My three year toddler Soham was trying to scold my elder eleven year old Mannan with a finger pointing out and a flair of fumbling half understandable combination of words seeing which, even though we couldn’t stop ourselves from laughing at first, we had to instantly when we saw that what we were considering as a harmless funny gesture was in fact offensive for Mannan.

He told us that even though we are laughing about it right now, this isn’t really funny as Soham would eventually learn that it is a fun thing and normally acceptable behavior that he could scold Mannan at any given point of time, for no reason at all.

Now this is one incidence which any of you who have two kids or more will readily relate to. Parenting is one such huge responsibility as it is not limited to a family or a home, it forms the character, psychological and emotional quotient of a person’s basic personality of who he really is. The repercussions and effect of how an individual is raised has a direct impact on the society as well. Also no matter how much of genuine effort and selfless devotion to their upbringing we put in, at times as flawed and human as we all are, we unknowingly fail to correct them at the right instance or miss out in passing the right message to them.

The reason Soham was trying and testing his extent of authority over his elder brother was probably stemming out of my behavior with Mannan which Soham was observing and so despite the fact that in words I was teaching him to affix ‘Bhaiya’ ( a term used to address an elder brother in hindi) to Mannan’s name, what I was unknowingly doing by way of my behavior and actions was that in correcting or scolding Mannan in Soham’s presence, I was inadvertently influencing Soham in making his own ‘okay and allowed to- do’ list of things in his mind.

I accepted my mistake and apologized to Mannan, promising him to be more careful and cautious of my behavior with him in front of Soham. With that issue settled at home, I couldn’t stop myself from pondering on the larger picture of the society that we live in, where now a days we see a lot of chaos, unrest in emotions, rage and anger issues. Smallest of differences lead to biggest of crimes in an instance. The value of human life and emotions is diminishing day by day.

After all the amount of noise and commotion that we humans create in preaching, teaching, grooming, molding and disciplining our kids is proportionally humongous as compared to any other species of animal existing on earth, yet with passage of time there are humans becoming less human but we don’t see much of animals becoming less of an animal, do we?

Probably it’s time we shifted our focus from 100% of academic perfection and oral preaching to what our kids are inculcating and imbibing from what they see and experience in our actions and behavior as an individual and the behavior of the society around them as a whole.

It’s true indeed that it’s more of what one does as compared to what one says that truly defines who one actually is. Actions do speak louder than words!