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Rashmi Gupta and Nikhil Gupta @ Nurturing Souls

Recently we came across an interesting scenario where child (fairly good in studies and in class-9) of parents that we were coaching tells his parents that he is not interested in Physics, Chemistry and Biology and would like to switch to EVS. As you know it is fairly early to skip some of these important subjects and hence parents were in dilemma. While exploring further it didn't come out that there was a clear interest from child to go for EVS (as he just got into 9th and doesn’t even fully appreciate what all EVS contains) and it could be just because he was trying to avoid hard work required towards some of these subjects (Physics, Chemistry and Biology). We would say it is still not clear why child was asking to change his subjects to EVS. Hence parents were quite confused. There is another similar scenario we faced with another parent whose son (in 8th standard) said that he wants to just play cricket and hence he would like to go to a school which encourages cricket and gives child lot of time to play and excel. Child was average in cricket and parents were really quite unsure how to deal with the situation. If they just ask him to continue with current school which doesn't have much of cricket, they are just killing his ability to take his own decisions but if they let him change the school it may be quite risky for him as he is currently average in cricket.

As we can see in all the scenarios above, challenge of this process of joint inquiry and exploration with child is that many times we may not know what decision we should take. Since Conscious parenting doesn’t involve any biases and past conditionings to prevail our decisions, it becomes the decision in the moment or no decision till clarity emerges. Sometimes we may feel that we are lost but the learning in this process is immense as that becomes your and child’s own truth and not a borrowed belief. In the first scenario above, being a conscious parent decision could be to move to EVS just going by the choice of the child. But it could be possible that he would not have really understood his liking or disliking of these subjects well. Let us understand this through another example. There was a boy who after finishing his 12th, decided to do his graduation in Economics rather than going ahead with Engineering. Since he was from a small town, this was quite unheard of (in that part of town) and his parents fully supported him. When he looks back he realizes that his decision to take Economics was not because he had great interest in Eco, but because his Economics teacher was fabulous and always encouraged him in this subject. On the other hand his science teachers were pretty ordinary and didn’t do anything to develop his interest in the subject. So looking at this example, possibly sometimes at a young age, children may not have really discovered there interests and they may be governed more by what they think is easy or where they are encouraged by parents and teachers. Therefore it is important to really understand from a child’s perspective as to what and why is of interest to him / her while helping in decision making.