Childhood In India Research Articles

Beliefs on Parenting and Childhood in India

In India, the family is a central unit of social existence and the socialization of children is a key function. Cultural scripts, parents own experiences, family situations and location guide parenting and familial practices. Parents’ beliefs and ethnotheories contain explicit and implicit ideas about the manner in which children ought to be raised. With increasing global interaction and urban movement, the urban Indian family is continually faced with the challenge of keeping up with the fast pace of change. Such change exerts tremendous pressure on the ethos of the family as well as on parenting goals and motivations. This paper explores the nature of parental beliefs or ethnotheories among Indian families. The relatively unexplored territory of everyday conversations, interactions and routines within families has been used to access the nature and source of parents’ ethnotheories. The paper specifically focuses on the manner in which mothers organize the daily routines of young children in the age group 3-6 years. The narratives provide a rich description of family life and have been organized within significant domains of childhood such as feeding and eating, regulation of behavior, development and learning, interpersonal relationships, agency for children and parental aspirations. Families living in Delhi, India formed a part of the study. The influence of cultural and familial diversity as well as situational factors was found to contribute largely to the multiplicity of beliefs. The rapidly changing urban situation indicates a need to renew ideas about parenting and childhood in India.

Robert Fraser Williams

Robert Fraser Williams was born in Durtlang (now Mizoram), India, to Welsh medical missionary parents. He spent his childhood in India, north Wales, and Leytonstone, east London. After national service...

‘The dangers of this atmosphere’: a Quaker connection in the Tavistock Clinic’s development

During the Second World War, through innovations in officer selection and group therapy, the army psychiatrists John Rickman and Wilfred Bion changed our understanding of leadership. They showed how soldiers under stress could develop real authority through their attentiveness to each other. From contrasting experiences 25 years earlier each had seen how people in groups are moved by elemental forces that undermine judgement and thought. This article arose from my experiences as a trainee at the Tavistock Clinic, where the method of reflective work discussion, giving individuals seated in a circle the choice to speak or to remain silent, seemed similar to a Quaker meeting. Many decades later, I found that this association had a basis in fact. Among other influences on Bion -- a childhood in India, distinguished service in the First World War, and a surgical apprenticeship with Wilfred Trotter -- there is a little-acknowledged Quaker source, in John Rickman, for Bion's radical work in the army that led to new methods of training and organizational consultancy in the postwar Tavistock.

Concerns of Childhood in India

This article points out some concerns that pertain to facilitating the development of children in context and the geopolitical issues that surround children as the State, community and parental agencies strive to care and rear children. State schemes like the Integrated Child Development Services and the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan suffer from the ills of managing country-wide programmes – poor infrastructure support facilities and personnel, lack of adequate monitoring mechanisms, inability to connect to the local realities including beliefs and aspirations of the people and the inability to get the various government departments together to move in tandem; not to forget the rampant corruption in the systems. Rays of hope are the NGOs, some of them at the national level that have made some inroads in the sectors of child protection, health and education. There is the rural/urban divide in the sectors of health, nutrition and education where private entry does not necessarily mean that they are child and parent friendly, they could be inadequate, exploitative and hostile to children and parents, without the knowledge of the latter. This is especially so of the private education sector. With the onslaught of the media, parents struggle to socialise the children as best as they can.

Lost Boys: The Infernal Youth of the Cinematic Teenage Vampire

Popular cinema in India has been identified as providing rich cultural texts for understanding the legitimization of ideological and political hegemony, especially through narrative-cinematic forms popular in the post-colonial Indian public sphere. An impressive amount of literature has explored the various trajectories of discourses regarding the post colonial nation-state, family, and the iconic presence of the mother informing the narrative organization of popular Hindi cinema. However, representation of boyhood within the specific narrative and visual rhetoric of popular Hindi cinema received little scholarly attention. This essay traces the representation of boyhood and adolescence - first, as predominantly integrated within the narrative of male protagonists' early life, a popular cinematic motifs in 1970s and 1980s which, interestingly enough, has somewhat disappeared from post-liberalization Hindi cinema; and second, as a discursively formed narrative agent with specific ideological and psychological connotations. Drawing analogies from a range of Indian literary works on and for children, I explore how concomitant cinematic tropes serve to reiterate and negotiate ideological and social codes interlacing gender, sexuality, class, and caste, not however without leaving fissures for subaltern agency. Keywords: BOLLYWOOD, HINDI FILM, CHILDHOOD, POSTCOLONIAL, IDEOLOGY, CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, BARNA PARICHAY New normative discourses on the in nineteenth and early twentieth century India produced a number of texts that directly dealt with children's character formation. Such discourses recurrently conceived the notion of family as an isolated private domain, separate not only from the kinship system but also as a shelter from an aggressive and cruel outside world. discursive construction of the Indian depended heavily on the ways of powers and pleasures were distributed and in the process generated a radical separation between childhood and adulthood. child was central to this construction, as a new idea of childhood helped precipitate the new discourse of the family. The child came to be regarded as a person with distinctive attributes- impressionability, vulnerability, innocence-that required a 'correct/ protected, and prolonged period of nurture. It was only through a certain practice and strategy that the child's character-building exercise was to be pursued (Bose, 1995, p. 118). Hence, to be the ideal child, it was necessary for (the him is used deliberately, because, as we will discuss later, discourses almost exclusively referenced the male child) to avoid rash confrontation with various corrupting influences and to be subjected to a system of love, affection, discipline, and punishment. Interestingly, this discourse on childhood in India underscored the fact that the was envisaged as a realm that played the most valuable task of shaping the individual's life. As Satischandra Chakrabarti, in an influential, widely read book written in Bengali, Santaner Charitra Gathan (Building the Character of Child, 1912), writes: word Hie has given a new turn to the system. In earlier times, the principal question before the was how juniors would behave toward elders and superiors and how elders would behave toward juniors. Now the main subject of discussion is how every life in the family, especially the life of children, can be developed. is now a center for the development of life. (P- 2) customary belief prevailing in Indian household was that seniority was to be respected. father was a disciplinarian, a figure of supreme authority, and the children in return offered bhakti (devotional love) to their parents, a kind of love that gods are supposed to receive. It is noteworthy that this bhakti towards parents, especially the mother, became a recurrent narrative trope in popular Hindi cinema in immediately post-independence India, an aspect that signals the normative, disciplinary ideologies that the child was to internalize from birth. …

"By Creating We Think": A Conversation with Tessa Ransford

INTERVIEW "By Creating We Think": A Conversation with Tessa Ransford Erika 1 Waters Tessa Ransford has published sixteen volumes ofpoetry along with many essays and translations. Her latest,Not JustMoonshine: New and Selected Poems, was published by Luath Press in2008. "Unashamedly intellectual" isone critic'sjudgment of herpoetry,while others have commented on her experimentation with formand her international perspective. She isequally celebrated forher advocacy of Scottish poetry: shewas president of International PEN (ScottishCentre); founded the School of Poets PoetryWorkshops; edited Lines Review literary magazine; founded thegroundbreaking Scottish Poetry Library;and established theScottish Pamphlet Society along with itsCallum Macdonald Memorial Award, inpartnership with theNational Libraryof Scotland. Erika J.Waters: I wanted to ask, first, about your ORE. Was this in recognition of your remarkable dedication to theScottish Poetry Library? Tessa Ransford: OBE stands for Order of the British Empire and was instituted after the First World War to thank civilians for effortsduring the war, and then continued generally for services to the community. Mine was, yes, for "services to the Scottish Poetry Library," and Iwas happy to accept iton behalf of the staff,committee mem bers, and hundreds of volunteers. Iwas given the medal in 2000 by the queen at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh on the same occasion when Sean Connery was given a knighthood, and thecaptain of theScottish rugby teamwas given an OBE. He sat beside me! EJW:But Scotland is really your adopted home, isn't it? TR: That's true. My father, who was a royal engineer, was posted to India, where he became master of themint in Bombay. We lived in the mint compound, where there was a swimming pool and a garden. Mint House, where we lived, had high ceilings and huge double doors.My ayah slept by my cot?under mosquito nets, of course. In India, children are accepted as part of thenor mal scene, so they're carried around and allowed to sleep, feed,orplay wherever theirparents hap pen to be. InApril 1944 ships containing dynamite and raw cotton exploded at the Bombay docks, just half amile from themint. We were lucky to sur vive! Soon after?I was about six years old?my father was given some leave, and, since convoys were able to go through the Suez Canal by then, we set sail in convoy to Britain. We arrived in Scotland just after D-Day in June 1944.My father returned to India after a fewmonths and stayed until partition in 1947,while my mother stayed in Britain with my brother and me. EJW:The war really separated your family?very hard for you. TR:Yes [nods],but the war was hard foreveryone, wasn't it? Hardest for me was that the warm, spontaneous, expressive, relational experience of my early childhood in India was replaced suddenly by an extremely cold and repressive regime at boarding school inpostwar Scotland. It consisted, as I now see it, of physical, educational, Tessa Ransford March-April 2010 115 INTERVIEW Erika J. Waters previously taught at the University of the Virgin Islands,where she founded and edited The Caribbean Writer and served as guest editor of volume 23 (2009). She has also edited collections of drama, poetry, fiction, and literarycriticism, and her work on women writers was funded by Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has taught part-time at the University of Southern Maine since 2002 and was a Fulbright Scholar inFinland in2005. She iscurrently working on a book, Touring Coastal Maine, forArcadia Publishers. and emotional deprivation. But by chance, I dis covered thepoems ofRabindranath Tagore in the school library.Finding Tagore revivedmy latent Indian side, those Indian attitudes to lifeofwhich Ihad been deprived: holistic, relational attitudes, which see the material world as incorporating the spiritual and as a fitting home for thehuman. Do you know my poem "In Praise of the World, the Flesh and theDevil" (see insetonpage 17)? Ibelieve thatpoetry became a golden thread to guide me through the labyrinthof life. EJW:Your strong feelings about India certainly come through inyour poetry. In "WithGratitude to India," you write: "I was part of the par ties,parades, / the bazaar, / could swallow the stenches and listen to thepoetry...

Early Childhood in India: Facing the Facts

Early Childhood in India: Facing the Facts

Surviving childhood in India and Ethiopia

The precariousness of childhood in the developing world is most visible when the media spotlight falls on famine, natural disaster or civil war, but it casts a permanent shadow over family life in that world, as it did in Europe a hundred years ago. Premature death, life-threatening sickness, irreversible stunting of growth and the loss of a mother in childbirth are some of the most tangible evils of underdevelopment. Although poverty contributes to this dismal situation, many individual contingencies are avoidable to a substantial extent if people can be drawn into primary health-care systems that encourage them to exchange detrimental customs for better ideas of managing hygiene and parenthood.

C&EN TALKS WITH

SHRI THANEDAR'S JOURNEY from a poor childhood in India to the helm of a group of chemistry-based companies is a classic American dream story. And with a recent custom synthesis acquisition and the formation of a new pharmaceutical services company, it's a continuing story as well. Thanedar's flagship firm is Chemir Analytical Services, a suburban St. Louis provider of industrial problem-solving and analytical testing services. Combined, his companies are expected to have sales this year of $24 million; Thanedar is targeting $60 million in sales by 2009. Growing up in Belgaum, India, some 300 miles south of what was then called Bombay, the idea of one day running a multi-million-dollar American enterprise was no doubt quite improbable to Thanedar. The oldest boy among nine siblings, his immediate concern was helping feed his family. By 1974, at the surprisingly young age of 18, Thanedar had earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry ...

Infancy and Childhood in India: A Critical Review

Empirical studies of childhood in India have been rare. Guided by universalistic theories of child development, developmental psychologists have seldom examined cultural variations in child-rearing patterns with Indian samples. Psychoanalytic studies of Hindu childhood have been influenced by therapeutic observations with segmented middle-class populations that are generally Westernized and educated, inviting a lively debate about the transferability of psychoanalytic individualism to non-Western contexts. Anthropological studies, invariably focused on cultural variation, have not searched for consistent cultural patterns in ethnographic materials on Hindu socialization. Based on fieldwork conducted in a village near Delhi, this article presents one of the first systematic quantitative and ethnographic studies of patterns of child care in Hindu extended families during the preschool years. The findings are discussed in terms of achieving a consensus between developmental, psychoanalytic, and anthropological observations of Indian childhood.

A lifetime's journey: the Opies and the folklore of childhood

A Lifetime’s Journey: The Opies and the Folklore of Childhood Gillian Avery (bio) Iona and Peter Opie. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Iona and Peter Opie. Children’s Games with Things: Marbles, Fivestones, Throwing and Catching, Gambling, Hopscotch, Chucking and Pitching, Ball-bouncing, Skipping, Tops and Tipcat. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. “In this book,” Iona Opie writes in her “Preface” to Children’s Games with Things, published in 1997, “I am presenting the rest—and the last—of the material from our surveys of the 1950s and 1960s, thus completing the picture of the joys and entertainments of the mid-twentieth century schoolchild” (v). Peter died in 1982, before the huge Opie journey through the folklore of childhood was complete. But his notes were there; the books that lay ahead had been planned and discussed in detail, and during the years that followed Iona carried on with the work that had begun in 1944. The Singing Game, half-finished when he died, came out in 1985. Seven years was the traditional time the Opies allowed for a book to brew; Iona dated her preface to Children’s Games with Things “1989–96,” and concludes: “And here is, probably, the final book by ‘Iona and Peter Opie,’ for it is the last book that will contain a substantial amount of Peter’s writing on children’s lore” (vi). It was published in tandem with a second edition of their first book, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, (ODNR), which, though constantly reissued, had never been revised since its original appearance in 1951. This is an amazing book on many counts, a pioneer book on a subject for which there was not previous model, undertaken by young novices with no experience of research. For both of them, formal education had finished with school; neither began with any academic expertise—all this had to be self-taught. Peter considered this an advantage; they were, he said proudly many years later, “two of the very last persons following the [End Page 286] tradition of the private scholar” (Cott 252). Neither of them had expected their careers to move in the direction it did. They had married in 1943 when he was twenty-four and she was nineteen. Peter, who had been invalided out of the army, was then working with a small publishing firm and was already an author. I Want to be a Success, an account of his childhood in India and his schooldays at Eton, was written when he was eighteen; two more books based on subsequent experiences were to follow in 1945 and 1946. In 1943, Iona was a sergeant in the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) and her plans were for university, not marriage. Iona explained, “If I had thought (and in wartime people did not often think much beyond the present) I would have assumed that we would go on just as we were until, when the war ended, I would go to London University . . . I was going to Bedford College to read botany and be a plant pathologist. . . . However, Peter needed a wife; and he proposed marriage” (Opie, “Opie” 207). By April 1944, she was pregnant and had been discharged from the WAAF. Their first child was to be born on her twenty-first birthday. Peter’s publishing company had been evacuated to the country. It was when we were walking along the path beside a nearly ripe field of corn that our future was decided by a ladybird. Idly one of us picked it up, put it on his finger (was it Peter? I don’t remember) and said to it: ‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home/ Your house is on fire and your children all gone.’ The ladybird obeyed, as they always do—and yet it always seems like magic; and we were left wondering about this rhyme we had known since childhood and had never questioned until now. What did it mean? Where did it come from? Who wrote it? (Opie, “Opie” 208) Peter told Jonathan Cott in 1981, “The story about wondering about the ladybird rhyme is the superficial level. The deep level is that we...

A small world after all: Globalization and the transformation of childhood in India

This essay investigates the phenomenon of global television in India and how Indian children, particularly those from the upper middle class, are being integrated into a global consumer cuitare. I suggest that in spite of the surface homogeneity of children's culture global capitalism mediates experiences of children differentially depending on class and location. It has led to greater class stratification in children's play and Indian children, unlike their American counterparts, are socialized to be producers rather than consumers.