Skip to main content

Degrees Of Freedom

I guess we all know our grandparents and great parents enjoyed far greater freedom to explore the world around them in their childhood than our kids do. The world is apparently not as safe as it once used to be or maybe we just have more data around how and why it is unsafe. It helps that families are smaller in size and an army of adults can focus on a relatively small number of children.

My grandfather would reminisce about his childhood and say his mother did a head count at the end of the day to make sure all the twelve children were accounted for. They had the whole village, the river and the woods to themselves during the day. Whatever the reasons, we keep our offspring tethered pretty close to the post.

The graphic in this article says it all. Compared to his great grandfather, Ed lives in a cage. Whereas J's great-grandfather swam across the Brahmaputra in his childhood, she swims in the shallow end of the pool in our community - and that is the high point of her day.

Comments

ggop said…
HC,
Wonder if being driven everywhere contributes to obesity. One thing which makes me mad - DVD players in cars. I don't mind them being turned on for long trips. But I see movies being turned on even on city streets on the way to/from the grocery store etc.
gg
Heartcrossings said…
ggop - I would guess there is a connection. More kids these days are obese than not. J looks like a shrimp compared to her peers ! Movies on the DVD + Nintendo = no hassle modern parenting :)

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

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...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...