Helen Issar runs a screen-free school in Bengaluru, and she has some gentle, slightly inconvenient advice for Indian parents.
Somewhere in an Indian home tonight, a toddler is eating dal-chawal while watching a cartoon pig, and a parent is calling it a win. Helen Issar would like a word.
Ms. Issar is the founder and director of Papagoya Education, a sunlit, screen-free micro school in Bengaluru that draws on Scandinavian early-childhood practice. She told Expressions that mealtimes were never only about getting nutrition into a child. At a shared table, children watch how adults eat and copy them. They try the palak because everyone else is having palak. In front of a screen, they also miss the body’s quiet signal that they are full. The same goes for adults.
Her prescriptions are unglamorous, which probably means they are correct. Keep a routine, any routine, and repeat it every day. Young children don’t understand clock time, so they read the day through its rituals. Serve dinner at 6:30 or 7. Retire the word “no,” except when a child is hurting someone, themselves or property. “No,” she noted, ends a conversation. To a three-year-old testing boundaries, it is practically an invitation.
Obsessions don’t worry her. One pupil was so devoted to cows that he became the classroom’s resident bovine authority, cowbells and all. Curiosity, in her view, is simply learning that nobody has told to stop.
For meltdowns, she recommends naming the feeling, taking three deep breaths and drinking some water. It works well enough that she once watched a toddler comfort a crying classmate by handing over the classmate’s water bottle. Children, she reminds us, learn far more from what we do than from what we say.
Her one change for tonight is to reclaim bedtime: bath, dinner, stories, lights out. In a darkened room beside a parent, she says, the troubles of a child’s world come tumbling out.
Watch the full conversation on Expressions