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ShareThe other Sunday, I was chatting with a former colleague of mine whom I chanced upon online after a long time.
After a few minutes of gup-shupping, he said he was stepping out to repair his keyboard -- his son had broken it. Aha! I thought, I have found another parent with a computer crazy kid and I asked him how long his son sat in front of a comp.
"My boy is two-years-old," he laughed, too young to be 'hooked' on to a mere machine. I told him, the warning in my voice masked by a smile. "It gets worse!" And as I turned around to watch my son engrossed in books, I wondered, "Had it really got worse?"
By and large, all of us parents tend to do two things as far as our kids are concerned -- either we praise them extensively or we run them down to earth.
And speaking of 'sins,' let me try to list those that most of us tend to do even when our kids have bloomed into teenagers.
We tend to talk down to them even though they, like my daughter, may be a full two inches taller than us.
We consciously indulge in endless comparisons, conveniently forgetting that there are many who have done even worse.
We forget that children bloom at different times.... Some might be early achievers and others, might discover their forte a little later on in life!
We judge our kids by their results or go by what their teachers say.
We often ignore that they are young adults and need to be treated like that.
So, when I, in a hurry switch off a computer, it is but natural that my son will go in a sulk when he has been waiting for an hour for Java to load and just when five minutes are left I have shut it off.
Sins and sulks brings me to the other important 'S' words in the life of a parent -- smiles, that are brought aplenty when the kids get together, even for a short break. Like the smile that broke out on my face when I got an unexpected call from my daughter last Saturday afternoon: "Mom, may I come home for the weekend?" If only for a short time, my world with its two teens was complete!
