Parenting is a joint venture between a mother and a father where the onus lies on both parents to raise a child and inculcate a wholesome range of learnings, habits, and values. However, it is widely seen across the boundaries that a child is always closer to the mother than the father.
Fathers are primarily considered as the one who is stricter, emotionless, and harsh due to their attitude and the way of handling a child. And this lack of proximity between a child and a father often ends up bringing several barriers that disturb the harmony of their relationship. But what can be the right means for fathers to raise their kids and maintain a harmonious relationship with them always remains a critical question. Therefore to shed light on the father and child relationship, our anchor Bhawana engaged in a tête-a-tête with Sushant Kalra, Director of Parwarish in the latest episode of Best for Him Podcast.
Abolishing the concept of associating parenting with gender, Sushant Kalra shares that ‘each gender has both feminine and masculine traits in them wherein nurturing is a feminine trait and despite that males also have those traits’. However, he pointed out that traits that are focused and nurtured get developed. “Historically men are nurtured for strengths, being a breadwinner and fighting it out for the family. Likewise, traditionally the responsibility of delivering kids, taking care of home and family is given to ladies. Hence the traits are nurtured like that”, explains Sushant.
Moreover, he clarified that parenting is not a natural process, rather it is a constantly developing process with different scenarios, circumstances and especially as today’s kids live in a very different environment than us. Thus, there is no written rule for parenting or any learning process for it.
“Parenting is a complex and personalized subject that is unique to each individual and one size fits all kind method doesn’t suit here”, said Sushant. While breaking the myth that there is no same kind of parenting issues between all parents and their kids, Sushant underlined the fact that parenting needs to be learned by understanding their kids in the right way.
“This is an art that needs to be learned over a period of time because every person is unique with their experiences. Every kid is different and therefore the parenting method is unique for each of them”, according to Sushant.
Sushant shared basic parenting that fathers need to understand the best fit of their own kids and in order to do that, fathers need to forget their own experiences from their days of childhood and avoid following the set template of being a father. “Parenting is not about doing the predefined things but understanding the child and then doing things”, concluded Sushant.