Monday, 30 August 2021 | Aditi Arora | in Guest Column
GUEST COLUMN
Aditi Arora
As the pandemic situation currently finds itself on an “easy-go” mode, people stand divided. The urge to move around freely still tends to overpower the trauma of the previous and deadly wave, keeps us pulling in. This push and pull dynamic is keeping most of the population in limbo even though many restrictions have been lifted, including the crucial decision of reopening of schools in the state. Parents are utterly confused as they are stuck in the push and pull dynamic; the counsel of sending your child to school in order to encourage a sense of normalcy in the family dynamic as opposed to risking an infection of the virus. Just the simple act of your child- waking up to an alarm for school- may prove to be very helpful to bring back the simple rhythm of the body, which plays an important role in regulating our nervous system.
The mistrust that the parental bodies are giving into and keeping their children at home, while schools make an effort to open their classrooms, may prove to be detrimental to their very critical developmental phases. To the parents who feel their child is vulnerable to the current scenario, it is vital that you take stock of your child’s holistic growth. This spectrum includes your child’s eating habits, emotional health, willingness to make friends and enthusiasm to innovate and indulge in creativity. The lockdown periods could have provided parents with insights into their parenting methods, identifying and correcting fault lines in order to create a climate of authenticity and safety. The question that now arises is that have the parents used the rest in periods to do a rain check on their methods of child rearing or has the atmosphere between them and their children deteriorated?
My expression, by no means is to belittle hard working parents but to initiate the parent into the self parenting process that may help in decreasing the ever increasing gap between children and their caretakers and help the adolescent authenticate into a young adult. For all those who are wondering why this piece started with reopening of schools, the hesitation associated with it and now is leading into parenting styles, is because it is difficult for a healthy fruit bearing tree to function autonomously; it needs the change in seasons, soil properties, appropriate shade and shine, to ready a ripe and edible fruit. Just like the tree a parent needs to be deep rooted for stability, have a flexible thought process, sway with the current times but not be uprooted emotionally by the pressures of the fast moving world.
For parents to work on themselves, I suggest to get involved in the process of healing through self awareness, try to identify your own parenting style. Are you an overly fussy parent, do you give in to aggression easily, have you continued a certain hobby despite being a full time parent or are you obsessively concerned about your appearance , can be some helpful markers to start your own inner work.
I am confident that these simple markers and creating easy, organic questionnaires for yourself will give you a peek into your own structure and lead to a better understanding of your own family. With a surge in cases of panic, anxiety, ADHD and trauma in children, we psychotherapists are also sometimes at a loss for words and techniques, and look to the parents for co creating a therapeutic environment for the troubled child.
With a self aware and an open parent in the picture from the start it would give us a quantum leap into giving us a better understanding of child behaviour but add to innovating better treatment methods, to bring relief.
(The author is a Dehradun based psychotherapist trained at the University of Vienna)
