Outsourcing Parenting

It takes a village to raise a child.
African saying
A chilling figure reached us late last year: 5,871 children committed suicide either upon receiving unsatisfactory academic results or even more pathetically, in anticipation of them, which means their emotional state was so fragile that they couldn& #8217;t bear the thought of either disappointing their parents or working out an alternative plan to the goal that had already been fixed for them. Anything below a certain magic percentage which is the key to a course in higher education and a 16-year-old thinks he is a failure.
In none of these cases did anyone expect these children to equate their lives with their marks. Yet, for at least 10 years that is what they had been led to believe… that they were worth only what they won in a classroom. Nothing about their all-round personalities mattered, whether they were thoughtful children, respectful to elders or compassionate to household staff/ trades people. It meant little or nothing at all how talented they might have been at music, gardening, sketching, fixing things about the house or cooking. Hardly anyone noticed or appreciated those aspects of their unfolding characters. What mattered was only whether they were scoring machines in schoolroom tests or on the playing fields. As these are the reported deaths, we can be sure there were many more. And as for those who did not take their lives, we may be equally sure that most of them live with feelings of defeat, depression and injury: an inflammatory mix.
Who is responsible? A system of intense competition that makes unnatural demands, robs a child of her free time, and is supported by a collaboration of social and familial expectations which together form a human trap.
Now, is there something we don’t know or are we carrying on regardless? For at least a 100 years since psychoanalysis proved it, we have known that an emotionally happy child will grow into a stable adult .Yet how, in the space of just two decades, has the attitude to raising children, and goal-setting for them changed to one of joyless and extreme urgency? Nearly every tender and imaginative space in a child’s life has been invaded and adult anxieties concerning performance bluntly passed on to seven and eight-year-old humans who have not yet grasped the concepts of wealth and success, but can sense their power. Bewildered
In the current pattern of rearing the next generation is hidden the kind of pain that I equate with what I saw on Khader Nawaz Khan Road (Chennai) some time ago: a calf no more than a week old was being driven with a stick to keep up with its anxious, mooing mother who was tied to a moped doing a brisk 10 kmph. The sheer bewilderment and panic in the young creature’s eyes as it wobbled along is reflected in the eyes of our youngsters goaded to get through tests and tricks devised by an adult vision of discipline and attainments deemed right for a child of three in LKG; for a child of four in UKG; for a child of five in class I. This is so the world over. An article in Time magazine (May 2008) described the joy of parents who send their children to learning centres at the age of two. “She can recognise numbers and pictures!” And this at an age when the child is powerless to choose for herself.
What about some time to stand and stare? Not on your sweet life.
On the one hand we recognise and celebrate individuality. On the other, a crowd of four-year-olds is expected to learn to read, write and recite at exactly the same pace, triggering early and sharp competition in the schoolroom. Socialising, and learning to give and live together is considered far less important and in not counselling children that the most vital thing in life is human relationships, we are doing them the injustice of opening the door to loneliness. Seeds of anger
Why will they — these tense, weary children — not grow up into impatient and angry young people if we do not spend enough time with them in their early years? We not only send them out of the safety of the house as soon as we can, but talk about it constantly in their presence as if our goal is to put some distance between them and us. “Come June, she will go off for three hours every day giving me some time for myself!” is something that we hear all the time.
Have we outsourced parenting to schools?
The most valuable thing we can give our children is our time and the continuous confidence of parental presence as they grow at their pace, and from their own inner visions. For, in every child the inner vision of life is brighter than the outer which is dictated by a world which imposes “learning” from the outside. All systems of modern education insist that the world must be understood in certain patterns: mathematically, historically, scientifically. Learning which could be delayed till the infant personality stabilises is applied too rapidly, suppressing the inner vision.
If we push our children away from ourselves and into the world too early in their lives and tell them to overcome everybody else, what kind of emotional equipment will they grow up with? We would do well to remember what Sylvia Ashton-Werner said about orienting children: “War and peace wait in an infant room, wait and vie.”

A touching innocence

Anne Frank, who died in the Holocaust, would have turned 80 on June 12. A stirring visit to the secret den where she hid for two years writing a remarkable diary.
Photos: Getty Images and The Hindu Photo Library Sensitive and poignant: A letter by Anne Frank dated 18 December 1936; diary entries and the girl herself.
“It is the silence that frightens me…and I am scared to death we shall be discovered. We have to whisper and tread lightly, otherwise the people in the warehouse might hear us”
11th July, 1944
I must have been 15 years old when I first read that sentence, in a book all my classmates were talking about. It quickly became my favourite adventure book, autobiography, historical thriller — and even a romantic novel (a book I would secretly cry over every time I reached the end, and be teased by my sisters).
I used to imagine Anne Frank, a girl of my age, creeping along a narrow wooden staircase, pushing past the movable bookcase that sealed off the secret annexe where she lived in hiding with her Jewish family… praying that the Gestapo would never find them.
Over 30 years after reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I was in Amsterdam. Walking up that very staircase myself. The steps of Anne Frank’s house! My heart thumped exactly as Anne’s must have.
Soon I was looking out of the very same window Anne did, writing in her diary entry of December 12, 1942: “I’m sitting looking outside through a slit in the curtain. It is dusk as I watch the people walking by; it looks as if they are all in a terrible hurry…”
What I see instead, is a long, very long queue of people , patiently moving forward in tiny steps. Would Anne, all those years ago, have ever imagined that every single day, almost 2000 people from all over the world would be queuing up right below, to see the ‘Secret Annexe’ that she was describing so vividly?Heart-wrenching story

And the story that drew all these people here… Anne was a bubbly 13 year-old German Jew, enjoying a carefree childhood in Amsterdam, when things suddenly changed in July 1942. Hitler intensified the persecution of Jews all over Europe. Anne’s father Otto had been preparing for this danger for months — and on a rainy night, hurriedly took her mother, sister Margot, and another family of four, to the sealed off back rooms of his office building. Among Anne’s bag of precious belongings were her 13th birthday gifts: a red-chequered diary, and hair-curlers.
Anne and her family never stepped out for two long years. And Anne never stopped writing in her Diary. Otto’s trusted Dutch friends brought them secret supplies of food. And just when it seemed that Hitler would be vanquished, and they would breathe free again, they were inexplicably betrayed. Angry Nazi boots raced up the hidden staircase, four days after Anne’s last diary entry, and a terrified family packed off in a cattle truck to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. In appalling conditions, Anne’s mother and sister passed away. Anne’s brave spirit was finally broken. Three months before her 16th birthday, Anne died. Only her father Otto survived.
Meanwhile, Anne’s diary lay hidden under old newspapers and escaped the destructive hands of the Gestapo. It was found and kept safely by a Dutch family friend, till her father, broken with grief, returned to Amsterdam. Otto was astonished by his daughter’s writings in the diary called “Kitty” — a journal continued into thick note books.
And then the book hit the world. Translated and published in 60 countries, Anne’s heroic story revealed not just an extraordinary writing talent, but the sensitivity of a little girl who accepts her fate with poignant maturity.
“Cycling, dancing, and whistling…that’s what I long for. But still, I mustn’t show it because if all eight of us began to pity ourselves, where would it lead us?” December 24, 1943
Anne displayed an extraordinary sense of judgement for her age; after her first girlish prattle, Anne copes with cramped spaces and flaring tempers, leading to insightful human observations: “I’ve learned one thing: you only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character!” September 28, 1942Stirrings of romance
And there’s evidence of her awakening womanhood, the shy beginnings of a romance…with the quiet Peter (the young son of the Van Daans who shared their hiding quarters). With endearing timidity, the two young prisoners cling briefly to each other one day; an episode of a slowly unfolding intimacy that brings out her most shining quality: a touching innocence.
I moved with the group into the next part of the annexe. A sudden hush descended in the room. Anne’s room, where she wrote her diary. Up on the walls, before our astonished eyes, were a few old pictures that Anne herself had pasted, still remarkably preserved.
“Our little room looked very bare with nothing on the walls; but thanks to Daddy who had brought my film-star collection beforehand, I have transformed the walls…” July 11, 1942.
In a whispered mix of world languages, Dutch, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, even Hindi… awestruck fans like me, were telling one another, telling their children: Look, Anne slept here. And wrote there. An adjoining bathroom suddenly reminded me that they were forbidden to make a noise with the flush tank during the day…how did that odd detail remain stuck in my head?
We could see a gigantic tree in bloom right outside Anne’s window: again, a Diary entry about the beloved tree that Anne measured the seasons of her life by. “It was Daddy’s birthday yesterday…Our horse-chestnut tree is in full bloom, and even more beautiful than last year”. May 13, 1944.
On June 12, 2009, Anne’s 80th birthday, ten saplings from this tree are being distributed to significant sites, including the 9/11 memorial in New York. An apt metaphor for growing and spreading a true appreciation of human rights and freedom.
I see a Visitor’s Book. John F Kennedy and Steven Spielberg have been emotionally moved to write in it. My comments seem hopelessly inadequate compared to their powerful phrasing.Inspiration to write
I am now in the Museum’s bookshop. I see a pleased bunch of tourists picking up a copy in Chinese. Is there one in… Tamil? I ask the attendant tentatively. Of course! Are you from India? she says with a smile. I tell her I am a writer. It strikes me then that perhaps my first stirrings of the joy of writing began with Anne’s book; were there other writers here too who felt the same way?
And like so many visitors streaming out towards the flower laden canals of Amsterdam, I too would hurry to a pretty café, sipping a drink, dipping randomly into the Diary again…
Goosebumps set in. For this is what I read in an April entry, a day that happens to be my birthday: "Dear Kitty, I don’t want to live in vain. I want to be useful to people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death… Yours, Anne.”
E-mail indubee8@yahoo.co.in
Museum file
Museum housed in original location, in central Amsterdam
Original red-chequered diary with actual writings/photos on display
Open 364 days of year, including Sundays (Closed: Yom Kippur)
One million visitors every year
Entry: Adults: €8.50; Kids: €4. Below 9 years: free
No tours, but free guide book in many languages
Original walls, layout, amenities largely intact
The Diary of Anne Frank among world’s most read books
Originally written in German; English translation most widely sold