Brighton, England |
I do not wish to be an
overbearing parent because I believe that I should
let my children have the liberty to make decisions on their own. I want to encourage them to have trust in their own judgments and abilities and I hope that
they do not succumb to peer pressures and depend on the online response from
their friends on Facebook. They must know that one’s self worth is not
dependent on the number of followers or friends he or she has whether in
cyberspace or the physical world. I want to impress upon them : “ The World is
Your Oyster” and when in doubt, listen to your inner voice.
While self-esteem may not be
exponential of self confidence,
perhaps the least each parent must do is to do all they can to ensure that
their children’s self esteem and self belief are intact. I try to be mindful about
what I say to my children and at the same time I must not be trying too hard to
make them feel better when things do not go well. One tough aspect of growing
up is to be always self assured to make up your own mind. Maturity is about
coping with the harsh realities that we do not often make the best decisions or
get what we want and through trial and error, we have to become adaptable and
flexible. Ideally we should all be doing what we like to do and not doing what
we are told or what we think we should do. However free will comes with
possessing strong sense of individualism and non-conforming takes strong
conviction and insurmountable boldness and courage to see it through.
A parent sometimes misses the
years when the child was still a baby. When the child was a baby, his or her
parents would moon over him or her and coo-coo to every single sound and smile
the child exuded. Sometimes, parenthood gives less, not more, pleasure through
the years as the child begins to have a mind of his or her own and become an
independent person in his or her own right. My late father once expressed his
disappointment in me as he lamented, “ You have changed.”
I never asked what he had meant.
Can an individual change over the years? I was probably not the person he thought
he had come to know or what he wanted me to become. Apart from the inevitable
changes that occur in our physical appearance due to aging, our outlook and
attitude change due to what we have experienced and we may even reinvent
ourselves from time to time to cope with changing circumstances and
surroundings. However I do not think we can alter our make up. Over the years, wherever we are ,
however the others perceive of us , I believe our cores or our essential self
remain the same. Every person has qualities that may seem irreconcilable in the
eyes of those around you but we must realize that the outsiders cannot be privy
to your real emotions and thoughts yet we care how others perceive of us.
Perhaps who we are really comes down to those around us.
In his book ‘The Self Illusion’,
Professor Bruce Hood wrote that whether we like it or not, we are all members
of groups of people and because no
man or woman is an island, we all belong to the one very big club: the human
species. Throughout our lifetime we either hang around with or fall into
different groups by default or otherwise. We are all associated with the groups
we have been assigned to by birth and through assimilation. Some people do not
want to belong to the respective groups they have been assigned to based on
their religious or cultural backgrounds because they have difficulties
discarding all the prejudices and biases that are attached to those particular
groups. Few of us can live as hermits, hence most of us do things that are
acceptable to the society they have been assigned to by birth or the culture
they have been brought up in. Sometimes we no longer recognize who we are as we
are much caught up in the value system of the groups or the community we live
in. What we think matter to us are actually what we are told that matter.
We think we have made our
personal choices but choices are
never our own because we are constantly surrounded by conscious and unconscious
processes. For example, it should
not be our possessions that define us but the advertisement industry tells us
we are what we own and therefore seemingly define who we are. Luxury brands
sell simply because they project prestige and material success and we live in
the world where wealth matters and hence our vanity is constantly exploited by
the advertisers.
Professor Hood wrote : ‘Our self
exists in the reflection that the world holds up to us. The American
sociologist Charles Horton Cooley coined the term “the looking glass self” to
express the way that the self is shaped by the reflected opinions of others
around us.” Apparently everyone holds a looking glass up to us every time we
interact with each of them, that probably explains why I find that some people
make me feel elated while some people make me feel extremely uncomfortable or
drained when I am around them. Cooley summed up the notion of self illusion in
this tongue- twister of logic, “ I am not what I think I am and I am not what
you think I am; I am what I think that you think I am.”’
It is our human nature to
pigeonhole others and in turn be labeled ourselves, if only we could stop
appraising the others and at the same time care less about how we could fit
other people’s perceptions, we would perhaps be comfortable in our own skin and
watch our inner thoughts good or bad,
for each of us is unique in our own imperfect and flawed ways and each
of us is entitled to his or her own views to live by. Nothing is what it seems.