Formation of Children !

I watched this Lilly in our garden for about a week since the time I noticed the stalk of flower it was to give forth! 

I found it informative and instructive about the resident potential in that plant to give forth a bunch of flowers. 

It was about three months back a bulb was planted in the soil. Our domestic helper since then would have attended to the plant by de-weeding, manuring and watering which provided the optimum conditions for this plant to grow into its trajectory.

I noticed dragon flies and honey bees resting on the buds almost every day waiting for the flowers to open. 

Today when all the four flowers opened, I was delighted because it was the day when the plant revealed its full elegance, so far hidden from sight!

I remembered about the book 'Parenting you child' which Anna and I co-authored with Ms Beulah Wood in 1998, which is still in circulation through Amazon. 

It was a during a week end of two days, that book was dictated which Ms Beulah Wood transcribed to create the first impressions that Anna and I had about parenting. Our children were teenagers at that time and we had reservations about being affirmative about our thoughts about parenting. We had suffered the death of our daughter and our children had by them moved in a formative way to find the direction and vocation in their lives. They did have set backs, but were resilient and consistent to find their purpose. We celebrate their childhood even more now, as we see them unfold as mature men, loving spouses, caring fathers and thoughtful sons, living their vocation in the frontiers of human need practicing medicine. 

What did we know about their hidden strengths, capacities, and values then! A lot, but not enough to envision their future!

The first thought that passed through my mind, as I watched the closet buds of the four flowers in the Lilly,  was this consciousness that children surprise us because they outgrow parents when they reach their adulthood. They move in to a new orbit of thoughts, perspectives, pursuits and an altruistic view of life, which would be well beyond the expectations that parents would ever had.  

I struggle a lot as I listen to parents, who have limited formative thoughts about their children, but live adherent to the prescriptive patterns for their children, often repeating the restrictive patterns under which they grew up.  

A father who is struggling with his son's drift towards watching serials in the TV confessed to me that he himself watched one or two serials every night after he household  has gone to sleep.  

As I heard this conflict in one home, I found yet another stress under which parents grow up! The parent's gravitation towards seeking fulfilment for themselves without shifting their orientation towards children, when teenagers long to lean on to parents for their formative perspectives to life.

The father seeks entertainment and the son follows suit. In a conversation, I drew attention of the father about taking up a project with his outstandingly able son, to help children in the neighbourhood in conversational English. Since they started on this project both son and father are involved in planning the class in the evening and making videos for children to make the teenager group to  hear conversational style in English. They spend time together to listen to the video recording they did of the group in the previous evening, during the group discussion, to get ready to give feed back on diction, semantics, word use, sentence style, listening skills, idiomatic usage, etc. 

For about two weeks, they have forgotten about the serials.  The father mentioned to me that he  discovered some new attributes in his son. His son became more adorable and trustable. 

This reminds me of the need for parents to discover the hidden resources in their children. How limiting it would be if parents do not catch up their children and stay oblivious of what they are becoming in their skills, thoughts and aspirations!

The formation of children starts with parents becoming companions to their children and lernmqign to partner with their children seeking a common interest!

I feel inclined to start an on-line discussion on Saturday afternoons to explore 'parenting preparation' for parents anticipating a child birth and for parents who have a newborn, toddler, preschool child, early school going child, child in late childhood, preteen child, etc. 

To know about ourselves is the first step in the direction of knowing about our children!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)