Every Child Has a Cord Connecting its Ears and Heart

Open any social media platforms, listen to any guests who visit our houses, consult any counsellors or child specialists, eye specialists, talk to any school leaders – they have one common advice for children – ‘Don’t get addicted to electronic gadgets, especially phones, tabs and video games.'

Is that advice wrong? Let’s think about that later. First, let’s understand how vague and dishonest that advice is!

I have one question as a rebuttal: What alternatives do most of us have?

Do you have time to say, ‘Keep the phone aside. Come, I have an interesting story to tell’? Do you have patience to say,  ‘Come, let’s play some game or let’s do something interesting. Keep your tab away now’? How many children have grandparents at home? We have built the neurotic and unsecured societies of kidnaps and rapes. How many of us can spend time showing sunrises, sunsets, rainbows and starry sky, at least occasionally?

We have systematically built compound walls between our houses and our neighbours’. We have overloaded children with heavy content at school in the name of changing world and competition. We send them to every possible class - wanting them to be singers, dancers, karate champions, chess grandmasters and what not – all at once.

We are busy shaping children's future. We are busy earning for their tomorrows. We are occupied with all possible nonsense of building a house for tomorrow without realising that today’s sand is slipping away from our palms of time.

Am I supporting children’s screen time with all these justifications?

No, I am asking my same questions: what alternatives do most of us have?

Why don’t we understand that every child has its own expressions that need patient ears to listen to? Why don’t we understand that every child has a special cord connecting its ears and heart that expects some personal talk? Why don’t we understand that every child wants to smile and laugh in its dreams remembering the story that it listens to from us before sleep?

We are implementing (even imposing) whatever we undergo at our workplace on our children. There are performance reviews, performance-based incentives, quality checks, targets (of marks), deadlines (of exams) and the list goes on. Most of our communication revolves around these with children.

How long it has been since you have told a story? How long it has been since you have laughed out loud with your child making fun of day-to-day happenings or your childhood stories?

On the other hand, we, the parents, teachers, educators and the whole ‘GANG’ around children have become over-protective about children. Naturally, children are confined, not exposed to real-world people and situations.

We don’t want to expose our children to insults, criticism, catastrophes, corruption, deaths – or any adversities of life. We think that they have negative effects on children’s minds. No 24-karat gold has even been used to make ornaments. It is hardened mixing the realities of copper or zinc to make it suitable for life’s ornament. It is necessary to make children aware of everything and it is important to teach how to think and what to take.

Let’s be sensible enough to understand: our children can make their own money tomorrow, but they can never earn your today’s time anytime in future.