Time and Quality time for children.

A few games of chess in a few hours with unknown children  at age 8.5 years.  

So you lose some and you win some. 

Sometimes you lose all and sometimes you win all.  

It's how you feel after you win or lose that makes the big difference to your psyche.  

A high after a win.  The need to share that win. To Share that achievement.  You need someone for that.  It's a natural human need, more so for a child.  

A low after a loss. The need to withdraw into the invisible shell.  

You need to be physically there  To reach out to the child inside that invisible shell that you can't enter.  To coax him out of the shell. To pep him up, to send him to play the next game when he does not believe in himself that he can win but so desperately wants to win.   It's the "wanting to win chord" that needs to be touched. So long as that chord is there you can always believe that - all it needs is a nudge to go back to the table and that it's just another game and it starts afresh and the previous losses don't count.  The mind has to forget it.  You have to remind the kid to look forward and not backwards.  

You have to make the child to live in the moment.   

If the child is not living in the moment then he has become an adult and that we all know - what it is like to be robbed of our childhood.   

BE THERE, even if you think you are not required.  

I was so wrong about thinking that 

all the movies that show the crest fallen face of children whose parents don't make it to their child's first baseball match or soccer match are over dramatised and the child is only being melodramatic and the wife saying that the kid really wanted you to be there --is so much of "booooo"  is highly over rated.   They are bloody right.   

As a parent Somethings have to be experienced to believe in.  

Some moments don't come twice.  

In hindsight I am so glad I was there for those 5 hours for Arjun to share his 2 losses followed by 2 wins and ending with a loss, for sharing his anticipation and strange anxiety of knowing the final score and final position in the tournament.  His jubilation to know that he was not last looked kind of a strange emotion to me till he told me that all his chess mates at school and sparring partners where he trains had told him that they had all come last in the first tournament that they had participated and that he would surely come last too.  

There is so much that a kid contains inside him that he does not share till he is ready to share with you and can share only if you allow yourself to spend time with him.  It all comes out with time only.   

Don't expect him or her to share what happens in his or her life in the Quality time window that you have identified for him or her out of your life at your own sweet convenience.   

The child will share it only when he is God damn well ready to share it with you.   

There is no substitute for "time". "Quality time with children" was a phrase invented and coined by folks who wanted to remove the guilt from their own lives for not being able to spend time with their children. 

On the 5th of August 

for 31st of July 2016

PS. Don't confuse spending time around and with your children and being a helicopter parent as being the same.