I Don't Have a Perfect Child and That's Just So Beautiful...

Parents love their kids and they should love their kids too. However, often, some parents, well most of them considering the lot I know go too far in this love for their kids and put different labels on their babies. 'You are my perfect boy', 'You can never do anything wrong', 'I know you can never fail' and the likes are examples of the labels I am talking about. While such statements often come out of love and do boost the kids' self-confidence, they can at times lower it too.

I remember when I was younger, my mother mentioned a few times to me that she would love for me to become a doctor and since I was quite good at studies and aced my exams mostly, she had high expectations of me. I too loved the concept of a doctor so I thought I wanted to be one too. However, I did not pass the Entrance Examination that helps you get to a government owned medical college in Pakistan and since the tuition fee of private colleges is absurd, I could not afford it. At that point, I felt like a big failure and thought really low of myself.

Prior to that experience, I remember feeling crushed when I got 5As and 3Bs in O'levels. That by the way was a really good result, but since I had always aced and gotten As in my school and was expecting the same result, accepting that actual result wasn't easy for me. My mother was very supportive of me in that time and did not once insinuate that she wasn't happy with my result. However, I remember the different labels that were placed on me sometimes by her and mostly by the relatives around me which made me believe that I was really intelligent and that acing my exams and getting the finest result was a testament to validate my intelligence and when I could not achieve what I felt I wanted, I felt devastated.

Labels and the expectation to do something as desired of by the parents or anyone a child looks up to is really sabotaging to his/ her well-being. When he cannot somehow meet that level or has other plans for himself, he feels insecure and inadequate and may not even trust you. That is when your bond with your child starts straining and when his self-esteem starts to drop low.

I remember watching an Indian movie 'Kapoor & Sons' about 2 years back I guess that highlighted this topic. A female protagonist in the movie has 2 sons and one of the two happens to be gay. Since that guy was an excellent student, found his talent fast and pursued it to become a well-established and successful novelist, he earned the title of 'The Perfect Child' by his parents. However, when living abroad, he found out about his true sexual orientation, but feels scared to open up about it to his parents especially his mother because he knows being gay is an imperfection in the eyes of his mother and he is just too scared to embarrass her. Ultimately, she does find that out when the gay blurts out that he is not perfect and he does not want to be perfect either.

It is this pressure of not opening up to your parents about something that I am talking about that starts to eat away on your child's self-esteem and put him in a cocoon which he often finds hard to break out of. This is just one of the many examples in the society that show how putting labels on your child or deciding things for him ruins his confidence and self-belief. For this reason, I decided a long time back that I won't put any labels on my son and let him be who is. So when someone says to me, 'Oh look how calm and nice your son has become now. He was too noisy when he was 2', I simply say, 'He has always been nice, but before he was younger and now he has more sense about things so the calmness is likely to come but he is a little fussy and stubborn child and that's what's special about him.' Or when someone says, 'What do you plan for his profession?' and I am like, 'Man, that's not my decision to make.' These answers do silence the people around me and put a smile on my face. You see, I love my son for who he is- he is not perfect and he does not have to be perfect. He is beautiful in his own special and amazing way and that's what I want.