3 Things I want my son to grow up with.

When you have a little boy, (especially when you thought you would have a girl for sure) — first comes a feeling of confusion, disappointment, and then acceptance. (Perhaps not for everyone, but I'm just being honest here!)

But 1 hour after I knew I had a boy — I had already moved into the acceptance phase. A lot of things about parenting in my mind had to shift. I had to say bye to the matching clips and rubberbands, the ballerina shoes and perhaps all my well-preserved soft toys and barbies would not come out of the cupboard. But while these petty thoughts occupied my mind, there were also those that worried me about how I was going to bring up a boy! What would I do to entertain him, what would I play with him? — The answers to this unfolded with time — and they have been well documented and recorded on our Instagram accounts, but most importantly, I wanted to bring up my son focusing on the following aspects, from a very early age.

• Kindness
• Respecting everything around him — people, plants, animals or things.
• Being open to new experiences

In my humble opinion, if he could do these things even to a minimal extent he would be a decent human being — irrespective of a girl or a boy.

While this is a journey of lifelong learning — for both him and us as parents, here are some simple ways we have tried to make this work for us.

Kindness

While being kind is not only about saying Please, Thank You and Sorry — I do believe that this is the starting point for young kids — only if they are not forced into saying it. With Yajur, when he wants something he knows the magic word ‘Please’ works wonders; when he gets something he wants, without thinking twice he says Thank you — with a smile; and when he is wrong — he knows he needs to say sorry to set things right — even if it means he takes half a day.

What worked for us is to practice this ourselves. When I need Yajur to do something — I also request him stressing on ‘Please’. When someone gives him something — we do not hound him to say ‘Thank You’ — we just stand by and let him enjoy his gift/treat and then he knows how to keep the conversation going.

It looks like we are slowly making progress with step one, but sure have a long way to go.

Respect

I believe that when you need to respect someone/something — you need to feel a sense of equality with them. Contrary to popular belief- you don’t need to always look up to a person or entity to respect them.

You just need to understand that they bring in value to your life and respect them for that- in simple words this just means you can respect anything around you — irrespective of age, relationship, or even if it is living or non-living.

So to get kids to respect things around them, the easiest way is to get them to see everything as equal. How every little thing is important in some way and how we can value them for that.

The easiest is to start with people. I always tell Yajur to respect his Great Grand Mother and his youngest cousin the exact same way — they are both amazing in their own way, and they add value to his life. This is slowly extended to Animals — it helps because we have a pet dog, and then to plants and trees around us. With time we have moved to other objects like his books, toys, and even shoes. All of them need to be treated with equal respect.

New Experiences

Routine and kids go together. But life is all about new experiences and they tend to break our routine. We must prepare kids to embrace these experiences and perhaps find ways to fit them into the routine too. Who knows, they may just surprise you by doing it much better than us adults as they come with no bias into this world.

When I say new experiences, they do include things like food, travel, books, people and more — but what I actually mean is things that we as adults do not consider ‘the norm’.

We tend to teach our kids only what we assume is the right way of doing something, and we make an unconscious bias in their minds.

So only if we are open to new experiences and perspectives, we will be able to enjoy what life throws at us. A simple example (yes it's kiddish — but that's what this whole blog is about) is how my 2 year old — arranges family member to do specific chores at home in his Peppa Household, and so we built a story around it — this is far from how our own household works, but who are we to say what's right and what’s wrong?

Originally published at https://yajurchronicles.com.