“What do you want to become when you grow up?” is a common question we ask our kids and being asked in our childhood I remember my answers used to change every time.
I live in Bangalore, and I see kids all around me so busy in their lives, which makes me think what the hell did I do when I was a kid?
I remember asking my friend’s daughter what does she do on a regular day, and I listened to her with a gaping mouth when she narrated her daily routine. She takes all kinds of classes - singing, dancing, sketching, tennis (which thankfully has stopped for now), etc, and nowadays, coding class as well so she can grow up to become a successful coder and develop problem-solving skills. When I asked her when she goes out to play with her friends, she looked very perplexed and replied on Saturdays and Sundays.
My second question backfired when I asked her if she was happy to do all these classes. Even before she opened her mouth to answer, her mother came running to her rescue and gave me a long lecture that sometimes kids should know to deal with pressures, and even though her kid doesn’t enjoy some classes, she makes sure she attends all of them for her benefit. She even asked me to put my daughter in some of these classes and made me think I was ignoring my daughter by not doing so.
So the next logical or rather an illogical step for me was to make my 7 year old join some of these classes except the coding one and tennis. The first month was fine, my daughter was adjusting well, but the drama started the next month. She started complaining that she feels tired taking all these classes and does not have time to play with her friends or watch her favourite YouTube channels. This time I can’t even scold her over watching the Internet because I am the one who has subjected her to all these online classes. So I asked her to choose which one she would like to attend, and to my utter shock, she only kept one i.e. the kathak class. She seemed happy and started paying attention to her studies and kathak, painted some beautiful pictures and continued her other daily activities.
But my daughter’s happiness did not last long. My friend visited us with her wonder kid and was very disappointed in me seeing that I yielded into my daughter without giving a fight. She still has not yet given up on me and gave me the last chance to improve my parenting skill. She told me to at least put my kid in coding classes.
Like an obedient friend, the next day I started looking for Kids Coding classes and I found White Hat Junior, Vedantu Coding classes, etc. and the promises they were making were very impressive - they send passionate coders to the Silicon Valley where the kids can meet scientists from Google and other tech giants, coding will help the kids with problem-solving and they can also excel in Math and Science, some even claimed that they can earn very early by developing Applications and computer games.
I talked to my husband who is also a part of this coding world and I am thankful to him for opening my mind and pulling me out of this conundrum. He asked me not to follow what my friend and other people are doing. He said that though coding is good, but that does not mean everyone should start running in this rat race, some great scientists and great people did not have White Hat Junior or Vedantu or any other coding platform to excel in their lives, what they had is determination, motivation, hard work, and love for the subject. So we let our daughter enjoy her childhood to the fullest by giving her the choice to decide what she would like to do or become, teaching her the algorithm of hard work, motivating her to ask questions and be a seeker and not a follower like someone rightly said, and love the subject she chooses and never fear failures.
Oh yes, my friend has completely given up on me now and prefers to talk about everything else but Coding :-)
PS.. These are some of my daughter's paintings she did happily with the help of some wonderful artists on YouTube.
Thanks to Priya A Art Studio, Creative Art.