out is their distance from their parents. I do not know whether the parents themselves are responsible for this, but it is evident that the children do not want to share their thoughts with their parents, even though they frankly confess everything to most of their teachers. I am going to set forth some examples without revealing the names of course.


There was this girl in my class who was so antagonistic to her parents that she did just the opposite of what her parents wanted her to do. Her parents came with complaints to me that their child was refusing to listen to them. I felt sad to realize that this should not have been the case. Earlier if we did not listen to our teachers our guardians would be called, but unfortunately now most of the time it is the other way round. When I asked the girl the reason she frankly stated that she did not like being bullied by her parents, especially her mother.


Now there was this boy in my class. I distinctly remember his mother calling me up at school and desperately pleading with me to talk to her son and make him realize that he should not use abusive language while talking to his parents. Amazingly the boy listened to me! Before his annual exam his mother called me up and requested me to ring up the boy and without revealing the fact that his mother had called me I rang him up and asked him to study properly.


Again another student of mine adopted unfair means in her exam. She told her father that it was not her fault and her father wrote a letter to the principal stating that his daughter was feeling humiliated and claimed that she was innocent. But when questioned by the superintending teacher she burst into tears and confessed her guilt. Her father had nothing to say when he arrived to collect the report card.


In the oral examination I was surprised to find so many students re-iterating the fact that parents should stop being possessive about them. When I asked a girl why she thought so and tried to make her understand that parents interfere in their affairs only to guide them so that they do not take any wrong decision in life, she told me that they should at least rely on the children ‘who are sensible.’ Now what she meant by being ‘sensible’ I dared not ask.

There is a kind of communication gap between parents and children and I really feel that it is high time parents realized this. I feel whatever psychological problems the students are facing these days could easily be done away with, if instead of taking the children to the professional counsellors the parents could spend a little more time with their children, talking to them and trying to understand them.