THERE IS MORE TO GOOD PARENTING THAN NEW FANGLED THEORIES

One day, while sipping my morning cuppa and flipping pages of a newspaper, a headline caught my attention: Utah becomes the first state in USA to legalise ‘free range parenting’. With this, parents would now not be prosecuted for letting their children walk to the neighbourhood store or play in a park without supervision. Wasn’t it age appropriate for children to be doing all of that, I wondered! Curiosity kindled, and I Googled.

To my horror, there were many other distinct paradigms of parenting. You could be a ‘tiger’ mom or ‘elephant’ mom, a ‘helicopter’ parent or a ‘lighthouse’ parent. I was ashamed of my ignorance and glad my boys hadn’t a clue that I brought them up without educating myself on all this erudite stuff.

But then, my own mom was perhaps even more ‘free range’ than me. Our ‘range’ was, in fact, limitless so long as we shuffled back to the coop before it got dark. Turns out we still survived our childhood. Of course, we grew up in times when there was no concern of pollution, roads were roomier and there were enough parks to play. But I often wonder, were their fewer rapists lurking around then or is it that the crime rate has spiked in last thirty years. Or is it that we have become paranoid, making our children less competent to find their way through the maze of life? If your 10-year-old hands you a glass of water when you get back after a hard day’s work, you have done your ‘parenting’ right.