We love our parents. They guide us, nurture us and inspire us to be our better selves. But there are times when we feel that desi parents could be more sensitive and perceptive about a few things we find important.
A Reddit user posted a rant talking about how Indian parents are somehow ‘helicopter parents’ and ‘uninvolved parents’ at the same time.
Helicopter parenting is a style of parenting where parents who are overly focused on their children. It’s exactly opposite of free parenting. Uninvolved parenting on the other hand, refers to style of parenting where parents don’t respond to their child’s emotional needs beyond the basics of food, clothing, and shelter.
Explaining her point, she wrote that Indian parents are helicopter parents when it comes to the internet usage and marriage and become uninvolved when their children need emotional support.
They monitor your media consumption and internet usage, impose a very early curfew, censor the peers you socialise with (a handful of conventionally “good” girls from the same socio-economic background, no male friends or a boyfriend and definitely not a same-sex partner) and strictly regulate your studies and extra-curriculars and even the career you pursue.
The problem according to the Reddit user starts when they suddenly become ignorant of your emotional and mental needs.
For Indian parents, depression, anxiety etc. do not exist; they are all a manifestation of your bad mindset and an overexposure to Western stuff because of “using the damn phone too much”.
Talking about how parents react to us seeking professional mental health help, she further wrote:
If you are visibly upset and quiet and on being egged on by them to share your troubles, you talk about stuff like break-ups or the possibility that you need psychological help or that you’re confused about your sexuality/gender, they’ll criticise you like no other.
This is what according to her privileges to Indian parents mean.
To them, if you have adequate food, accommodation and access to good education, you are privileged enough and cannot demand anything else, like, um, you know, mental health and emotional support.
A lot of people agreed to what the Redditor expressed in her rant and shared their experiences.
There were others who put forward the point that the concept of mental health is new to them, maybe.
We love our parents the way they are. We appreciate all that they do for us. Every generation is different. They may or may not understand depression and anxiety because they were taught to push it under the rug. But it’s real and we’re ready to speak about it. This post has sparked a conversation on the style of parenting adopted by Indian parents.