I woke up at 9 am on a Sunday, today, to be the ‘phone a friend’ for my niece in an hour long treasure hunt my brother (her father) devised for her. What a fantastic way to get her excited about puzzles and problem solving!
It got me reminiscing about my enterprising mother and her genius mechanisms for us, when we were kids of what was a then undefined term: Social Engineering (for good). So I thought I’d jot down some of her actions and my perceived impact of those actions here, maybe, for progeny or, maybe, for my generation that is now on the cusp of parenthood and wants a few quick tips.
First let’s establish my mother’s goals:
I think my mother prioritised 3 traits with her children: ‘self-reliant’, ‘physically active’ and ’emotionally stable ‘. That does not mean she assumed we were smart or active or stable. It meant she knew she will be make active choices to guide her children in that direction. So she inculcated in her words, actions and daily lifestyles things that would help us understand
- What do self-reliance, physically active and emotionally stable look like
- Why these are traits to aspire to
- How to achieve them
Our duty as parents is less to make our kids into ‘something’ and more to guide them on the what, why and how of the ‘something’ and let them achieve it themselves if they so choose.
And no matter how advanced AI and Google get, a mentor who can do that is irreplaceable in life. Now that we have established my mom’s guiding principles, let’s dive into the fun stuff:
Make a story interesting, call it before the climax
My mother is a master story teller! You will not catch her skimming the milk on this one. Her eyes grow big, her hands flail about, she’ll even dance if the story calls for it. And I know she started telling us full-fledged stories pretty early, because I have seen her with her granddaughter (my brother’s daughter) when she was a baby. The exact image that comes to mind of their interaction is this
But here’s the clincher, once we started getting older, she stopped giving us the ending. She would pick up a book and paint castles with her words and heroic pursuits and genies and riches and then simply say ‘I’m tired now’. She would quietly put the book down (with the page where she left off open) amidst our cries of protest and promise to read the rest of it in a day or so.
I mean who does that?
It was brutal and it was effective because we were so invested in the plot by that point that we needed to finish the story. And if mom wasn’t going to help us, then we were going help ourselves! Even if we weren’t good at reading at first, our curiosity was a strong driver and we kept attempting to read the rest.
She built in us the interest of reading by literally showing us how vital it was to be able to read!
If you want to know more you’re going to have to learn to read.
And we did. My brother and I are, both, voracious readers and whether you believe that YT videos, TV and audio books can give you the same amount of information as reading books or not, reading and a cultivated interest in reading is an irreplaceable asset.
Go wide before you go deep
In the book ‘Behave’, Robert Sapolsky writes that “… by the start of adolescence, there’s a greater volume of gray matter and more synapses than an adult … over time… less optimal dendritic processes and synapses get pruned…”
He summarises that essentially the brain collects a lot of ‘thought processes and connections’ by the early adolescence and then prunes the ‘information/skills/abilities’ that are unnecessary later. He then confirms the correlation through his landmark study on developmental patterns, that the more packed the initial heap of info to prune from, the higher the adult IQ over the pruning process.
Whether to directly apply this study or just to find out what her kids have natural inclinations toward, my mom took us places. She took us to book readings, she got us excited about space missions, she picked us up from dance classes and cricket matches and drove us to perform in plays. She enabled us to do a vast and varied string of activities to build us up holistically.
And she made this sustainable for us by not turning into tiger mom. I remember 2 distinct instances that cemented her stance on the sustainability of these activties:
- She registered me to classical dance classes at the age of 4 because she saw my face light up and my body start to automatically move whenever a good song came on. She did the same with my bother and sketching. She observed the happiness of her children and invested in it.
- When my teacher recommended my mom to take me to Boogie-Woogie (Indian “So you think you can dance”) she denied it stating that the aim of teaching me to dance was not to compare me with others. Especially that early in life, my role was simply to learn a new skill, enjoy the experience and understand if this is something that I wanted to continue for longer. She valued learning for learning’s sake.
I ended up learning dance, skating, acrobatics, acting (plays), yoga, sketching, story-writing and cooking by the time I was 15. Not competitively though, I just learnt what these things were and what it meant to do them and most importantly which ones I enjoyed doing. She watered the seeds of my interests with structured learning and community. And in doing so she helped me find my passion(s) and taught me how to find new ones.
Let others in
My mom grew up in a nuclear family and she raised us in a nuclear family as well. But she understood the importance of diverse opinions. Let me be clear, she was the ‘CEO’ of her child’s care. There were no two ways about it. The decision-making lay in her hands. But she also knew that friction of opinions enable children to truly make choices. And that’s the crux of it: once a person knows about their options, they are automatically empowered to choose. And they may make an easy vs difficult, wrong vs right choice, but it will be their choice.
So we had table debates every dinner (No arguments, no raising voices and no storming off). And it wasn’t necessary that we were experts in the topic of the discussion, but it was necessary that we all got a chance, even me as an 8 year old, to lay out our thoughts on the subject. And when we had an impasse, we would call others in the family with expertise or strong opinions on the topic to continue the conversation. I remember calling cousins, aunts and friends to join a side in the discussions.
This also manifested in the people we were free to hang out with. Our extended family has a surprising number of instances of estrangement. But the differences between our parents and their siblings never trickled down to us. We were always free to visit, to bond and be influenced by all these members of the family. We were always allowed to ask questions (respectfully) about the situations that caused the schisms in the family and the diverse perspectives of those events. We sometimes didn’t get all the answers because they were difficult to talk about, but we were never reprimanded for wanting to understand the different points of view.
The children, we, ended up making our own choices about religion, faith, marriage, love, vegetariniasm, etc as we grew up. But this is something we could do because we knew our choices, to some extent, understood the repercussions of our choices.
Play the ‘What can you do about it?‘ game
My mom played an easy game with us called ‘what can you do about it?’ Instead of telling us what needs to be done or giving us whatever we need immediately, she would ask us ‘what can you do about it’ whenever we presented with a request. So if we asked her for evening snacks, we knew to come prepared to say ‘I can run down and get some Parle G. Could you make tea?’. Or if we needed help with homework, we’d be prepared to say, ‘I already tried it this way and this way but I am getting the wrong answer. Could you help?’ She made sure we gave our own needs some thought before asking an external support system.
In fact she believed in developing this ability so much, that she’d let us have what we wanted, even if she didn’t want that for us, if we came up with good AIs for ourselves. This one time I wanted to go to a waterpark with my friends, and she really did not want me to go (for multiple reasons). We continued bargaining for hours. She said that the ratio of girls and guys was not ideal, so I managed to convince another girl friend to join us. She complained about the price of the tickets and we managed to find a discount by moving the dates we wanted to go. The back and forth continued for awhile before my mom finally exclaimed “What will it take for you to stop asking me about this this trip?” and I said, “You saying yes.”
She laughed so hard, that she let me go on the trip.
I understood the value of hook or crook that day, honestly. When you’re dealing with people, lots of the things can work to unblock your goals. So it helps to keep thinking, what can I do about this? and keep trying answers out till something gives. I genuinely believe that the ‘what can I do’ game builds ability and confidence in one’s ability to make things happen for themselves. It builds the social skills, the cognitive maneuvering and inclination to problem solving. We pay good money to top institutes for this kind of teaching.
I kinda wrote too much so I’m going to quit. But the more I think about it the more tiny yet amazing details of my mom’s master plan come to mind. She gave up her job to prioritise us, she invested all of her intellect, time and money to our upbringing and I’ve told this to most of my friends, I love how my mother thinks. Her brain functions in ways we could never catch up to, but we can at least collate and share these instances of classic ideas, so they can inspire new parents coming up with strategies to raise their children.
Thoughts on the edge 