It seemed a usual rushed up evening. I came back from work and sat with my 5-year-old daughter and her homework. The curious questions and innocent struggle to spell new words and understand things around us always make up for an exciting couple of hours. However, this one was a little different.
An innocuous chapter on “My Family” had me thinking more than the girl.
She had to write names of her father, her mother, her brother, her sister, her cousins and tell what she calls her maternal and paternal grandparents. The chapter goes on to explain the difference between Big Family (join families) and Small Family (nuclear set-ups).
Seemed an easy homework to do.
But it wasn’t.
Why don’t I have a brother or sister whose name I can write here?
Why can’t I put my cousin’s name as brother, after all he is my brother?
It surely was getting both difficult and un-easy to explain her these differences. Because we have never discussed this with her. She lives in a happy full of cousins/friends set up and has never really missed having a sibling of her own. Until now
Why does her text book make her think these things which we haven’t made her think?
Everything else around our family set up is traditional but if facing this one question with my child bothers me, then what about the new-age modern family set ups?
So many of my friends are single mothers. Probably till this homework, they have not even introduced the concept of paternal grandparents or maybe even father to their child. How would they be making their kids answer these questions?
I also know of couples who leave their children with either of the grandparents who live in smaller towns, because both the mother and father are working in metros and can’t look after their children yet. The child calls the grandmother, her mother.
With LGBT couples becoming a reality, is our education system thinking ahead that when adopted children of these couples go to school, how would they be answering these questions? Maybe they don’t want to differentiate who is the father and who is the mother.
Why is our education system making our children think stone age when we are nowhere near it now? In this day & age when each family is having its own definition to the word family, why is a text book bringing question marks in the minds of the smallest member of that set up? Shouldn’t it be a decision of the elders of the house to decide when such things are okay to be discussed with their child?
I hated getting this homework finished and as I did, I hoped and prayed that this chapter gets reviewed soon by curriculum experts. No harm it taking it off completely, I am sure our children would still manage to get into MIT and Wharton without having understood the concept of family in their text books!
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