A while back, I was writing about my being an introvert and proud to be, and while I’m happy being who I am, and secure in the fact that parties will never hold the same appeal to me as a book, or watching a movie at home, the world has in my past and still does consider introvert to be odd people, people that cannot be possibly happy, keeping to oneself is apparently a human defect that needs to be corrected, never mind that apparently one third of people are introvert (yes that means one out of three person).
I’ve been reminded of this  this weekend as my daughter’s school was holding a parent-teacher meeting one on one. During that meeting I was handed a sheet detailing the progress Ishita made in several areas of development, her motor skills, fine and gross are all fine and heavily developed, no big surprise here, but her language skills are for the most part all rated as “in developing stage” , the teacher blame it on the fact I don’t speak English home and urged me to do so, but that would be a different topic all together, though maybe not quite. The other thing that is not yet developed are her social skills, if we go by the assessment made by the teachers.

And that one I asked to have a little clarification about.

The teachers said that Ishita was keeping to herself, and not really playing with the other kids often. Hearing this I asked if there was a reason, they claimed it was the language barrier but to me it doesn’t compute, so I asked if the other kids were mean to her, or if she was scared and shy around them, to which they replied “No she is pretty much happy and content to be on her own” to which I replied that it was ok then. But apparently no, they urged me to have her socialise more outside school by taking her to the playground and strongly encourage her to play with other kiddos as they still feel it’s the lack of English that is making her keep to herself.
By then I knew better than argue, they made up their mind, keeping to oneself is a flaw, and it needs to be corrected. or maybe I should have voiced the fact that I the mother am a notorious introvert, that yes social gathering drain energy out of me, and that without solitude on a daily basis I go neurotic, aggressive and snap at anything.
The fact remains that 30+ years later people still think kids HAVE TO interact with their peer all the time, that keeping to oneself is not a normal behaviour, never mind that the child in question is HAPPY to be in their own little world. My mom spent years trying to explain it to my own teachers, who went to all kind of lengths sometimes rather cruel ones to force me to just mingle with more than just my two close if not best friends, they even sent me to the State psychology department to see if I didn’t have a mental or emotional issue (the shrinks never quite got why I got sent there in the first place as thankfully they understand that being introverted is not a big deal). And now I’m seeing that I’m probably going to hit the same road as my mom did, trying to explain that there is nothing wrong being reserved to a bunch of people that think extroversion is the only way…sigh!

Beside they blame language on it all, but I noticed on several occasion that if Ishita WANTS to play with another kid at the playground (and yes it happens from time to time) she doesn’t let language barrier stop her, and she definitely show no sign of being shy in approaching another kid, she just socialise on her terms, like her INFJ of a mother does, the other kids don’t seem to mind the fact she is not talking any language they understand either, so it’s definitely not another toddler making her feel bad about the lack of English that make her stay away from other kids. Beside it doesn’t even compute with the rest of the assessment made b the teacher saying she was active, eager to try things, and dances. If she is eager make signs on the nursery rhymes the teacher sing, and such, that clearly doesn’t mean she is shy. But a lot of people make the common mistake of thinking introversion is actually a synonym of shyness.
And my reason for not believing one moment that language is the issue in her alleged lack of social interaction is that in general she is a go getter and doer, she doesn’t speak much at home either, simply because she wants to DO things, not ask for them to be done, so as long as the word isn’t a necessity she will not say it. She likes to watch the word around her, and  process the visual cues quietly before trying to do them herself, and for a 2.5 year old child she is actually pretty clear on what she wants to do, to the point of being stubborn. So in pretty much the same way she will not eat if she isn’t hungry, she won’t go play with another child simply because someone else said it was the proper behaviour. And if my paediatrician said forcing a child that young to eat when they aren’t hungry can have some serious repercussion on emotional development, then why should be forcing a child to interact non stop with peers have any benefit I ask you.

I hope that one day, the world will cease to see us introverts as weirdoes and just acknowledge that maybe just because we aren’t a big majority we aren’t abnormal, and that we can’t all possibly perform best in group activities.

There is no denying that each culture has their own parenting style, and that there is no good or bad way to raise your children, and yes I saw a lot of things that are done much differently in India than in Switzerland, this came back to my mind recently when I stumbled about this article titled “Why French parents are superior”, the author is an American who lived in France and studied differences in parenting between the French and the Americans, and noticed that the French do approach child raising with far less anxiety, which apparently leads to better behaved toddlers in public.
Now I am not going to go as far as claiming that the French are indeed superior to other parents, or that I know exactly what American parenting style is like. But I grew up in a far different parenting style than what I see around here, and yes the way I was raised is pretty much the way the author of that article describe as the French way.

The one paragraph that stroke me the most in this whole article is this one:

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.
That pretty much sum up how I see things should be, and pretty much like the difference she noticed, I notice the same here, Indian parents nowadays want their kids to be stimulated all the time, and in many families I have seen that a baby or toddler is rarely left to play on his own, they are the family pet, they are constantly played with, carried around, stuffed with food, some parents obsessively try to get their 2 years old to recite all the rainbow colours and the alphabet, toys that make it to the Indian markets are all coming with brags about how educative they are, and what progress the child is expected to do with them. Playschools boasts an impressive list of achievements and academics, claim their imported soft play area is specifically designed to scientifically enhance a child’s development (and yes I read that one on a school leaflet). And if it wasn’t enough you have the bragging moms at the playground rubbing into the nose of all the others that their kids can count up to whatever, and knows all the States and possibly their capital city. The older the kiddo get the more achievements are expected. the tuition classes, dance classes, sport classes all pile up in the extra-curricular activity time, and it’s not unusual to hear or see a 7 year old kid up past 10 pm to study some more and be up at 5 the next morning to catch the school bus at 6-7am and cross the entire city to be at the top school. The mother of the child is of course expected to be at the child’s service, making sure enough food goes into the tummy round the clock and that a piping hot freshly cooked lunch will be sent along with the kid in a tiffin box.

A far cry from what I grew up with:

- Bedtime until the age of 10 was 8pm, no if, no buts no negotiations, I was allowed to watch the family movie on Friday night and that was it. After the age of 10 I was allowed to stay up until 9pm, but once dinner’s been off the table (at 7pm) I was to stay in my room and do a quiet activity of my choice: Finishing homework, reading, painting. Absolutely no TV, no music, no video games, no computer time (though that one was simple I had no computer until I was 14, and then it was such a crappy one that it wasn’t worth it)

- After school my time was left free for me to manage as I grew older. Elementary school was finishing at 4pm (6 hours of school a day in Switzerland, with a 2 hour lunch break in between so that kids could go home and eat home cooked food). The catch of that freedom was that by the time dinner was on the table at 6.30pm  I was to be done with my homeworks so my parents could check them, fortunately the school system made sure that homework time never exceeded more than one hour a day, and the homework were given for the whole week so that the child can if they want do more on a certain day and less on another, what mattered to the teacher was that the whole homework load was completed by Friday.
My parents while still checking the homework in the evening, didn’t really push us to do it diligently…why? Because they wanted us to learn the simple cause and effect principle, the school was strict about that, no homework done on Friday = detention which meant stay after school to finish doing them in a classroom…not fun. So much so I learned early that first detention wasn’t fun, then that if one day I finished my homework in 30 minutes I could do a little more from one of the other days and finish my load a day or two in advance and get more freedom later.

- After meal times is parent’s quiet time, so after lunch and after dinner, I was to just stay out of their hair, discussion time was meal time, and yes we were encouraged to discuss ANY topic and my parents would answer truthfully making sure that depending the topic the words and content would be still age appropriate, but they weren’t going to say something like “Once you get married you’ll know how” when we asked “How do you make babies” or refuse to answer a question about “What is murder exactly” my dad was a jail officer, so he had lots of stories about crime, criminals and what is in the law and what is not. No taboo in my family, and believe it or not I built a lot of my GK around the dinning table rather than in school, my parents loved to read and learn, and figured out the best way to pass their interest to us was to first leave a lot of books around the house, and then talk about them.

- Saturday morning and afternoon was chores day, fun individual activities and shopping, Sunday was FAMILY day, capitalised, it was a de facto no TV day past the morning cartoons (over at 10am) provided it was a rainy day, if it was a Sunny day we were out of the house early, in Winter to go skiing, in Summer to go Sailing, in the Spring to go cycling, in the Fall to go hiking. The rainy Sundays were cultural days, going to a national heritage site, or a museum, and when back home from that it was board game time, and boy we had an impressive collection, enough to fit a whole wardrobe I kid you not. All these activities might have had an educative side, but my parents never pushed it on us that way, beside if we wanted to play hungry hippos on board game time, then be it, my parents would not push trivial pursuit because it was more intellectually challenging, the focus was on having fun as a family during a specific time dedicated to that.

But back to cultural differences shall we? It is clear from the article and from snippets of my childhood life that the French way put as much value on the time of the parents than the one of the children, there is some balance they achieved that apparently the American do not (no proof here I’ll take the words of the author) and yes a sense of individuality that I see missing from the desi model. The desi mom breathe and live for the people around her, they all come first: kids, in-laws, husband, their needs are all more important than hers. And the urban progressive woman is struggling with this notion more than ever, tied between what she wants and what the society still want her to do.
As a woman in an intercultural relationship myself I feel the pull too, the deep inside me would want a more “French style” parenting, the realistic me see that it’s not possible because it takes two parents to grasp the notion, DH never grew in that pattern, and it takes a society that support it to do it. So Ishita grows up in yet another blended system, one that will define her the way my upbringing defined my childhood.
What is clear to me, is that while I haven’t enforced bedtimes as strictly  as my parents, I can’t see myself hovering above her the whole time, and sure need and deserve and indulge in my me time. So when her school has started announcing the admission being open for nursery 2 weeks ago I was the only parent to openly plan to put her in the afternoon batch : 12pm to 2.30pm. My reasoning being that the mornings are all spent preparing tiffins, having to supervise the maid, taking shower and whatnot that i don’t want to have to ship DD to school to still have the maid to watch over. Nope mind you school time is ME time. A few of the other ladies in the school are toying about the afternoon batch but are concerned that their kid will not have lunch at the right time at home, or might not nap at the same old schedule so are willing to bypass their own craving for peace and quiet so that their kid doesn’t get to deal with too much of a change in their schedule.

As I said two different approach to child raising, but where I will not venture is to go as far as saying that  one model is superior to the next the way the author of that article said. because it all boils down to what works for one person.
And contrary to what certain Indian stereotypes about western women, the fact I don’t raise my children the desi way doesn’t make me less family oriented, or them superior.