Daily Times

One of the downsides of being a parent is being needlessly burdened with the obligation to discipline one’s offspring. I say ‘needlessly’ as recently I have learnt that ‘discipline’ is indeed an over-rated, over-dated, and maybe by now, a redundant notion, which is probably only practised by people like me, relics of an era gone by!

I am part of a generation that was mostly raised in an environment where discipline formed a major part of life, be it home or school. At our residential abode and at the schools I went to there was an unsaid motto: ‘Children should rarely be seen and surely never be heard’! That was a time when, if guests came, a child had no business being in the vicinity, unless summoned by the parents, and God forbid, if even an unintentional stray eye was even cast at the tea trolley laden with all dream gourmet delights! It was regarded as being in the same category as the major sins and dealt with after the departure of the visitors in the same manner. If one was lucky enough to accompany one’s parents on a social visit to the house of an ‘uncle’ or ‘auntie’ and food and drinks were served, the protocol to be followed was: first, say, “No, thank you.” Second, “No, thank you, we already ate.” Third, if the host still insisted, “Thank you” and take one tiny item of the delicacies sent down from the heavens itself, no matter how much one was secretly craving for more!

Legend has it that when my uncle got posted in Quetta, somewhere in the early 1970s, my phuppo (paternal aunt) went with my two cousins on holidays. While there, they went to visit one of my uncle’s colleagues. Sitting in the host’s drawing room, my cousin, younger of the two and a rotund, food-loving fellow, reportedly took a long deep breath, sighed and remarked, “Pulao kee khushboo aa rahi hai” (I can smell the aroma of pulao)! Legend further has it that it was quite possible that it would perhaps have been the last time he would have smelt the pulao had it not been for divine intervention!

Every time, which should be read as perhaps ‘one’ or ‘two’, I banged the door inadvertently, I was made to go back and shut it three times, without it making a single, audible sound, and might I say it was a lesson learnt well, as since I can do that in a single go now! When we travelled in the car, it was supposed to be in complete silence, with urgent calls of nature communicated in Ammi’s (mother’s) ears and while we ate, it was without talking and with the mouth shut. We were reminded that there was a difference in how humans should eat and how animals ate and there was never a possibility of the cutlery clinking on the china! There was never a chance where we would be allowed to chew gum like a cow, with the jaw moving side to side and making ghastly sounds! Thank the dear Lord in heaven, never!

When I had children of my own, I decided to relax the rules a little. They are allowed to take food when they go to visit other people, but in moderate amounts and without disclosing that maybe they represent a drought-stricken area. They are allowed to talk at the dinner table provided it is not with their mouth full or even remotely full, but never are they allowed to chew with their mouths open; we have dogs for that but they still cannot chew gum like a cow. They can talk in the car but they choose to put odd bits in their ears and listen to other mayhem rather than the fountain of innate wisdom: their mother. But most important of all they can ask out aloud when the next service station would come!

What my parents did and what we have done or what most people of our generations and backgrounds did and still do was and is to make sure that their offspring is never foisted upon others and is not a source of nuisance. Sadly, it seems to be an endangered practice now. Last week, I had the pleasure of flying out of the country and what was even more pleasurable and refreshing was the fact that it was not on our national air carrier! But the heavens had a similar fate in store, lest I missed out on my tears, as a family of six sat directly behind and by my side: it consisted of four children ranging from two to seven. I have to admit that the older two girls were well behaved or maybe downright tired, but the younger two cried and screamed constantly as the mother sat there like a zombie, leaving the father to catch up on his weight-lifting exercises! After four hours of continuous torture, I was glad when they got off at a stopover! But much to my distress, the four had been replaced with a brand new five in the bus, which I had to take with the group I was travelling with. And all those five kids put Dennis the Menace to shame! Unfortunately, all the five kids were again in the bus and in the airplane in front of me on my flight back, with a Barbie-doll mother who was utterly useless and lacked any capacity of controlling her children, but worse still was the fact that she had no inkling that they needed to be controlled. Those kids cried and screamed and kicked and fought and threw tantrums throughout, so much so that a fellow group member just could not take it anymore and shifted her seat to the back of the plane, much to the surprise of ‘Barbie’ who plainly thought she was being unreasonable! The flight attendants were going nuts, as the kids would not sit in their seats or fasten the seatbelts and Barbie would not comply with their requests, mollycoddling the manipulative little buggers!

There have been instances round the world where families were asked to get off airplanes after they refused to control their children. As I researched I found that most people agreed with the policy as no one wants their trip to be ruined by howling and tantrum-throwing children and parents who can exercise no control over them. Bloggers have advised such parents to take vacations nearer to their homes and to travel in their private cars until they are capable of controlling their monsters!

Maybe parents today have stopped making the effort to discipline or teach their children any manners. With the influx of easy new money, much stress is on how much one can spend on the child and how much money can be given in lieu of real time, affection and effort. It is easier to get children off one’s hands by giving them money or toys or whatever instead of having to put an actual effort in. A friend of mine teaches at an up-market school in Lahore where the standing orders are not to say anything to the student or the parents as that amounts to losing business.

But in all sincerity I cannot blame the children for they are a product of their parents’ rearing practices. It is such parents who need to be ostracised and taken to task for disregarding the welfare of their children; it is parents like Barbie who are the real menace to society!

The writer is an advocate of the High Court