How Workaholism Is Making Us Neglect Our Children
Ever since modern capitalism took its roots in the contemporary world, it trapped all of us in work. The trade-off between leisure and work has since been determined by the consumerism that capitalism plunged upon us. We have all become busy. Life has taken such a pace that we hardly find time for thinking why we tend to do things that we are doing? Why do we take shortcuts which we take every day? And, how many shortcuts do we take during a particular day?
If we can’t even think about what we do, then how can we think about its impact on our lives or those who are in our care? Now imagine how many things and people we have ignored in our life. Don’t go too far. Just imagine how our behaviour, whether conscious or unconscious, with our children, has affected them. We should ask certain questions of ourselves.
Are we really fulfilling our child’s basic needs? Have we really assessed the quality of care that every child is provided at home? Is there any availability of children’s books in our homes? Do they get necessary toys and other playing material that help enhance their thinking? Do we provide them adequate support for learning (our engagement in
activities that promote learning and school readiness), playing, singing and reading? How often do we talk to our children, and how serious are we while talking to them? What measures, both positive disciplinary practices and dictatorial forms, do we take while disciplining our children?
However, this is just an oversimplified version of the rights of children that parents should provide them. For now, I have left out the obligations of a society or governments towards its children population.
Over Guiding
Just that it could be done quickly, we do a chore ourselves which was supposed to be done by a child. At times, we do a little thinking for them too. And often, we dress our children just because we think it will take them a little longer to do that on their own. While so doing so we all should ask ourselves whether we are really being just to our children.
We have seen parents doing the schoolwork of their children. Some of us never want a child to run our errands even when they grow up to a suitable age. We often hesitate to send our children to the neighbouring grounds, parks or other such common places. We are reluctant to expose our children to our culture, surroundings and people.
We have also seen a few people keeping their children away from others in the neighbourhood. Sometimes, they don’t want their child to play with underprivileged kids and later in life we want them to empathize with the impoverished. Our values are misplaced when we give importance to the class system while dealing with children. Just because someone is earning less than us doesn’t mean that he is a lesser being. We teach our children more divisions than we teach them about the commonalities.
People should also stop teaching their children that a person’s life is defined by the job they do. We are humans and our lives have different aspects-earning aspect, family aspect, friendly aspect, relationship aspect, societal aspect, and there are tens of such aspects to life. But all we count is the earning one.
We are not making our children’s lives easy. Instead we are putting them in a tangled web where we have lost ourselves. We are only making them workers for someone else. All we think about is the monetary aspect of our lives. What a person has made out of himself is judged by how much he earns and all other qualities are treated as secondary.
Also Read: GULA OF KASHMIR: TALES FROM THE SPRING OF VERINAG
Ignoring Your Child
The hardest part is when we ignore our children, especially when they are babies. Have you noticed why some people get angry and aggressive more quickly than others? Studies have shown that it is linked to their troubled childhood. Children who were left to cry for long periods of time got their adrenaline activated. Adrenaline produces aggressive behaviour.
Some people act smart and call it “crying it out” method. Well, their smartness is misplaced. Babies can’t calm down on their own without getting tired of getting no attention. Due to the cortisol (stress hormone) release, their immune system gets suppressed. With the result, they can’t control their emotions in their adulthood. This is not all. The long term cognitive development of such children gets impacted to a great deal, which directly affects their intellectual skills while they are growing up. Their brain structure gets entirely changed. It is not false to say that their brain is like an adult’s who is suffering from depression.
The neglected babies are more likely to become dependent later in life. The psychology behind this is that they are too scared to face problems alone. The physical separation from their caretakers makes them respond to the pain in a very unusual way. They develop memory malfunction as adults, because their subconscious doesn’t want to remember the harsh experiences of crying alone.
Consider attentively the fact that crying is the only way babies communicate until they develop the proper vocabulary, which is at the age of 3 years. If you ignore them often before reaching that age, the risk you are taking can affect them for the rest of their lives.
