Today, anything that is fashionable and stylish is ‘cool’. In the process, it has created a kind of unspoken pressure, a constant endeavour to confirm to conventional paradigms of what’s ‘in’ and what’s not, resulting in several long-standing repercussions.

 

This is an oft-repeated, one that is discussed with painful regularity at the dining table, most often by frustrated parents who, despite all attempts to revamp their image and become ‘child-friendly’ are perpetually at their wit’s end trying to figure out how their children think.

 

The definition of ‘cool’ varies, meaning different things to different people, but the basic idea underlining it is that it implies ‘moving with the present times’. Now what this connotes is highly subjective too. It could mean wearing denims in place of the usual chudidar for a girl from a conservative place in Ahmedabad’s walled city. It could also mean succumbing to peer pressure and beginning to roll joints in a reputed college for the elite in Pune or Bangalore. The circumstances are different but the motive is just the same: acceptance.

 

It makes sense to accept that the phenomenon of peer pressure has always existed and that it doesn’t have any permanent solution. The urge to conform to the standard parameters one witnesses around himself will always be there. However, upbringing plays a pivotal role in deciding how a person would react under different circumstances.

 

For example: landing on a college campus where smoking is the norm, two people from different backgrounds may react in different ways. One may buckle under the pressure and ‘join the gang’, in order to not feel left out. The other may have the gumption to say, “This is not my idea of ‘cool’, and I am very comfortable saying that”. Depending on how they will react in this situation will determine a majority of their lives, for it goes without saying that addictive habits can have severe repercussions on the health.

 

Why I invoke the topic of upbringing is very simple. The ability to judge the advisable from the avoidable is put into us subconsciously at a very early age, by the people we see and emulate the most. It is invariably the family that influences most of what you go on to do in life. Very often, the environment a child gets at home and the way the parents groom him, would make him timid, assertive or aggressive with the passing of time. In a home where people are used to speaking their mind without making any bones about it, children will automatically grow to express their thoughts without being intimidated. A couple that understands and values self-esteem will ensure that their child respects himself, first of all. And it is these early lessons in life that influence most of what we would go on to do later.

 

In the present scenario, where the definitions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are getting seriously muddled, it makes sense to go back to the debate on upbringing to decide how exactly we want our children to face the future. In a world where perceptions change by the minute and absolutely nothing is permanent, it is values and the family’s culture alone that shall stand this generation in good stead, when everything else looks illusory.