Kids Will Be Kids

Some time back while I was giving bath to my son Adithya, he suddenly dropped a bombshell.

‘Appa, what is life?’

Spirituality, religion and philosophy have never been my cup of tea and my knowledge on these subjects is at best peripheral. As I picked up my jaw from the bathroom floor, wondering how best to answer this existential puzzle that bothered my seven year old son, Adithya helped me with a second question.

‘Why is it written that two life left, one life left?’

Ah! There you go!! From then on, I reduced his quota of computer games by a good thirty minutes every week.

As a parent, we are supposed to appreciate and encourage kids to ask questions. I remember a teacher admonishing his eight year old son when I was a post-graduate student. ‘Ask me anything, but don’t ask ‘why’ for everything’! What the heck, I had thought then. Now, a wise father of two boys, I have no hesitation in agreeing to the sage words of my teacher. There is one more thing I have discovered in my short profile as a father. Parents experience tender and loving thoughts about their children when they are fast asleep or after they have left for school. Really!! Once I called a friend of mine and asked him what he was doing. ‘Relaxing. I have just dropped my daughters for the tuitions!’ Similarly another friend quipped, ‘son has left for school. And there is peace at home.’ Though told in a lighter vein, this also shows the talent of kids to exasperate parents.

Children are capable of astonishing us with their amazing abilities that can send any Limca World Record holder scurrying for cover. One Sunday morning I found my two sons discussing something animatedly sitting on the bed. They had just got up, had not brushed their teeth and their faces were hardly ten centimeters away from each other! Kids are immune to common irritants like smelly mouth, untidiness, homework and squalor. I can bet my neck that the amount of dirt and grime you scrub off their bodies during an evening bath would not be less than the quantity of muck spewed out by the washing machine after cleaning a heap of doormats. Homework is perhaps the most important activity that most kids are allergic to. They can tell you with a straight face that there is no homework on a particular day but the next morning they startle you by asking why you did not make them to do the homework last evening! Now the teacher would scold them and only you are responsible for that!! The drama and absolute lack of focus young children exhibit during studies is something that can put to test patience of the most composed parent. When exams approach and my wife begins to teach Adithya in the evenings, I volunteer to do the dishes or other chores in the kitchen. Else it is easy to fly off the handle at the study table with kids who are staring blankly at the books waiting to watch Doraemon!

These days it is interesting to listen to the lingo of small kids. When I ask my son to hurry up so that he won’t be late for school, he responds with a lazy ‘chillax, chillax appa’! Initially innocuous and funny, the language and slangs used by kids pose a challenge to the parents as they grow up. We start worrying about the company they keep and it is indeed a struggle against the inevitable trying to filter curse words and expletives in their conversations with friends. Oh my god, how will I explain to him why he should not use those words!?

All the parents daydream that their kid would one day become a scientist or an officer or a great musician or even a software engineer. After the rise and rise of Arvind Kejriwal, may be, a politician too. ‘She picks up the tunes so very well’, ‘my daughter is only three and she is such a good dancer. You should see her dancing for munni badnaam hui’!, ‘he is very good at counting and yesterday he told me exactly how many chocos he ate with milk’, ‘my son is going for robotics class you know! He is just seven and the teacher says he does better than the thirteen year olds’!! For all these planning and dreaming, children keep shifting the goalposts relentlessly. My elder son wants to be a space scientist one day, a Virat Kohli or Chris Gayle the next and then an actor and then a singer and so the list goes on and the younger son wants to be a train driver, pilot and doctor. But today, given a choice and chance, most kids would prefer to spend their evenings playing with their friends or watching cartoons. Just being kids.