Source: Goan Voice Daily Newsletter 2 June 2013 at www.goanvoice.org.uk Full text:
There are not too many things we Goans can't do besides not being able to throw up good community leaders and then following them loyally through thick and thin. But one of those things must surely be our inability to maintain a dialogue with our children. I am not referring to the western ideal of trying to be their friends, but merely to being freely able to talk to them when they want to or if we want to. We have painted ourselves into a corner where our children will not even consider the possibility of approaching us for more than a superficial matter, let alone a deeply intimate one. Perhaps it all starts when the children are young. We tell them the truth except when it really matters. Take Mum and Dad going for an evening to the races, or to visit some friends. Nothing sinister here, but they will tell the young ones a fairy tale. "We are going to an office party" or to make it weighty, "we need to go to the doctor". Children may be gullible but they have a mind even at that age. They have a suspicion even at say 7 years old that doctors are unlikely to consult at 9pm. That scenario progresses from lying to scolding and berating. A kid's confession of getting a C grade in a given semester will result in a harangue about how he or she is spending too much time with the opposite sex or idling with friends. No thought given about being positive, of suggesting some improvements in teen lifestyle and the benefits of education in later life. Punishments will be given not as a last resort but as early recourse. It's the beginning of hardening of attitudes on both sides - parents and children. It amazes me to experience how parents are such advocates for their children's rights in Canadian schools. In my view, that's a good thing and a bad thing. It gives the kid some semblance of self-esteem in the right situation, but allows the young student to get away from responsibility in an unjustifiable one. Compare that to our own day. A summons to parents by the teacher no matter the reason, resulted in a severe reprimand if not a beating on return home. No thought given to rehabilitation, merely to punishment. Coming to the subject of beating and violence, I can only talk about the Bombay Goan experience where this was a given. There were boys in my school who were regularly given the 'backhand' by their Goan fathers and in some cases the leather belt or bamboo cane treatment when the parents were fuelled by alcohol around dinner time. This was of course in addition to being whacked in school by the priests and teachers using a bunch of metal keys or being made targets of wooden dusters which primarily existed to erase blackboards but were imaginatively used as torture tools. It's not hard to imagine that a sure outcome of such reprimand styles was a clamming up of any desire to communicate freely with one's parents and even a loss of affection and love if continued unabatedly. Children grew to depend and trust on friends and neighbors however good or bad which then molded their future characters accordingly. Not all bad resulted. Along with fear, discipline became an outcome, accompanied by respect for authority. There were better ways to achieve such results, ways that didn't include physical punishment, but that was how it was then. Granted that Goans may not have been the only culture that inflicted such labors, but much of it was stereotypically Goan. We came from a colonial heritage that was Catholic and therefore puritanical. Portuguese rule and the Church with its eternal damnation instilled fear in our elders and they in turn ruled us with the rod rather than with the mind. The latter was the easier way but then in those days easy was never the way to go. I suppose education or the lack thereof had much to do with it but on reflection, perhaps this is not true. I knew as many educated parents who did what they should not have done as parents who were knowledge deprived. In the scheme of things played out on us in the future did the gross abuse really matter? I think it did. If we forgave our parents, it was due to time that healed, not the parents that asked for forgiveness, believing to the end that what they did was right. We transferred that burden to our children not through the hand or the stick but through the psychological ineptitude and confusion (did my parents do right after all? No they didn't) that has chained us from maintaining healthy relationships with our progeny. Perhaps, like we once did, they in turn will forgive us one day, but we must ask for it. ====================