Parenting Tips and Parenting Advice versus Parenting Insight

Parenting tips can never become a good parenting advice.

As I sat in front of my computer to start writing my post for today, an old friend, named Harsh, barged in asking for some tips for undoing the wrong he had done in his ignorance as far as parenting his two daughters was concerned.

I refused to give him any such tips as I think parenting is not such a mechanical thing as could be faultlessly executed with the help of tips only and without any insight into it.

'30 ways to do this and 25 ways to do that' kind of approach just doesn't work here.

In fact it works nowhere. You need tips only when you do not have a real insight into the thing; and if you don't have the insight, just forget that 7 or 17 or 27 tips are going to do any good to you as far as the quality of your work done is concerned.

Tips are for those who do not have the insight. And if you have it, you will never ask for tips.

It's something like the medicines are for those who do not have the health, and if you are healthy you will never take any medicine.

In fact it's only a myth that the medicine cures. It never does! It's body that does. Even the father of the modern medicine Hippocrates accepted this fact.

But Harsh had a real problem that he had come to me with seeking for some parenting tips in the name of parenting advice. His daughters were neither good in studies nor in extra curricular activities. They were only 'a bundle of mischief' as per Harsh's statement.

"So what is wrong there in being mischievous?" - I asked him.

"Shouldn't children be disciplined and mannered so that they learn well and behave well?" - he questioned me back.

"No." - I said - "They should discover or invent their own discipline and their own manners, and if they are left free they very efficiently do it out of the lessons they learn from life. But we preach them so much that they are over-filled with what we stuff them with and there is no space left for learning anything new from life in their numbed minds - minds that WE have given to them trying them to make our own replica in the name of making them good boys or good girls. Are WE good enough to make them good as our replica?"

"You have confused me more. I had thought you would give me some clear-cut parenting advice or better some parenting tips to follow." - Harsh said in a desperate voice.

"But the path to clarity always passes through confusions, or else no real insight is possible into any damn thing on earth. In the name of parenting advice if I start giving you all those parenting tips that everyone around has on her/his fingertips, will it really do any good to your children? Had it done, there wouldn't have been any parenting problem in the human society today. But we all know there is, and there is a lot of it everywhere whether in the third world countries or in the first." - I wasn't sure whether Harsh was getting me or not but his face was telling that he was certainly feeling the gravity of what I was saying.

"OK, I admit I don't know the ABC of parenting and I don't hope to learn it too in all its intricacies now. What do I do then?" - he said.

"Send them to Avinashi and never question the validity of what all she does with them." - I referred him to my wife who runs a health, fitness and personality improvement center in the town.

What else could I have done? Parenting tips? Parenting advice? No, nothing less than the parenting insight is going to do any good to the future generation, which only we are responsible of having brought on earth.

At times I think that our right to become parents should be suspended until and unless we knew how to live right and how to parent well.

Only loud thinking... it's not possible, I know!