Wednesday, August 20, 2008

How would you handle this?

Yesterday night, before bed time, Anjali was in the playground as usual. She was playing, first in the playground far away, getting to the slides, and watching a three year old boy hanging upside down from the bars. It was just past nine and we decided to bring her home to get her to bed.

As we walked across the exercise area, Anjali wanted to get down and play with the exercise equipment, namely the treadmills and the rotating disc. She and daddy had a good time on the rotating disc for five minutes. Then, out of nowhere, came another child, not very old, perhaps two and a half. This girl wanted to play in the exercise area too. Well, that was fine with us, the area was plenty enough for ten children.

Then we began to notice that the child kept recognizing Anjali's intentions and kept beating her to where she wanted to play (First one treadmill, then the other, then back to the rotating discs.). This kid was bigger, and therefore faster to run and climb. That was fine with us too, kids play all the time in some sort of competitive spirit.

Then she began to push Anjali off the rotating disc (despite the fact that there were two). At this point Anjali began to retaliate, using her (much less considerable) 16 month strength against the bigger girl, not giving her the opportunity to climb on to Anjali's disc. But ofcourse, she souldnt win, as the other kid was bigger, so husband and I encouraged her to go on the other disc. The other child understood us and then jumped across. Anjali tried to be understanding, came back to her original disc, and started twisting, with her hand on the support bar. The other kid began to shake Anjali's hand off the support bar.

At this juncture, Anjali turned to us to complain. We were a bit helpless, as we didnt quite know how to handle it, and chided the other child for doing these things. But things began to heat up, and when the other child kept pushing Anjali out of her disc, going so far as to step on Anjali's hand, causing Anjali to cry in disappointment and pain, we took Anjali away, glared at the girl and went away.

Husband told me later, "With this situation, you either do two things, either you tell the child that if she does this she will play alone all the time, or you go to the child's mother and tell her what the child did".

The child's mother had been sitting on a bench ten meters away, with (probably her younger baby) in a stroller and talking on the phone. I had been about to talk to the mother when i noticed the baby and that she was talking on the phone and didnt say anything.

But what causes a 30 month old baby to behave in this fashion? Its a touch of intentional cruelty, which definitely should be discouraged. and why didnt her mother step in when she saw her child behave like that, as husband and I definitely would have done had we seen Anjali behave like that in public.

I cant make judgments on the behavior of other parents, though it makes me wonder. However, I wonder at what kind of impression children and people like these would make on Anjali, who has so far been doted on by family and friends, her every antic getting video and photographic coverage, and plenty of appreciation. There will definitely come a time when she would have to move beyond this circle of doting people and face people who may not think she is such a super wonderful smarty pant. I am sure all of us have traversed this path with various kinds of markings when we were kids. But how best to handle this when we have a sensitive, sweet child in our hands?

After last IEP, I read a passage by The Mother about the harm of leaving children with servants, because they donot have as sophisticated a mind and inadverdantly pass this consciousness to the child. I guess that is true. But my biggest worry on that would be because the servant would not love the child as much as granma or granpa or mummy or daddy would. The Mother then said that there would come a time when the child moves into the outside world where he or she would have to meet people of different and negative natures, but the foundation of love and consciousness that he has had at home would help him get over this problem.

If I tell this to husband he will say that I am worrying unnecessarily over something that could be handled easily when the time comes, but reflecting over it has never done anyone harm.



1 comment:

  1. I would have reacted the same way and pulled Ananya out of harm's way. No point in chiding the child (its her mother who shd do it!)

    Saw you rblog after ages!!!!

    ReplyDelete

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