Who Let The Kids Out?

omething changed forever the day urban India got caught up in the murder of 14-year-old Delhi schoolgirl Aarushi Talwar last month: parents struggling haplessly to cope with the demands of raising today's global Indian teenagers were suddenly brought face-to-face with their own anxieties. The teenaged Aarushi's social life of e-mails and SMSes, Facebooks and Orkuts, parties, boyfriends and arguments with parents, played out relentlessly by the police and the media for the last three weeks in titillating detail, "is the life of 99 per cent of schoolchildren today", as Asha Mirchandani, mother of two, puts it. A generation raised on Krishi Darshan and Chitrahaar is finding itself out of depth coping with children who have grown up on cable TV, video games, free internet access and mobile phones. Brought up in the era of licence raj deprivations, today's parents are bending over backwards to grease the wheels of social acceptance for their children both in school and at home, giving in to demands for serving alcohol at birthday parties, winking at drug and tobacco abuse, extending curfews for late nights, and handing over the keys to the family Merc to their underaged children, hoping as parents have done for generations, that somehow their kids will grow up right in the end.

But experts warn that the social changes unleashed by the economic boom are so rapid and overwhelming that urban families may just crack under the pressure. "When liberalisation happened 17 years ago, many parents went overboard, giving their children everything they had missed," points out Dr Avdesh Sharma, one of Delhi's leading psychiatrists. "At first it was voluntary, but now kids have started taking advantage of their parents' overindulgence. And now parents aren't in a position to pull back." The result? "Both parents and children are floundering, in need of a new value system to deal with the changes which, in just one generation, have transformed family life."

Dr Sharma cites the example of a teenaged schoolboy whose parents consulted him because they suspected he was on drugs. They were the kind of "cool" adults with an anything-goes style of parenting: offering him alcohol on his birthday, covering up for his truancy in school, content to know only what the child wanted to tell them about his life, "dousing the fire", as Dr Sharma puts it, "as and when called for". Until one day, the police caught him with drugs and it was time to seek professional help. Not having the courage— or an open line of communication—to confront him themselves, the parents sought Dr Sharma's advice. When the child eventually landed up in his consulting room, he turned around to ask the psychiatrist: "Who are they (his parents) to talk to me about right and wrong when they have their own problems and have no time for me."

Parents are undergoing a crisis of confidence, family counsellor Vimala Lal agrees. "They aren't able to keep up with their tech-savvy children, who are forced to grow up much faster and take their own decisions because parents either don't have the time or the skills to deal with the complexities of their children's lives today. They find it easier to be a friend to their child than a parent." And yet, she points out, today's children are crying out for ground rules as much as, if not more than, kids of previous generations.

Take, for instance, the young teenager who was brought to Lal by her angry parents. They had first given her a room of her own in their basement with independent access, and did not bother to ensure she kept the deadline for reaching home after partying with friends. It was when her grades began to drop that the parents discovered that their child was staying out late, bribing the driver to keep her secret. Her key was withdrawn as punishment and, faced with a rebellious teen, the parents turned to the counsellor for help. "You can't start laying down the ground rules only after things go wrong," points out Lal. "You need to have an open channel of communication with your child, or you'll end up buying peace and avoiding all confrontation."

The distress within the Indian family—till recently in robust good health—is showing up in the statistics as well: depression among children, which experts say is mostly fuelled by parental anxieties, has risen to an unprecedented 8-10 per cent in contrast to the 2-3 per cent only 30 years ago. Indian teenagers have the world's highest suicide rate, accounting for 50-75 per cent of all deaths among young women in the age group of 15-19 years, and one-fourth of boys between 10 and 19, according to a recent study in British medical journal Lancet. Mental health experts also point to increasing behavioural disturbances like truancy, teenage pregnancies, experimenting with drugs, alcohol and tobacco among schoolchildren across urban India. "There's less communication between generations now because of technology, and more rebellion and earlier at that than ever before," says Dr Sharma.

Many sociologists believe the disintegration of the family as we recognised it only a generation ago is inevitable as we shift towards a capitalist culture. The battle between generations is hardly new, but it's the erosion of family that is alarming. "It's not unique to India. In all societies undergoing urbanisation and industrialisation, there is a disintegration of family life," says Ashis Nandy. "Even a country with such a formidable tradition of family life like Japan is now facing major changes in the family structure." There's a shift to nuclear families that urban India is currently undergoing, according to Nandy, where even our psychological links with the extended family of grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins are snapping. This transition goes hand in hand, he says, with other changes: working mothers, stress in marriages, parental responsibilities devolving only on the mother and father, kids being pushed into premature adulthood, dependence on peer groups rather than kin for all activity from leisure to coping with family problems, growing violence and conspicuous consumption.

As Lal points out, "Parenting has never been more demanding than now when technology has invaded our homes to an unprecedented level. This new technology, whether it is the computer or internet or mobile phones, requires more parental supervision, not less." Ironically, it's also an age where parents have less time than ever before to spend with their children, shifting the burden of responsibility either to school authorities or servants. Previous generations of parents could afford not to take such an active interest in their children's lives, counsellors point out. But today, it can be very dangerous. For instance, if you aren't educating your kid about sex by 13, they are able to access the information—misinformation, rather—from other sources like the internet, and that can often be disastrous.

Even parents who are ready to meet the challenges of raising this generation of "gamers"—a generation for whom technology has been central to their lives for as long as they can remember — say it's an uphill task to counter the prevailing school culture of sex, alcohol, drugs, tobacco and late nights. "It scares the hell out of me," confesses Sudha Shastri, who cheerfully allows her two school-going sons to describe her as a "nut case" so long as they respect the rules she lays down for them: no breaking the law, whether it's underaged driving or drinking, and only half an hour of "screen time"—including surfing the net, video games and TV—on weekdays. "All you can do is keep yourself informed about their lives and let your children know you're there for them," says the IT professional who has even gone on Facebook to keep up with her kids.