W hat a week! Deepika Padukone and Ranbir Kapoor attended Karan Johar’s party (OMG!), Dr Strange put to rest any doubts that Marvel films are better than DC Comics films and we had a supermoon. Oh, and in other boring news, Americans put an orange in the White House and my children woke up to the news that their Diwali earnings were as valuable as Monopoly money.
So, how many of you shared the news of @realDonaldTrump and demonetisation with your children? And then raided their piggy bank for `10s and `100s to run the house with.
While I’m all about having conversations with the kids about life as we know it, I’ve somehow shied away with having talks about current events with them. I find daily news depressing and don’t want to deal with having to tell them that life sucks, people are mean and we’re all heading towards the apocalypse. Give me feel good news sites and videos of otters juggling stones any day.
But, this was one of those weeks in which unless I was literally living under a rock, I (and my children) couldn’t miss or even try to escape what was happening in the world. If anything, the furious pinging of my phone with those awful WhatsApp puns were a constant reminder that stuff was going down.
So, we sat the kids down to try and explain what it all meant.
The opening lines of both conversations (‘Donald Trump is President’ and ‘You can’t buy Pokemon cards because that 500 is worthless’) drew dramatic groans of disbelief from the kids but led to interesting questions. ‘Why don’t people like Trump?’ ‘Why don’t people like Hillary?’ ‘Why is he so orange?’ (Ok, that’s my question) ‘What are taxes?’ — both topics led to conversations about governance, democracy, dictatorship and citizen rights. These are big sounding words and as improbable as it seems to be describing them to a five and eight year old, it’s possible. (They caught on to dictator pretty quickly, and were shooting me meaningful looks through out that segment.)
The internet has been filled with op-eds, memes, heartfelt blog posts, enraged rants and everything in between this past week. What really stood out for me were the posts devoted to talking to children about the election results and how to allay fears and anxieties at home and in classrooms. This has been a particularly divisive election and as one Clinton campaign video rightly said, ‘Our children are watching’.
Election results that leave many feeling vulnerable. Reforms and laws that aren’t as rosy as they seem. Environmental news that literally leaves us gasping for breath. How many of us at home and in school, talk to children about these things?
As they grow up in a world increasingly filled with hate, violence and bad news, it will be harder to escape the realities we grown-ups have created. We need to be honest and tell it to them like it is - “We screwed up.” But the optimist in me also believes that there’s good in the world. So, I ended the day with that video of the otter juggling stones. It felt like there was still hope. Fleeting and small. But there it was.
(The writer’s parenting philosophy is: if there’s no blood, don’t call me)