Feeding kids with lies and Lays alike
When it comes to parenting, we Indians have a rare flair of feeding our kids with all kinds of nonsense. The tradition of such parenting has started taking its toll and families have started experiencing untold miseries triggered by their own kids..

Vaatupura A Jayaprakash.
PARENTS HAVE always been role models for kids of all ages. This has been endorsed time and again, everywhere in the world. This is a similarity found in all cultures and when cultures communicate and exchange their niceties, naturally there will be polarisation in parenting too.
Howsoever hard and fast that polarisation might be, when it comes to real parenting, we Indians have a rare flair of feeding our kids with all kinds of nonsense, thinking that it is all for the children’s good. And the children, who have the rare faculty of not differentiating between what their parents are doing and what they are supposed to do, pick up wrong signals and precedents from a very early age, and become the chips of the old blocks by the time they come of age and be parents themselves.
The tradition of such parenting has started taking its toll, and families in this subcontinent have started experiencing untold miseries triggered by their own kids. It starts from basic human habits to telling lies and committing crimes. Eating too much, drinking, smoking, disclaiming and dishonouring, scaring and browbeating and so goes the list.
However, our children pick up these evils, don’ts and lies the same way they chip down fatty Lays chips, cookies, wafers and other confectionaries. What is the price the modern nuclear family pay for this? What is the risk the kids come to shoulder when they come of age? How is this going to put the society to ransom in the long run? We parents hardly take time off to think about it. We are obsessed with the welfare of our kids, and we feed them with flat lies and fatty Lays alike. The consequences are manifold.
The kids become the replicas of their parents; with everything attached, both good and bad.
They take things for granted thinking that if parents do, it must be right. A kid grown with a lot of browbeating turns out to be a bully.
If the parents tell lies or break their promises, or fail to keep their word, the kids of such parents will also have the same traits in the long run.
When parents are not able to imbibe qualities that last for a lifetime, children pick up the worst qualities from other social agencies, and these qualities last for a lifetime and beyond in the form of familial ignominy.
Mothers force-feed their kids. They do it as if the kid is going to die if he skips a meal. This feeding tendency leaves the kid fed up with food. He or she resorts to eating junk and drinking deadly beverages.
If the need is for maintaining restraint, attitudinal balance, being responsible etc are not taught in the family, kids naturally grow into wanton boys and girls.
Commitments like caring for the weak, elderly and lonely, either in the family or in the society, have to be nurtured in the family ambience itself, and as and when there is an occasion for the parents to be committed and responsible, they have to be so in such a way that their kids pick up this lesson at an early age itself. But do we do this?
What the parents do is that give some lame excuses and lie right in front of their children to free themselves of their responsibilities.
When someone seeks help from our family, we have to help him or her according to the nature of the help and our limitations. Instead, many parents play hide and seek when someone approaches for help. Can we expect our kids to be different when they grow up?
It is unhealthy to eat out for long, and it is hazardous to eat junk food. How many parents are ready to shun such habits? How many new parents have the tolerance to teach their kids the need for maintaining a healthy diet regime?
We feed our kids with all the junk available in the market, and we boast of their chubby size, tastes and the nowhere seen talents and skills. And the kids in turn happen to grow up in a world of illusionary achievements and false prides. Can they ever be what they actually are? We spoil our kids the same way we toil ourselves for their welfare.
Television eats on our health, wealth and happiness. Why are our kids too tip-toeing the same line? They are put in the rut by their own parents.
Consumerism is taking us to new lows everyday; still we take our kids to supermarkets and stuff them with all types of nasty tendencies like buying things we don’t want, buying much more than what we want, eating things that are hazardous, and finally feeding them with a regular doses of ‘use and throw culture’.
No wonder, modern materialistic and monitory criteria that reflects our social, personal and moral values are meticulously copied by our offspring, and they transform themselves into chronic insensible figurines, symbolising falsehood, lies, greed, hypocrisy and snobbery; the dirty and disastrous signs of modern parenting.
It is investment all the way, and the talk of the family is all about returns. The power of money is equated with prestige; and eventually the finer lines that demarcate good and bad, vice and virtue and modesty and malice, truth and falsehood are made to look non-existent and meaningless.
Thus, a generation slowly gets deprived of those humane values that have had much greater sway on human civilization and sustenance than any material or monetary possession ever had. The ugly face of modern parenting is visible in our families, day in and day out.

Will our kids ever be able to grow into beings of virtue and values?

Among us are innumerable parents who go that extra miles and ensure that their kids pick up good social, personal and cultural values from their parents themselves. There are parents who try to transform their kids into better beings than what the parents had been when they were kids. There are parents who dedicate their whole life carving a niche for their kids by the sweat of their blood. Some parents practice impeccable lifestyle so that their kids would follow their footsteps.

However, in a heterogeneous society like ours, their number is dwindling. Thanks to the pressures exerted by modern market, material and monitory forces, the alien cultures and civilisations that come to play in our society via our so-called modern world order, dictate new benchmarks. The consequences of this cultivated benchmarks of falsehood and felony are so ubiquitous that a little slice of it could be seen on the faces of our modern kids who are raised by lies and Lays alike: by their parents themselves.