Educating Parents
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The world is changing very fast in terms of science and technology. Accordingly education has to synchronise itself with the times to be relevant. This poses challenge to not only educators but also the parents. As we now live in digital age where everything is turning online, its time parents need to buckle up to remain pertinent.
Keeping up with digital understanding
One of the most common problem faced by parents is to keep up with the digital knowledge which they lack, while their children possess and therefore unable to keep a tab on their activities. Most children overuse or misuse the digital content while the parent remains oblivious. This does more harm than good. So the first step for parents is to familiarize themselves with digital world by networking with other parents and educators. Its learning by sharing. Once the parents are digitally educated, their monitoring abilities increase substantially.
Understand Cyber Threats
The other concern that is growing rapidly is cyber abuse or cyber bullying. Children have a very high propensity to get entrapped into this, since they are increasingly getting more vulnerable due to lack of physical social proximity owing to the new world situation brought in by the pandemic. The parents have to remain alert and spot warning signs like the child getting nervous while using phone or social media, not wanting to sit or meet up with family or friends, loosing temper easily and getting frustrated, rapid decline in school performance, sleeping very late and so on. They need to search gather information on this on the internet and equip themselves. The school can be an effective partner in this effort in upgrading the parents on this aspect.
Instilling Life-skill
The digital technology has made our life easier with banking, shopping, paying bills getting done at comfort of our house on just click of a button. However it is creating a socio-behavioural growth void. Simply put the new age children are failing to pickup or learn certain basic life skills which the earlier generations gathered. For example they fail to show appropriate behaviour in a social gathering. Instead of greeting elders and strike conversations with their contemporaries they prefer to surf on their phones. Another example is the children lack the ability to negotiate while buying from a shop which requires a combination of skill, instead prefer buying online. Guardians and parents have to ensure that such life skills are consciously ingrained in the children.
It is very important that parents understand the need to educate themselves to the new challenges of this era to be a better guide the children. The parent-school partnership on these lines could go a long way in educating parents.
Manisha Sinha
Green Valley High School
Vadodara
