This is How you parent your Children

The best parenting advice I ever got didn’t come from another parent. It wasn’t even about parenting. Nonetheless, I’ve used this advice every single day of my 10+ years of parenting, and it’s the most valuable tool in my toolkit.

When I was pregnant with my eldest son, I was reading through some old Reader’s Digest magazines, and came across one of those cute, funny stories used as place-fillers at the end of an article. It went something like this:

Our last pet had passed away, so we bought a new kitten. The first day we had her at home, she started sharpening her claws the side of the couch—as kittens do—so my dad picked her up and put her outside. Fifteen years later, she still claws the side of the couch every time she wants to go out.

This story is my guiding beacon as a parent.

Every moment of every day, you are teaching your children something. With every single thing you say, do, or don’t do, you are teaching your children what they should say, do, and not do. The trick, as a parent, is not to teach your children the right things; the trick is to know what you’re teaching them.

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If your children overhear you telling your friend how much you hate Susan’s new haircut, and then they hear you telling Susan you love her hair, you might think you’re teaching them the value of being kind to people, even if it involves a little white-lie.

But what you may actually be teaching your children is that:

1. It’s okay to talk about people behind their back.
2. It’s okay to insult people behind their back.
3. It’s okay to lie to people

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If you tell your child to clean up his room, and when he asks why you yell: “Because I’m your mother and I said to do it!”, you might think you’re teaching them both the importance of keeping their living space tidy, and of respecting their elders.

But what you may actually be teaching your children is that:

1. It’s okay to yell at people if they don’t do what you say.
2. Being older, bigger, and stronger than someone gives you the right to treat them however you want.
3. When you’re bigger than someone, you can control their environment and there’s nothing they can do about it.

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If you’re running late to get to an important event and you happen across a car that’s broken down, so you stop and help the driver, you might worry that you’re teaching your children that punctuality doesn’t matter. (You may also worry that you’re inadvertently teaching them a variety of swear words as you get on your way once more!)

But what you may actually be teaching your children is that:

1. The well-being of people is more important than any single event.
2. All people matter—even people you don’t personally know.
3. Helping people is the right thing to do.

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Often we don’t know what we’re teaching our kids until after they’ve learned it, but this “advice”, such as it is, helps me be more mindful in the moment of the lessons I’m teaching. And, most importantly, it allows me to reflect back on when and how I taught the behaviour I’m seeing in my children.

If your children—especially small children—are behaving in ways you don’t like, it’s not because they’re not good at learning, or they’re not paying attention, or you need to discipline them more; it’s because you’re accidentally teaching them the wrong things.

Stop trying to change them. Start changing yourself.

Otherwise, in fifteen years, they’ll still be clawing the side of the couch when they want to go outside.

-Jo Eberhardt

I cant do well in academics and they call me useless

My mother was a prodigy, graduating from high school at 15, having begun college classes while still in high school. She got her bachelor’s degree in teaching at age 19 and began teaching high school—kids barely younger than herself!

I, on the other hand had Asperger Syndrome, dyslexia and nerve deafness so I couldn’t do well in school to save my life. My mother was ashamed and embarrassed of me. She once told me that I had the lowest IQ in the family (based on testing administered in the ’60s).

My brothers were expected to do great things in life, whereas I was told daily that I was useless, I couldn’t do anything right and that I would never amount to anything. My mom’s favorite phrase was, “You’re not worth the powder it would take to blow you up.”

Just as she had predicted, I had never made much of myself as society judges it. However, her golden sons had not gone to college and never really shone as brightly as she expected either.

When my mother died, I was in my 50s. I spiraled into a deep depression, partially fueled by the fact that I had never proved my worth to her. I lost my job and became homeless. My best friend at the time encouraged me to go to college to improve my earning potential but I laughed in her face. With my Asperger’s and learning disabilities, I’d surely fail. She told me I didn’t have to do well, I just had to pass. She reminded me that they would give me financial aid. Since I was unable to hold a job at the time, I did as she advised—just for the money.

Once in school, I became obsessed with maintaining passing grades so I wouldn’t lose my financial aid. I arrived in the library as soon as it opened and stayed til it closed FIVE days a week, studying. My reasoning was that if I kept my grades as high as possible, when I inevitably failed my exams or papers, I would have a margin of error so I would still pass.

That first semester, I passed—with a 4.0 GPA! Then I began to be absolutely driven to maintain it—to prove to my mother and myself that I was not stupid. It took me FOUR years to graduate with my Associate’s degree because I took the minimum number of credits per semester so as not to become overwhelmed, plus I took one semester off to care for my brother and nephews after he had a stroke.

When I walked at my graduation, I was one of only SEVEN students in my graduating class of 2500 to have maintained a perfect 4.0. The school had sent me a letter asking me to speak at commencement but because I was homeless, I never received it until it was too late to respond. My only regret was that my mother would never know, never be proud of me.

Because of my performance I received offers of scholarships from many schools including Cornell. I didn’t consider it possible to go to a four-year college even with a scholarship because I was still homeless and had zero money. But my friends and family encouraged me, saying that I deserved to get my bachelor’s. I told them that I would start a GoFundMe and if I got enough money to finance my trip to Oregon to go to Pacific University, I’d go.

My loved ones came through and I raised $1500. So I packed up and drove a rickety, leaky, run-down motor home from Southern California to Portland, Oregon, and arrived, still homeless, to begin my journey to my bachelor’s degree.

Three and a half years later at age 59, I walked at my commencement as a Magna Cum Laude student. Again, I wished my mother could have been there.

Neither of my brothers ever went to college. They did OK without it though. However, they are both blown away that their “dumb little sister” did so well in college. My “embarrassingly low” IQ, by the way, is 145. My mother and brothers scored higher but there are plenty of valedictorians with scores much closer to average!

Honestly, IQ points are not an issue for someone who is dedicated and takes advantage of every possible help available. I spent endless hours in the math tutoring lab; I asked for a special testing environment because of my hearing and dyslexia; I sat at the front of every class, every day so I could read the instructor’s lips. I was not shy about asking questions and challenging every answer marked wrong that was actually right.

Anyway, I proved to my mother and myself that I am not stupid or useless. And I am worth AT LEAST the powder it would take to blow me up!

-Marcia Wilcox

You Cant Writeand Explain Algo and Code For QuickSort & Merge Sort?

I expect a software engineer candidate I’m interviewing to be able to code Quicksort and Mergesort if woken up in the middle of the night after a day of doing a triathlon. Not being able to do so is a serious gap in an engineer’s understanding of data structures and algorithms.

I don’t expect I’ll ever ask a candidate to do that on a whiteboard, exactly because I see it as a given. Something is wrong if I’m interviewing a candidate who may be unsure how to write down fifteen lines of code that implement Quicksort, just like something is wrong if I’m interviewing a candidate who’s fuzzy on for loops.

I’m familiar with the sentiment that says that real software engineers call library functions when they need to sort, so they don’t need to know how Quicksort works. I believe this sentiment is deeply misguided.

If you can’t implement a simple Quicksort algorithm you are unlikely to be a successful software engineer in the companies I tend to work at, and that’s not because I expect you’ll be asked to implement Quicksort by next Tue afternoon.

 It’s because Quicksort and Mergesort are two of the simplest, most fundamental algorithms which are part of an engineer’s basic knowledge. The core idea of those algorithms can be described in a sentence. If you can’t convert that sentence to code, you’re not ready to be an engineer in my company.

-Alon Amit

Invest time upon yourself

     Invest time upon yourself - Always invest a lot of time on your health, it’s important. Don’t ever feel guilty about spending time in grooming yourself, dressing up and carrying yourself well, it only makes you feel confident.

 -Saranya Ravichandran

Highest Form of Freedom

My grandmother, who is now 96, marched out of Auschwitz in broad daylight after taking off her striped uniform and changing into normal clothes.

A Polish friend who worked in the camp as a secretary and wasn’t corrupted by the racist propaganda had risked her own life to bring her the outfit.

Out she walked, past guards with rifles, attack dogs, and hatred so intense it would make your skin crawl with fear.

Her parents, and almost all living relatives, weren’t as fortunate.

The rest of the war, she spent in hiding.

“At that time,” she explained to me during a recent visit, “we couldn’t set goals, let alone pursue them. We were deprived of our agency, of freedom.”

That’s why she always encouraged me to go as far as possible in life.

Because the highest form of freedom— the ability to actualize your dreams, to create a life of meaning, purpose, and wellbeing—is not something to be taken lightly.

Whatever you choose to do with yours, never forget that it’s a gift of the greatest magnitude.

-Ben Wise

Overall, be independent

Overall, be independent - Be responsible of your own choices, whether they’re right or wrong. Take advice, consult people but make your own choices! 

  -Saranya Ravichandran

Hero Worship

The most interesting thing is that the followers of B R Ambedkar themselves don’t follow the sane advice given by Babasaheb and worship him not only as a hero, but almost like God.

I have seen many Ambedkarites who can’t hear a single word against their hero and treat each word spoken or written by Him as the Gospel Truth and any one criticizing him as devil or anti-national.

In many ways, there is nothing new in such hero worship.

Gautama Buddha preached people not to believe in God and seek to reach a state of nirvana, following the path of the Buddha by becoming Enlightened through your own effort. However, today Buddha is worshiped as God by Buddhist and He had been even declared as an Avatar of Lord Vishnu by Hindus.

Most people can’t avoid hero worshiping or idol worshiping because that is the easiest thing to do in life. All you have to do is to pray your hero/idol regularly and hope that all your problems shall be take care by them.

Hero worshiping can’t be avoided unless the people are willing to take the responsibility of their lives.

It is a hard reality that most people don’t want to take responsibility of their own life. They expect their parents to take care of them when they are young. However, when they grow older, they want their spouse, their company, their nation to take care of them. When they grow older, they want their children to take care of them.

Since all worldly people never meet to their expectation, they pose their faith in God for taking care of them.

When one God is not enough, they make some people (living or dead) as their God and then they hope that their followers shall take take care of them.

In this process, they become slave to the leaders who use them as fodder to fulfill their own aspirations to become the next God for the next generation.

And then they cry that their heroes have become dictators, without blaming themselves who have empowered them so by surrendering of all their powers, responsibilities.

-Awdhesh Singh

Do things alone and do it often

 Do things alone and do it often - Go shopping alone, go travelling alone and tell yourself you’re doing very well, alone. I’m not saying you don’t need people but explore things alone, once in a while.

-  Saranya Ravichandran

I was teaching 6th grade at that time. I had a young girl (she was about 10 or 11 years of age) who was a very gifted student but very quiet. She seldom raised her hand and was very withdrawn. I always wondered why.

One day I was reading a short story from the book “Chicken Soup for the Kid’s Soul”. All of the stories are targeted for young children to pre-adolescents. Most of the stories only took 5 to 10 minutes to read so they are great fillers to have when you have a few unused minutes of class time remaining.

The story I selected was about a young girl who was being molested by her father and how she found the courage to alert a sympathetic adult who helped her get out of that horrible situation.. The message to the children was to encourage them, if they should find themselves in this situation, to not to be afraid to seek help. I also talked to them and told them that if such a thing should happen to them not to be afraid to seek out a teacher they could trust. I emphasized that any teacher in our building would help them.

The bell rang and all the students filed out for lunch. A few minutes later the girl came back into the room and asked if she could speak to me. I said “ Sure, what’s on your mind?” She said “Its about the story you read. I have been…..” and she broke down in sobbing uncontrollably, unable to get the rest of the words out. I asked her if something had happened to her as I described in the story, she nodded through her sobs. I led her to a chair and told her to wait a minute. I ran to the corridor and grabbed one of my female colleagues who was also a good friend of mine. I told her I had a student in my room who I believed had been molested and could she please come with me. She immediately came into the room and hugged that poor girl.

When she got her somewhat under control, we took her to the office. Meanwhile, I called her mom. (Her mom and I knew each other from interactions throughout the school year so I felt a familiar face would help her get through this.). She immediately came to the school and I told her what we suspected. Of course she was devastated. She broke down in my arms. I held her and said that she needed to pull herself together for her daughter. She wiped her eyes and went into the office. That’s when they discovered the details of what had actually happened.

We subsequently found out she had been sexually molested repeatedly by her uncle. She was so ashamed she hid it from her parents, even when the situation escalated. Unfortunately he was now going after her younger sister! That’s when she knew she had to do something and the story I read gave her that impetus. Her instinct to protect and care for her sibling kicked in.

I think of her often. She is an adult now and I hope the situation didn’t leave her with any lasting trauma. I hope she has adjusted well and is happy. Later, her mom sent me a heartfelt note thanking me for what I had done (I really didn’t do much….I just did what any adult would have done…). Included in that package was a copy of a form filled out by the student nominating me for national “Teacher of the Year”. (If you’re wondering, I didn’t make it…)

-Michael Dibiasio

Do not abuse your rights - Every time you abuse your rights in the name of feminism, it could knowingly or unknowingly have an impact on someone who genuinely needs it. Never take your womanhood for granted!
 

-Saranya Ravichandran

Geniuses.............

Laszlo Polgar performed an experiment to raise a child as a genius and proved to the world that geniuses are not born but made.

Somewhere in the 1960s, Laszlo Polgar presented a theory that great performers are made and not born. He believed that he could raise a genius himself. When he tried to present his intentions, the local government asked him to see a psychiatrist. But Laszlo remained undeterred, stood by his opinion and made it his lifetime goal to confirm his theory.

To start, he needed a wife. In 1965, he started approaching women, explaining his intent. A Ukranian lady named Klara found his concept intriguing and agreed to be a part of the experiment. Soon after, in 1969, Klara Polgar gave birth to a child whom the couple named Susan Polgar.

The experiment began in 1970 where Laszlo Polgar decided to homeschool Susan and teach her chess. The reason for choosing Chess was because it had a clear objective and ranking. In other fields like writing or acting, people can debate if a person is truly world-class or not. However, the chess ranking system determines if a person is the best player in the world or not.

Laszlo himself was a mediocre chess player at best, but he left no stone unturned to help his daughter develop expertise in the game. Susan was hooked by the game and practiced intensively every day. 

By the age of 5 years, she had amassed tons of practice already. Her father decided to have Susan participate in a local chess competition where most of the participants were more than twice her age.

At age 5, Susan decimated all her opponents by winning the tournament with a 10-0 score. In another tournament, where the participants were adults, people joked about Susan participating by saying she could barely reach the table. Susan beat several adult participants in the event making the naysayers take their words back.

As the years went by, Susan turned into an expert chess player. By 1984, she had become the top-ranked female chess player in the world at a tender age of 15. She was the first woman to qualify for the Men’s World Championship in 1986. She went on to achieve the coveted title of a grandmaster in 1991. She became the first woman in history to win the Chess triple crown.

Now, you might assume that Susan was born as a genius due to some stroke of luck. But it was not only the first daughter of Laszlo and Klara Polgar who dominated chess. Their second daughter, Sofia and the third, Judit Polgar achieved extraordinary success too.

Sofia Polgar, went on to become the sixth top female chess player in the world. She won several tournaments and medals like her elder sister, Susan. Among her other achievements, Sofia is well known for the “Sack of Rome”.

During a tournament in Rome held in 1989, she won the event with a score of 8.5 out of 10 which had several other grandmasters. Sofia was only 14 at that time. The experts rate Sofia’s performance in the tournament as the fifth-best ever in the history of chess. Her chess skills would have put any normal chess player to shame, but unfortunately, the other two sisters overshadowed her achievements.

Judit Polgar, the best female chess player in history

Finally came Judit Polgar, born in 1976, who achieved the highest results among the three sisters. Born after two sisters already proficient in chess, Judit naturally found herself in the atmosphere of the game. Judit is considered the strongest female chess player of all time.

Judit was the fastest to achieve the title of a grandmaster, men and women included, at the age of 15 years and 4 months, a record earlier held by the well known Bobby Fischer. She was the youngest player to break into the top 100 players at the age of only 12.

When Judit showed exceptional chess prowess at a young age, Garry Kasparov had commented saying, “She has fantastic chess talent, but she is, after all, a woman. It all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche. No woman can sustain a prolonged battle.”

However, in 2002, Judit beat Kasparov, after which he walked out of the table with angst apparent on his face. The incident made him change his opinion about the effect of gender on chess. Until then, many male players believed that gender-based limitations exist in chess and some continue to believe that today.

Judit has also defeated various other world champions such as Vladimir Kramnik, Vishwanathan Anand, Anatoly Karpov and many more.

Judit Polgar’s trophies and victories in chess are too many to list. Some of her records remain intact till date today. She is the only woman to win against a reigning world number 1. No other woman except Judit has qualified for a World Championship event. She is the only woman to have crossed a score of 2700 Elo points.

Laszlo Polgar managed to prove his theory right after many decades of effort, both his own and that of his daughters’. His effort is called as one of the most amazing experiments in the history of human education. He believes that when a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius. Whether that happens or not depends on the upbringing and the effort put in.

-Maxim Dsouza