Developing hunger in our children

By far one of the toughest task as a parent I face in my life is to get R to focus and be determined to achieve something. Of course it started off with me believing I was setting tough goals, but its not that at all.

When we grew up, our middle class upbringing and environment, automatically assured a feeling of depravity at many levels. There would be missed opportunities which would be enough to rub in the fact that life wasn’t about the ‘Ask and you shall have 2 of it’ environment which today’s generation lives in.

One of the basic root cause of course is consumerism itself. Too many easy choices exist today within very easy access. Amazon and flipkart are a part of children’s vocabulary too easily!

Another one I guess is of course affordability. If I’m taking a European holiday often enough and staying in nice hotels, that becomes the benchmark for him to expect from holidays and hotels. And of course it doesn’t stop there, does it? Expecting to be treated in a certain privileged manner becomes a part of one’s psyche I guess.  

In our case an added on factor of course is the age of parents!! 40’s parenting means you’ve got more cash in hand and more chances that the kid was not a part of a tick mark exercise. So you’re even more likely to want to provide ‘the good stuff’ to them and to yourself at this stage in life.

So its obviously not a child’s fault if he doesn’t understand why his folks are getting impatient or aggrieved when he leaves his tasks incomplete or is very obviously doing them with a very short-sighted reward in mind. (Think ‘I will let you play for 30 minutes if you complete your homework”) He is certainly not thinking of it as something which he ‘needs’ to do. It’s a favour being done or sometimes just to avoid these parents from getting upset.

I don’t have a solve for this yet. I tell myself sometimes that I used to resent my dad’s hitler like rule in the house… and yet many times I find myself becoming the same. Discipline is the shield I hide behind to get the task at hand done. It feels very bad to realise that part of me i grew up saying i will never become - so easily make its presence felt in me! I know even with the best of intentions, I will not be the ‘perfect parent’ and that’s not even the aim. But why does it feel like some kind of a personal failure to find this hunger missing in him then? Its been a part of my personal ethos soooooooo long and deep that it feels like he's a little bit less of me if he doesn't have it in the same measure. 

But maybe, i am being too impatient and hard on myself - Just like i am being with him. Thats pretty much the only hope i have at this time... that and the fact that i am very much a product of my Hitler dad and damn proud of it today! So maybe there will be a day R will be me, and proud of me too :)