As a father, I have learnt—it’s not about how you ‘raise’ your boy, it is about who you are while you do it

The importance of the relationship between father and son has the stamp of both history and the epics. Whether it is Dashrath and Ram, or Dhritarashtra and Duryodhana, or even Odysseus and Telemachus, much has been made about continuity and transference (literally and with reference to a shrink’s couch). The family being the primary structure of social organisation and primogeniture being the norm among royalty and such like, it is not difficult to understand why this should be so. In modern societies, the Max Weberian notion of “work as worship” and the visceral compulsion to have one’s progeny, especially boys, propel ahead of those of others, makes parenting a stressful endeavour, almost like a benchmarked vocation where the pressure of failure overrides even the joys of success. As far as I am concerned, allow me to state at the outset that I decided not to play ball, as it were. Which actually translates to aimlessly kicking a ball with my boy around a park, rather than getting him to enroll for football coaching. Stated simply: Despite the burden of history on the one hand, and the modern obsession of ensuring “successful outcomes” for your boy on the other, I chose to be a little chill about “how to raise my boy”, not allowing the role to assume the importance of a cosmic contract.

To begin with, my boy learnt only so much at home; he learnt loads from his peers, from the internet, from his gaming friends and from the gaggle of kids who assembled in the colony park without any specific agenda or purpose (I was often a participant, and we would play or do whatever the assembled senior citizens felt less violated by). I can’t even isolate a list of top priority values that I might have set aside to inculcate in him. What I focused on, I suppose, was trying to make him feel secure. So here’s a derivative that begins with “love” (easy for most parents, though it comes with a sub-function called “time”) and maps out stages that are interlinked, with “security” as a conceptual fulcrum that holds the formula together. This is what I believed: Give my little boy enough love and time (which my profession as an academic allowed in abundance). Being loved makes a child feel secure. Security gives him confidence. Confidence produces effort. From effort comes outcomes. From outcomes one gets what is commonly known as success. So, the life-goals part of bringing up my son was not so stressful: Love him enough and give him time, and the rest will sort itself out.

The real challenge was not about what but about how? How would he get to wherever he was meant to get to as an adult? How would he go about doing the things I hoped he would do? More importantly, what are the things I hoped he would not do? Early on, we had a more successfully applied rule for my son than how it was applied later when my daughter was born: That a “no” meant no and “yes” meant a yes. Simple formula perhaps, but it underscored two principles. He had to learn to deal with disappointment and the fact that there were things he could not get. Secondly, if he was indeed promised something he more or less was assured it would be honoured. Basically, the world was not his oyster, but if he were told there was a pearl inside one, he could expect to find it.

As confessed at the outset, there really is nothing earth-shattering in what I practised in raising a boy. Knowing that I did not call the shots beyond a point was perhaps the biggest learning for me. And perhaps a blessing for him as well; at 19 and adequately sensitive and balanced and fair, and in college doing fairly well academically, I guess he did okay. Ergo, so did we as parents, I guess. The challenge was to be a certain kind of father, rather than act as a particular type of parent. It’s who you are as a parent rather than how you “bring up” your son that is important. Mostly, children have to be left to be. And allowed somewhat to “raise you as a parent” as well!

The writer teaches at Ramjas College, University of Delhi