Note to readers: My Family and Other Globalizers is a fortnightly parenting column on bringing up global citizens.
There have been many moments in my journey as a mother that have left me flabbergasted. Pride of place among these belongs to the time that we were on board a flight from Tokyo (where we lived back then), to the Okinawa islands – a pristine paradise of white sand and azure waters. Immaculateness comes at a price, and visiting the islands was prohibitively pricey. So, you can imagine my bewilderment, when my older progeny looked about the plane mournfully and inquired, “Why are we so poor, Muma?”
I spluttered like a car out of petrol, before regaining my composure enough to ask him what on earth he meant. “It’s just that we’re always stuck in economy class,” he continued, “and all my friends fly business”. “Well excuse me, Mr Fancy Pants, for not meeting the expectations of your friends,” I replied, my voice dripping with sarcasm thick enough to cut with a knife. But the fact is that our children only say what they think, and they think these things because of their environment - that of a fancy, private, international school.
Because my husband is a diplomat, we have lived in several countries. The boys have been to schools in Jakarta, Tokyo, and Madrid. To give them some consistency through these tumultuous moves, we decided to have them remain in an international school system that follows the same curriculum. The education is quite good, but the sense of normality that emerges from inhabiting such a privileged space, is inevitably skewed.
Two years ago, in Madrid, my son went to his classmate’s mansion for a birthday party only to find Luka Modric kicking a ball in the back lawn. The Real Madrid player is apparently a family friend of my son’s classmate. In contrast, the birthday parties I throw for my kids involve cake, balloons, and three-legged races in the public park behind our apartment. They have been entirely football-star-free.
The privilege my boys are used to is only further complicated by technology. Up and down the privilege scale, I hear complaints of how children can no longer activate their inner resources, their imagination, their creativity. In my generation, we could spend entire afternoons with paper and crayons. Or even less: marbles and bottle caps. I remember wandering about the garden, picking up fallen leaves, bird feathers and interesting pebbles, all treasures that I would then use to play make-belief.
My children find my tirades about how privileged they are in comparison to my childhood, mildly hilarious. They roll their eyes and snigger, “Yes, yes, we know you only had sticks and stones for toys.” I have protested at this reductive interpretation of my carefully constructed discourses on the need to reflect on our advantages.
But then, I remember feeling a similar sense of annoyed amusement at my own father’s lectures on the privileges that we, his children, enjoyed in comparison to his childhood. He would tell us about a band of wild monkeys that blocked his path en route from home to school and back. A path that he walked alone with his two siblings, all under the age of 10, and all terrified of the simian bandits they had to brave daily as the price for getting an education.
“You get to go to school safely in a bus, while I had to fight wild monkeys,” was basically his version of, “You get to play with iPads, while I had to amuse myself with marbles and bottle caps.”
In some ways, 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 one of upward mobility; of a comment on the general increase in prosperity and well-being that has been a defining, human macro-trend. There has never been a better time to be born on this earth than now. You don’t agree, dear reader? Imagine then, giving birth in the medieval ages. Or having to go to war in the trenches in the early 20th century.
The problem is that while it’s a good thing that our children have easier lives than we did, just as ours were easier than our own parents', I can’t help but think it’s a tad too easy for the younger generation. I want them to understand how much of the world still lives in degrading poverty. To develop empathy for those less fortunate, but without any sense of condescension. To learn to help the underprivileged, not out of a sense of charity, but from a deep understanding of their own random good luck. They are playing football with Modric in a Spanish suburb, rather than begging at traffic lights in New Delhi, but for the roll of the cosmic dice.
As parents, our attempts towards this end have been sporadic and idiosyncratic. We make the boys do tons of chores around the house, and unlike the fashion among their classmates, we don’t pay them to do so. My older one often cooks for the family. The younger one lays the table and in a good old-fashioned throwback, massages his weary mother’s feet. I rarely need to go to the spa, thanks to my personal masseur!
The spouse and I are not always on the same page on how far to go to ensure the boys aren’t spoilt. On our last flight to India, he booked seats for him and me in Premium Economy, while the boys were seated far behind in Economy proper. I thought this was terribly unfair, and through the flight repeatedly offered for either of the boys to take my seat. But mysteriously, they kept refusing.
Later, I discovered they had been having a ball, out of sight of parental stricture, ordering forbidden fruit like cokes and binge-watching movies. As far as they were concerned, economy class sans parents is the high life. What can I say? Parenting is an ongoing education.
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