Madonna may have spawned generations of "Material Girls" with a little help from their parents. An elementary school teacher trying to stem the tide may not be quite enough.
J's three year old friends at daycare wear brand name clothes and some even wear make up ! Surely Mom had to help with the perfectly applied eye-shadow. That a woman would think it necessary to embellish a face so innocent is baffling to me. If J asks to wear some I tell her "You are beautiful even without make-up. God makes all little girls just perfect." She seems very pleased to hear that.
Being a child's role model is challenging in today's world. Powerful yet subliminal lessons are learnt from a trip to the mall, watching a TV commercial or parents' social interactions and spending patterns. These could be in direct contradiction to the values the teacher is trying to instill. With the signal to noise ratio being so low it is difficult for a child to discern any useful message.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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