By Pulkit Sharma
Many of us have mixed memories of our childhood: a good portion of joyful moments, a certain number of painful memories, a few lifechanging experiences, and many routine recollections.
These memories exist in a cohesive narrative that continues to give us a unique sense of who we are, what we want, and how the world is. This narrative got created as we lived our lives, experienced our emotions, shared it with those around us, and learned how to find meaning in our lives. It is this narrative which tells us that despite all cycles of ups and downs, life is beautiful and worth living.
But an increasing number of our children are grappling with a disconnected narrative of darkness, agony, and suffering. A lot of them feel and express that life is very painful, traumatic, and difficult.
Rates of self-harm and suicidal thoughts have increased alarmingly by 22% in children in recent times, according to a study, published in the journal of Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology . How do we understand and deal with this worrying trend?
An important causative factor behind this phenomenon is loneliness. When children feel low, they need a person who loves them and has a fair degree of patience and wisdom to tell them what is happening, how they can soothe themselves and find a meaning in their experience.
Adults are too busy and too fatigued to deal with children’s emotional turmoil. Consequently, children are left to themselves, their peer group, and their young role models on social media to make sense of their pain.
The result is that children keep telling themselves that life is traumatic, the other children around them keep reaffirming it, and social media keeps on endorsing it. There is nobody to tell them that this is not the reality; it is just one way of many ways of looking at reality.
Life continues to feel dark if we keep focusing on trauma, misery, and pain. Change happens when we start noticing and admiring the silver lining in the dark cloud.
So, what is the silver lining that we can encourage our children to notice. I can think of two very important virtues that we seem to have forgotten.
The first is gratitude: acknowledging and appreciating the small joys that life offers us daily, the things we often take for granted and do not feel thankful for. The second is: perceiving pain as an opportunity. We often feel that pain is an anomaly and it should not be a part of our life.
However, we don’t realise that it is this pain that tests our endurance, and if we can find away to face it with wisdom, it can offer us tremendous self-growth.
But these are the virtues that we can neither teach our children nor the AI can explain them. These virtues can be appreciated and adopted by children only when they spend a lot of time with adults who personify these traits.
That’s why as parents, grandparents, teachers, and as a conscious society, it is now very crucial to prioritise children in our lives.
The writer is a clinical psychologist based in Puducherry
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
END OF ARTICLE
