Column

Aerobics? Gardening? Cooking? Penmanship? What classes would you like to send your toddler to? Yes, that’s right, these are all classes for your precious little tot to take so that she has that extra edge when she’s filling out those Ivy League applications... oh in about fifteen years from now.

Everywhere I turn I am bombarded by fliers, advertisements and text messages exhorting me to give my three year old that competitive advantage by teaching him the finer intricacies of finger painting.

When we first moved to Mumbai a year and a half ago and I was looking at pre-schools for my son. I thought it might be nice to find a mother-toddler activity to do with him till he started play group.

So I googled and asked around and finally had a list of places to call. Almost every place I spoke to seemed to offer the same set of things — phonics, GK, interview coaching and personality development. I can never forget one of the women I spoke to, who, bless her, very enthusiastically tried to sell me a skipping and aerobics class for three-year-olds.

I soon gave up looking as I had no interest in sending my child to brain sharpening classes and Toddler Leadership lessons (which strangely enough gave me nightmares about Lord of the Flies)
Of course, in the last eighteen months, I have come across many more classes for tots, from the educational to the creative to the physical. Some haven’t made it past the sales spiel (where words like creativity, curriculum, space and broadening horizons are thrown at you), some have been trialled and some, my son has even done (swimming and gymnastics).

Now we have all had extracurricular classes growing up. When I was in school almost everyone in my class was either an MS in training or an Alarmel Valli in the making. But as far as I can remember we were all encouraged to take on one activity. But this obsession with sending children as young as three for at least four-five different activities is current and the general acceptance of it baffles me.

Now it’s one thing to help your child find a sport or creative activity that they enjoy and will act as an effective stress buster or source of solace. And it’s quite another thing to send your child for a colouring class because their teacher mentioned casually during the PTA meeting that he/she has trouble keeping within the lines. Or even worse, because all the other children you know are going for colouring class. Or jazz ballet. Or world music appreciation. Or general knowledge. Or handwriting classes.

Yes. Handwriting class. This one, for some reason really annoys me. Especially since it was targeting four-year-olds, and also because the person who sent feelers out for the class held forth on the importance of monitoring and controlling our children’s handwriting from an early age, in an email littered with the carnage of the English language. A parent so lazy that they could not be bothered to spell out whole words had the audacity to suggest that we should be policing how our four-year-olds write.

I think a good way to cure parents who are serial class sending offenders would be to send them for a class every day of the week. And let them have little say in choosing it. While the children play outside and dream up of games where they are slaying dinosaurs with sub-atomic particle guns, their parents should be sent off to learn to colour within the lines and practice their sleeping lines. Oh and learn that could is c-o-u-l-d. And not cld.

— Menaka Raman, a former advertising professional is currently a freelance writer, occasional blogger and also moonlights as a mother. She tries to write when she’s not chasing dragons and riding magic carpets with her two boys aged 3.7 years and 7 months