Adventures in Parenting

 Did the title catch your attention ?   It did catch mine. I clicked on the article. Almost, that is .  Until it dawned upon me that no one becomes a billionaire without obsessing about money. Surely, anyone who has obsessed about money to that degree, has severely neglected many other parts of their lives, likely, including parenting.  I don't need any parenting advice from a billionaire. Thank you.  The next door 'regular' family with well-mannered, well-adjusted, resilient kids will have more to teach me about parenting than a billionaire ever will. 

 Words have amazing power. Yes, that is a cliche. But sometimes, we realize it when someone else points it out to us. I was recently working with a coach, and after listening to me for a while, he said " Karthik, I had asked you about what you want, and instead you told me about quite a few things that you don't want. "   Now, the idea of focussing on what we want and not what we don't want , isn't new to me, but I wasn't aware of this tendency of mine.  But now, that I became of it, I could see a lot more clearly that there are a million applications for it in the context of parenting ( and all relationships ) .  Instead of saying "Don't yell", I now try to say "Speak softly" Instead of saying "Don't spill the food", I now try to say "Pay attention to your plate while eating".  My 4 year old becomes 'defensive', when we verbalize what we don't want. Both my wife and me are trying to change our langua...

 Until a few months ago, whenever my son would ask to watch 'Tom and Jerry' during dinner, I would always reply with ' Tom and Jerry have also gone to have dinner. So they can't come on TV ' .And it always worked. That is until last week :)  This time, when I gave him the same explanation, he replied with ' Appa, no joking ' :D 

 The greatest gift parents can give their children is to become emotionally mature themselves. 

 It was a few years before my son was born that I developed an interest in the topic of fear. I had realized that fear creeps into our lives in a million small ways, and we make numerous subconscious decisions each day to avoid potentially fearful experiences. But some of my greatest lessons in fear came after I became a parent. One particular episode comes to my mind.  When my son was about two and a half, we had a water filter in the kitchen. This particular water filter had a self-cleaning mechanism that would kick in every few hours, at which point it would make strange sounds, and multiple lights would start blinking. One night at about 10 PM, my son and I were in the hall and I was coaxing him to finish his glass of milk. Just as he finished his milk, I switched off the light, and incidentally, the water filter's self-cleaning mechanism kicked in right then. We could hear strange sounds. The blinking lights led to ominous looking psychedelic shadows on the wall.  Ou...

 When I became a parent, I did not know what to expect. Well, I did expect chaos to take over for a while, and not surprisingly, it did. The pandemic created its own set of complications, but it was also a blessing in disguise; we were able to spent a lot more time with our son as a result.  I had been thinking about writing about some of my experiences in parenting ; sort of like a diary for me to read years later ,  but I kept putting it off because something would always come up. But today, this fine Sunday morning, it is time. Time for a new blog.. A blog about my adventures and experiences in parenting.