We spend the first year of a child's life teaching him or
her to walk and talk "and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up
and sit down."
I read this somewhere and its really true and so truer than
now with respect to Jispa. Jispa is suddenly becoming a big girl. She
understands stuff, is able to argue back and is broadly able to resist. So
whats wrong. Nothing – just as parents now we have to be all ready to handle a
different child than the one we were handling six months ago. The nature of adolescence
is now panning out. Neither she nor we know if she is an adult or a child.
Should we treat her as if she knows nothing or should we treat her as if she
knows everything. We have to get after her to do her stuff and she says she
knows what to do. Jasmine is letting her peel and cut cucumbers and I baulk at
the approval. That’s not done. I don’t think she is ready yet but then many
girls younger to her do this and much more.
She fights and fights aggressively for freedom and
responsibility and on giving she promptly screws it all up. She would then proceed to just not do what is expected
of her. Its not that she doesn’t understand. She does but just something
happens and …. And it just creates more confusion in our minds. Is she old or
is she young. Every phase gets tougher and tougher. Now that she is in the
fifth grade the pressure of homework and studies have cranked up dramatically.
There is a lot more to study and with her swimming schedule the time that she
has is dramatically less. Time seems to have been condensed these days. So much
so that we are now constantly on her case. Jasmine gets completely done in by
the stress and then it gets to me. I try and understand and allow but then
Jispa will simply mess things up and make me wonder whats going on. I allow her
leeway in the morning to relax and not rush – the consequence is that when we
are to leave she will not be ready and there is a mad rush for the bags. I
allow her some time to read a magazine
at night – the consequence is that she remembers in the morning about the home
work to be done and there is a mad rush with unfinished home work. We let her
see a movie and project will remain unfinished or she will be ill prepared for
her reviews.
Oh dam me. I always maintained that I will not put pressure
on her to study. She is free to enjoy her life and do as she pleases. Studies
will not be the main focus of her life like what my parents did. Studies they
knew was the only way out of a life of struggle. They were right in their era.
Time shave changed. I maintained always but then it lasted only till I became a
parent of a 10 year old. So now I have changed to from studies is not it to
only studies is not it. You need studies and something else. Or you have your
something else and you have studies as well. Earlier when Jispa was born I was
a complete ass. I even thought that great it’s a girl, at least the pressure on
her to grow up and study and become an engineer is not there. But dam… that’s
not the thing. We know she is smart and we know that she can do well. She has a
great brain that is able to memorise as well as reason. So what’s my job as a
dad? Is it to give her a great and happy childhood that she will remember for
life (and not blame me like how I sometimes blame my parents) or teach her to
study, make her study for now and then hopefully she takes a call later on what
she wants to do in life.
I really don’t want to pressurize her. Yesterday as well I had
to take the school magazine from her and get her to study and finish her
homework. She obviously did not like it. It showed on her face. Later on I asked
her about it and then I spoke to her. I told her I was sorry. She had to finish
her stuff, I hate being a mean dad much
more than you hate having one. But I am sorry. She understood. At the end as
was sleeping I told her “I am sorry and I promise you that it WILL happen again”.
We laughed. It’s a tough one. And it’s not as simple as ‘let Jasmine do the
irritating discipline thing and I will do the fun thing’. That’s not on as
well. That’s unfair to one parent. So we both have to be mean and sweet. The thing
is to alternate. But it’s getting freaking tough on both of us. We are
constantly being pulled in by our true nature, our role as parents and our
desires to see our child do well.
So what’s the answer to all this? its difficult. The way I see
it right now and the way I explained to Jispa is simple. I have no option but
ensure that you have a great base. She is around 11 right now. I have another
5-6 years at best to hound her and get her to study. If this base is well
constructed then she can build it from there on.in fact she can then even
decide to chuck it all and do something else altogether. But to have the
freedom to choose you need to be able enough to get the choice in the first
place. If you want to reject an admission in a college you need to get the
admission to start with. That leave sus with very little room to play with. And
that little room is gobbled up with her swimming. If she swims so many hours a
day, she is eating into all her time for everything else. Plus we have to
ensure she plays a bit and movies and relax and read… wow. I keep explaining to
her that if she was a simple fun kid then she would have had time for a lot of
simple cute fun. But is choosing to be a champion. Representing Mumbai is no
mean feat, there are choices to be made and scarifies to be done. It is up to
the athlete to choose. But she will need to.
On this a bit of philosophy that I read might help. It’s quite
an interesting story. I have read this story as a kid, but I never did figure
that this is an interesting and deeply philosophical construct. Read on. How limiting
Jispa’s choices now we are actually giving her the freedom to choose! Sorry
Jips, I think you are not going to find this one inspiring. Atleast for now.
Odysseus Nudged: How Limiting Our Choices Can Give Us More
Freedom
According to legend, the Sirens were beautiful women whose
voices were so alluring that when sailors heard their song they could not
resist approaching and were drowned on the rocky shores of the island where the
Sirens sang. No sailor had heard their song and lived until Odysseus, who, on
the counsel of the goddess Circe, had his crew tie him to the mast of his ship.
When he heard the Sirens’ song he begged to be released, but his crew, their
ears plugged with beeswax, would not unbind him and saved him from his own
desires. Odysseus was lucky – he knew that he would be unable to resist the
Sirens and had himself bound – but people often have difficulty foreseeing
their weakness from a distance. Sometimes they need help.
I love watching my not-quite-two-year-old son learn about
the world from his mistakes. I look on with sympathy at his falls and bumps and
spills and I try to restrain myself from interceding. But when he’s about to
tumble down a flight of stairs I step in. It is difficult to balance preserving
his freedom to explore and make his own mistakes with the desire to keep him
safe. There’s a lot to be said for giving kids autonomy and letting them learn
from experience, but sometimes you have to behave paternalistically and tie
them to the mast (or at least install safety gates).
When you start treating grown men and women like you’re
their father, though, the charge of paternalism becomes a more serious one.
There may be cases in which a heavy-handed approach is necessary (particularly
when people’s actions harm others), but we should be careful about using it. A
more circumspect approach is libertarian paternalism, described by Richard
Thaler and Cass Sunstein in Nudge (and re-articulated more recently by Sunstein
in his Simpler) as a way of influencing people to make decisions that they
themselves would consider beneficial, without restricting their freedom.
Here, we are not tying Odysseus to the mast – the more
appropriate analogy would be to the beeswax that Odysseus had his sailors put
in their ears. The wax prevented the sailors from hearing the Sirens’ song and
saved them from being lured to their deaths, but it also left them free to
remove the wax if that is what they wanted to do. This sort of intervention is
an acknowledgment that the sailors’ freedom is important, but also that people
are not always perfectly rational. As Carnegie Mellon economist (and
psychologist) George Loewenstein recently explained to me, “When people have
problems exercising self-control, restricting their choices can, in some cases,
leave them more freedom to choose.”
On its face, Loewenstein’s claim may seem paradoxical –
isn’t a person most free when presented with all her options and allowed to
choose among them? But as the mythical Sirens make clear, there are some
options that we are not truly free to resist. Without beeswax in their ears
Odysseus’ crew would have been doomed; the wax gave them the freedom to choose.
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