Rekindling relationships

Human beings are social animals living in locks. We tend to help each other in times of need.

Dr Jagadish Hiremath

Modernity and quality of life is appearing to be inversely proportional these days. While we enjoy a full-fledged freedom to make decisions just as we desire, we ignore the perks of living together. The idea of independence that youngsters of the present consider as a fundamental right is actually converse of what a joyful life needs.

This development, which is a product of a lot of factors like education, aspiration, loss in family structure & now worsened by Covid is not good for the future of our community.

The aim of education which is to make lives better, seems to have turned the other way round. Education system celebrates independence to such an extent where families that constituted a large number of individuals earlier started disintegrating into modern nuclear families.

Traditionally human beings are social animals living in flocks. They tend to help each other in need especially in situations like this. The case of a young mother we had at our hospital about 8 to 9 months ago is a classic case of how nuclear families get into trouble raising their children right from the beginning.

In this case the baby was healthy and the parents cheerful but there was something amiss. There were no relatives around. The father was not available 24/7 as he had to go to work & I was told by the attending staff that the mother would cry. She was young & had left her parents to marry her lover. It was the same with the new father too. Our staff did their best to help the parents but remember raising a newborn is not an easy task. Baby needs a lot of attention & it is humanly impossible for one person.

In a traditional family setup, for a young mother there will always be her mother, in-law, aunts, sisters around to care for both new born & her. Depending and supporting each other in times of need is an instinctive behaviour of humans as animals.

However, in early 80s everyone got different, there was an increase in girl education exponentially & around the same time soap operas/movies showing independent family structure dissing community living of joint families. The protection kids got was lost to a certain extent.

Eventually the idea of being fiercely independent gained momentum among the newlyweds. It was better to be in a city independent as a couple, than in a community where there were some interdependence & few strictures. In 2020 with Covid coming in this worsened. Now we see many couples without family support.

“It takes a village to raise a child” goes the adage. Right now, especially with Covid, the village is gone. I foresee a lot of kids growing up dysfunctional. It’s high time we understand that human beings are interdependent beings, not independent. We need to address this as a community. Parents alone are not enough. Small correctional steps should be taken now. Let there be interdependence.

(The author is the chairman of Aasra Hospital.)