Leave them alone!

Our parents were a cool lot, I have to say. Each of our milestones were not celebrated on Facebook and neither were our illnesses documented. We were allowed to go out and explore. We FELT the mud and the grass. We hopped about in puddles. We earned the wrath of our elders, but we did it anyway.
Junk food was never an option. Indeed, there weren’t many places to hang out and in any case, we didn’t want to. Money was precious and so was time. We were taught values of both. Our parents didn’t spend a whole lifetime spending their money on gadgets and their time updating their social status.
They were. And they let us be.

What are we doing now?
We complain about lack of time, but the time we get is spent online, not with our children. We feel guilty about not having enough time for them and we buy them costly stuff, toys, electronics – stuff they don’t need.
Whether a child started crawling or didn’t want a meal, everything goes online.
We say each child is different, then we compare our child’s every little aspect with lakhs of other children and reduce our child to a statistic, because hey! we know it all, right?
Wrong. A baby who has come into this world knows nothing. It is up to us to teach our children that they do not have to run a race in which their parents are placing bets.
Everyone gets their childhood only once. Let us do what our parents did to us. Leave them alone!