The news about a 15 year old boy conducting a caesarian operation under the tutelage of his doctor parents was shocking.  Yet it is not exactly the boy’s fault, but the parent’s, albeit the boy would have reaped the paybacks had the publicity not turned adverse.

Parenting has taken a whole new meaning in this era where talking about good values are passé, and edification about the brainy and brazen is in vogue. Top it up with the competitive mind-set, and we have a volatile situation on our hands.

The process kick-starts even before a child is born. Names are selected to reflect the kind of person we want our child to be, ‘Aishwarya’ for the beauty-conscious and ‘Amartya’ for those with an intellectual proclivity, or ‘Sanjeev’ rather than ‘Sanjeeb’ or ‘Sanjeet’ for an effective Google search result.

Next comes the selection of birth-date. Thanks to the miracles of science, we can opt for a “made-to-order caesarian” stating the date and time preferences to the obstetrician, astrological consultations notwithstanding. So we can reshuffle appointments and lo! We can fit in our baby’s entry into the world according to our schedule and star preferences. 

With the orchestrated entry of the child, we have established one thing. We have already begun wielding control over our child’s future, and the feeling is heady.  Unknowingly, unwittingly, this sets in motion the process whereby we begin playing God with our child.

So we decide how we want our child to look, what we want him to be, the competitions to enter, even the icon he emulates. In addition, we control his environment, not with a view to overall balanced development, but to mould a prototype of someone we want him to be or outdo.  And in the process, it suits us to look the other way if he harms or hurts another, as long as he achieves the goals we have set for him. As in the instance of the young boy conducting the caesarian operation which involved the lives of both the mother and baby.
We begin with playing “comparative babies” when the neighbors and relatives stream in to coo over the new addition to the family. The “such cute dimples” give over to “hah, you should see my niece’s dimples, just like Preity Zinta’s”, and “but my son learned to say ‘mama’ when he was just one year old, how come yours hasn’t yet spoken up?” 

“Comparative babies” gives way to “competitive parenting”, the continual process of evaluating your child’s performance as against that of the next kid we know of or hold your breath, ‘toddler icons’ like ‘Budhiya Singh’.  So babies from the cradle and toddlers from playschools are snatched from their world of fairies and gooey messiness to the world of perfection,  groomed to be a Miss Universe a la Sushmita Sen or sent to ‘astronomy ‘ classes  to become the next Suneeta Williams.

It is indeed very sad, that even inadvertently, we are indulging in the worst kind of manipulative parenting. The fault, dear parents, lies in ourselves that we are control freaks. Let us leave our kids to their world of mistakes and make-believe, let them be.