QUANTITY vs QUALITY

 A few years back, while I was teaching at a boarding-school, there was a teachers’ workshop which dealt with individual attention and spending time with children. This of course meant how we, as teachers, could do that. What a paradox! Here we were, surrounded by hundreds of children, sent away by their parents, and we had to somehow find ways to fill in that gap, and provide parental care as well. Now the parents had many reasons, like busy careers, children being spoilt due to being in joint families, no good schools in their towns, or some just sent their children away because they cramped their busy social lifestyles! Most of the parents had good reasons, but some, I felt, were just selfish. 

I didn’t mind spending more time with the children, in fact, we would spend great times together, after class, on the field, in the dormitories, telling stories, cracking jokes, dressing-up as make-believe characters, or just plain old ghost stories in dark rooms at night(which I quickly had to put an end to!). It was heart-rending to watch them miss their parents or homes, trying to keep their chins up, but tears unexpectedly falling at the mention of anything from home. So many times I cried with them, feeling their pain and loss. At twenty something I missed home, these children were just five years of age!

Some years later, I started working in a day-school. And to my surprise, the children here were going through the same emotions as children in boarding-schools. I soon learned that parents did not have time for their children even when they were with them. A lot of them were busy with their jobs, household chores, social lives, and the worst of all, televisions or computers! And to my utter dismay, when told about this, they felt that their child was just saying that or behaving badly because he/she just wanted more attention. Bingo! How right they were! But they only saw this as a fault on the child’s part, rather than the problem having anything to do with them. Many of them told me that they spent ‘quality time’ with their children whenever they could.  

 Actually, the concept of ‘quality time’  was first conceived in the early 1970s, when both parents started to work outside, and they carried with them the guilt-pangs of child-neglect. So some research scholars of that time came up with a solution of breaking up their time into ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’ time. They also came to the conclusion that a child only needed about an hour of loving and close attention each day! So the guilt pangs evaporated and now busy careers and snotty noses could be managed perfectly! Not any more. 

I do have something to say about this, as do many child experts and psychologists all over the world, because soon, it became evident that business management principles could not successfully be applied to home and child management. It is an illusion, because children are not on our time-table. It is they who decide(as all parents will agree with me) when they need our attention and when they feel that we are just in their way! They may sometimes be too tired or too uninterested. And then there are times when they are inconsolable because all they need is us and nothing or no one else will do. Right! 

Being a parent of three myself, I agree that there is not enough energy, inclination or time on our hands. We would rather just sit and read a book or watch something on television or go out with friends. But how can we forget, we have now the greatest responsibility- to bring up our children. We chose this and now we need to stick with it. The time spent now with them, the hugs, kisses and cuddles, will give them the security and stability they will need in their adulthood, when they are on their own. Next time, I’m going to talk about a few practical ways to achieve this. Till then...!

 

 

Juhi Mehta, the quintessential mother-teacher, runs Life Express - an after-school center for children. She can be reached at juhimalini@gmail.com. She also writes 'Reflections of an inner Journey'