A deeply moving and inspirational book that offers nine principles for living a life that inspires and enriches the lives of your children while also strengthening family bonds. The Wisdom Bridge (Penguin Random House India) by Kamlesh D. Patel, affectionately known as Daaji, was released in early October and is the perfect guide to stress-free parenting and raising resilient children and happy families.
A Village Is the People, Not the Place
A nuclear family is a self-reliant unit, and it offers personal privacy and freedom. The influence of the extended family does not figure much. For example, in most families today, when the children start earning, their finances are separate from their parents’. I am not suggesting that it’s good or bad. It’s simply different from the past. High disposable income, personal freedom, and the advent of technology have made it easier to spend money. Today, at the click of a button, one can buy anything from a cup to a condo on Amazon.com.
For most families in the past, life was simple but not easy. Today, for a nuclear family, life is easy but not simple.
Parents in a nuclear family are responsible for getting everything done on their own. If a child falls sick, there is often no help. If the school has a snow day, who would watch the children while the parents go to work? Simple things like meal planning and play dates have become stressful because the support system is lacking. The cushion is gone. The DIY lifestyle can feel like an assembly line of chores. Even a minor slip-up and the chores begin piling up. I see many young families toiling away every day to keep it all together. Mothers doing the double shift of working as professionals and homemakers Fathers working multiple jobs But what stresses out the parents is not the work, it’s the lack of support.
And for a couple with a newborn, it can get overwhelming. Welcoming the new baby home is a beautiful feeling, but it’s also expensive and stressful. These are not the typical words associated with the joy of welcoming a child into the family. According to the Max Planck Institute of Demographic Research in Germany, the decline in happiness experienced by parents in the first year after the birth of their first child is greater than when experiencing unemployment, divorce, or the death of a partner. 3 Raising a family is an ennobling experience, but doing it all alone can suck the joy out of it.
In the past, whether a family was rich or poor, everyone had a support system to lean on. Everyone had a cushion in case of a fall. Today, the rich can buy themselves a village. They can hire a nanny, a cook, and a cleaner. But a middle-class family is stuck in the earning-to-afford-daycare syndrome. For families with low incomes, the situation is worse. Most parents are struggling with prolonged work-ism to take care of the family. And while they do that, the children who spend a lot of time on screens sometimes end up wandering alone into scary digital ghettos.
The isolation in today’s nuclear families affects all of us. Isolation creates loneliness, which becomes a public health issue. The health risks of prolonged loneliness are equivalent to those from smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. According to an AARP survey in 2018, one in three adults over the age of forty-five in the USA feels lonely. 4 For poorer families, this number is one in two. Other developed countries, such as Japan and the UK, also show alarming levels of loneliness. In the UK, the government created a special ministry and appointed a minister of loneliness.
Loneliness might evoke an image of a grandmother looking down from her apartment window with a blank expression on her face. But the picture is gloomier. A 2018 survey of 20,000 adults by health services company Cigna showed that the loneliest demographic is Gen Z.5 It’s our children who are suffering the most from loneliness.
In a world with fewer villagers, how do we raise happy and resilient children? To find a solution, we need to go back to what made human beings the most evolved species on earth.
Together We Thrive
We human beings are unique in what we call collective learning. It refers to the sharing, storing, and accumulation of information over time and across generations. Information was initially passed down through gestures, then verbally, then with symbols.
The Excerpt is taken from the book The wisdom bridge written by Kamlesh D. Patel