The Architect’s Shadow: Why our children are not our second chances

I have been wanting to write on this topic for a long time. At times, I fall short of either words or simply the will to write. Today, somehow, I summoned my entire courage and mind to sit with this topic and pen down my thoughts and notions.

Before we go further, my definition of childhood is between one and thirteen years. Adulthood is assumed here to be the age of eighteen years. The years in between - call it teenage years or adolescence.

I was not very old when I realized how a child's environment can impact their mindset. I used to see a lot of my friends in my school who used to behave in a certain way. Somewhere, somehow, my mind always connected all of it to their families. (because who else will a child be exposed to, most of the time of the day?) I was always at a loss for words to define what I am feeling or what they are behaving like, but somewhere deep inside me, it said, either my thoughts aren't right, or their behaviour isn't. As a child, without any access to the internet or even without any access to psychologists, I tried to find answers, but honestly, every time I failed.

As parents and as adults, something that all of us need to imbibe is that our every action, every word, is being monitored by the child. We can't torment them for the sake of making them better children and giving them a more secure future. How we, as adults, see ourselves and how we see them all is going to impact or enhance their future lives. So, we'd better be careful if not mindful.

Our image of ourselves: How we see ourselves has a huge impact on how our children end up seeing themselves. If I, as a parent, could not achieve something in my life, that does not give me the right to impose that dream on my children to fulfill. They came into this world to live their life and not to live our lives. So, before telling your child to become an IAS officer, because I could not, give it a thought whether the child actually wants to be an officer or not. Parents/adults need to understand that children are not "sequels" to their parents' lives, which is a necessary wake-up call.

Our image of society: How we define the people around us, is yet another thing that defines how our kids see the world. If I, as a parent, constantly keep saying that a certain caste/religion is bad, then my child will also see them through the same lenses. Moreover, they will also develop hatred and negativity, and will have to fight an uphill battle to unlearn the hatred we gave them. Did we not read that the Babri Masjid case, the Gujarat riots, the Kashmiri Pandit genocide, 26/11, and 9/11 were all the outcome of people having such a distorted image of society? This shows us that "minor" household biases are actually the seedlings of "major" geopolitical conflicts.

What really goes on when the "damage is already done"? So a lot of my friends have parents who comment that one goes through a divorce in a love marriage because they chose the person themselves and did not let their parents make the choice. If the same parents undergo a divorce of their daughter, whose marriage they arranged, then the narrative shifts. It says, "Can't really help it, it was written in your destiny." So, a divorce in a love marriage is due to the wrong choice of the person, but a break in an arranged marriage is a destiny? How hypocritical that sounds. And what can one do when this damage is already done? Can someone travel back in time and change things? Probably no. Certainly not. Conditioning like this also ends up defining the adulthood of a person. This is how adults often use logic as a tool for control rather than a search for truth.

Writing this was a battle against my own silence, but the weight of the topic eventually outweighed the comfort of keeping quiet. We often forget that we are the primary architects of a child's reality. Whether it is the pressure to fulfill an inherited dream or the seeds of prejudice sown at the dinner table, the "images" we project become the walls of their world. It took me years to find the words to describe what I felt as a child watching my peers; today, I choose to use those words to remind us all: our children are not here to live our unlived lives or carry our old battles. They are here to build their own, and it is our duty to give them a foundation of clarity, not a blueprint of our own shadows.