Jargogled Impressions.

As a parent, if you are constantly feeling guilty of not doing enough to develop your child’s cognitive, analytical, physical, physiological, or psychological needs, then you are not alone. Torn between isolating what’s nature and what’s nurture as you carve out the calendar for your little ones, its your wont to do everything you can to maximize the opportunities for them and it’s only natural that there’s always more that you can do.

More often than not though, we end up inflicting our own desires and passions on them. This is not wrong per se, but if we are blind to the reason why, then it’s possible that by pushing them towards it, we are instead pushing them away from it.

Our job as parents are not to be the haunting presence in their lives, constantly shadowing their decisions and their moments. Instead, our job is to be their path bearers, their saarthi, their shepherd, or their back-ups.

What we need is for them to learn to think on their own. What does it mean though, to think on their own?

I am still learning this, but right now, it feels to me that they learn to take decisions slow or fast, and they learn to be confident in their decisions once they do. Thinking, in effect, is taking decisions. Some of these decisions are giant, life changing ones. Others are decisions about our day to day lives. But distilled down, the decisions rely on how much and how long we have thought about something, whether it be a career decision, a hobby to pursue, or a behavior to pursue, or a routine to arrive at, or a friend to cultivate and invest in, or the kind of life to aspire towards.

Too often, our decisions are not decisions after all. They are the default options we have learnt through our biases to mistake for decisions. These default options are insidious, they are the ones we most often rue. And they happen because we did not really think much when we made them.

And thus, thinking for oneself involves thinking when the need arises, knowing when to think, and also involves thinking about who to ask help for when our understanding seems limited. After all, asking for help is a decision too and it comes with some thinking around where we might have a gap in our understanding and could do with a little support.

And so, with every activity that we lead our child towards, we can and we must aim at using them as tools that help them learn how to think. Through exposing them the elements that form part of this system that is the world, and by highlighting (not telling) them the interconnections that these elements form, and by experiencing the function of these elements can our children learn to appreciate the complex system we live in, be it the personal, the social, the cultural, the educational, the professional, or the cosmic.