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Topics to discuss with children when most things spark a debate at home? Just remember: a family that philosophizes together, stays together.
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How, despite the seeming disconnect between the childhood of Enid Blyton’s characters and our own in India, we found a way to build bridges to the southwest coast of England, the stomping grounds of many Enid Blyton protagonists.
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Stretch out your birthdays into birthday weeks and years. Recovering from a year of breast cancer treatments has made me more determined than ever to celebrate my birth.
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The story of parents lamenting how “spoilt” their children are is an age-old one that repeats with every generation. And it can be read as a comment on the general increase in prosperity and well-being that has been a defining, human macro-trend.
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Screens are mental overload and fracture our brains into a prismatic way of seeing. Reading books provides an inimitable stillness of mind and inculcates a habit the young takes into their adulthood.
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Travel puts our own reality in context. There are limits to everyone’s ability to embrace cultural diversity. The real traveller is so much more than a tourist.
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Young mothers need wives, not husbands. The need for their husbands to be annexed by the baby rather than just do things like research or giving a bath is universal. Some husbands, however, do experience how wretched parenting can be.
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Can there be room for Mom Rage in Attachment Parenting?
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My boys were chosen to join their school’s brand-new cricket team wholly based on their 50 percent Indian genetics. But in this case, thank God for cultural essentialism.
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According to psychologist Daniel Berry, when children appear not to be following instructions, what they are following is the biological imperative of making sense of the world around them.
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Goa, like the rest of India, has been adept at domesticating foreign influences and making them its own.
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Schools should offer courses in Empathy, Philosophy and Unusual World Views: where the emphasis is on thinking unpredictably, out-of-algorithm.
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Tarry a little, let your child be curious and ask away. Answer them. They remind us to be curious. And curiosity may be our most important human characteristic when compared to AI-powered machines.
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And why every once in a while, I try and slash a tiger mom claw at the boys, to awake them to the reality that their competition will be global not local.
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If I had chosen to leave the children behind in Spain, or even at home in Delhi, the “death” of their nani would have been akin to a video game - lacking in corporeality.
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In the era of terrestrial TV, Gitanjali Aiyar had ruled the screens of millions of Indians - first in black and white and later in colour. Her passing, in early June, created a tsunami of posts on social media.
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Not just a vessel and caregiver, a 'woman' is more capacious than a 'mother', and must prioritise herself on a par with her baby. Too much sacrifice and abnegation are harmful to both a mother and her child.
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Cleaning up, well and often, is one piece of the Japanese archipelago that I am trying to ensure my boys carry within them always.
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How much would you pay to prolong your children's belief - in fairies / Santa Claus / mama’s ability to kiss and make everything better?
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Whether or not you choose to have children of your own, pets are the right gateway to help practise at being parents, and learn a thing or two about care and discipline.
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It’s important to talk to your child about the difference from a young age and to stand up for them if they are made uncomfortable by the attentions of a stranger.
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Society has done a better job of integrating women into the workplace than men into families. Research has shown that boys lean on their fathers more than anyone else when it comes to the development of their social skills.
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On baby names and Rafael Nadal, endless suggestions on what to eat during pregnancy, and arriving at an answer to what unites us on earth - irrespective of nationality.
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More than 55,000 Seven Elevens, Family Marts and other convenience stores punctuate Japanese cities, and any lost or distressed child can ask to use the phone at one of these stores. They can then wait there until a parent arrives to collect them...
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So much of the joy of parenting can't be captured in words.
