Obedience or Independence

My baby is still very small but she clearly gets her way with me. She knows exactly how to get things done the way she wants. Made me realize that this is just the beginning and soon I will have to think about many important things. One of the very important aspects of grooming a child is identifying the right traits that you want your child to grow up with. While I understand that every child is different and that there is no rule book to help you bring up your child, other truth is that babies are like soft clay and everything you do shapes them for their future.

Obedience and independence are important aspects of a person’s personality. Do we want our kids to be obedient or we want them to be independent thinkers. I have seen many times people want kids to be absolutely obedient at home and absolutely independent with leadership traits at other places. Often it makes me wonder how to kids cope with such pressure and such different expectation from them.

A few generations ago parents were all for obedient child. All the parents wanted was a baby who listened to what they said and obey their orders like it was an order from the almighty. The current generation of parents is a little different and we want some kind of a mixture we want kids to be obedient at one time and independent at others. Seems quite complicated.

There are further more effects of these traits in the long run. Independent thinkers seem to be the way to go as that’s what seem to be the quality of all the people who achieved greatness. But another important thing to be noticed is that inculcating obedience also has certain advantages in the long run. In real life, people obey orders in their everyday settings, for example team members obey their leads, students obey teachers, and everybody obeys policemen. One needs to have some level of obedience when working in teams and for proper functioning of any unit say family. If everyone starts beating their own trumpet there can be little that teams can achieve or little harmony can be found in a family were everyone goes their own way.

But too much obedience might have a not so positive impact too. It’s been noticed that when obeying orders one passes the responsibility for their actions to the authority figure. Anyone who is too obedient seldom stands for his/her own rights. They can sometimes be taken for a ride by the authoritative figures. Also they sometimes lack the vision to improve their own life and hence let someone else make decision for them.

Too much independence has its fair share of problems too. One can often be left alone, one might find it difficult to adjust to different conditions and working with teams might become a challenge. While Individual differences are personal factors that mean people will respond to situations in different ways. Conformity is an essential social mechanism in society, and without which we would not have social norms and acceptable behavior

The challenge is strike the right balance. Teaching the child the technique to way their options and then make the decision as to which situation requires them to be obedient and when to be independent and go their own way and resist pressures to conform to a majority. There is no rule book to it. Kids are born with some inherent traits we need to respect them. some kids have natural gift of being independent and others of being obedient, some are even gifted with the sense of when to behave which way. 

As a parent we need to respect kids natural behavior but also we need to be conditioning kids to behave the other way if required. This may not be simple process and may require years of hard work by both the kid and the parents. One thing that works for many people is rewarding kid when they behave appropriately and boosting their confidence.  The other thing is not publicly criticize the baby for any behavior rather have retrospective sessions with them so that they understand situation rather than get defensive about their behavior. Also as parents we need to lead by example and make sure that we always display the right attitude in front of kids as  more often than not kids imitate their parents behaviour.