Urbanization of childhood in India

Have you ever compared your kid’s childhood with your own? Do you think there has been a significant difference in our upbringing compared to our children’s? Nine out of ten times -- if you are living in urban India – your answer is going to be YES.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to experience the changes that urban Indian neighborhoods have gone through. And these very changes have altered the natural growth pattern of our innocent children.

Changes -- under the pretext of development -- have been induced too much and too soon, and in multiple dimensions: economically, socially and physically, in our neighborhoods. The economical and physical changes are far easier to understand and comprehend than the undercurrent social changes.

We can see malls at every other corner “nukkad” in our vicinity, permanently altering the physical landscapes. The steep rise in the number of vehicles, owned by an average Indian household, has resulted in congestion even in inner roads leave aside the main roads. The problems of rise in pollution level and its relation to global warming, road accidents, bird migration are well recorded and talked about everywhere. Strangely, I am yet to see a serious debate on how these changes have altered the lives of our young ones.

There are no more open spaces where our children can go and ride their bicycles these days. The idea of gully cricket would soon finds its place only in our history books, as most of us are scared to send our children out on the streets either because of traffic or pot-holed roads forget about their rendezvous with gully cricket. The few green areas left in the neighborhoods have been converted into walk-areas with huge signboards of “playing not allowed” hanging in front of them. Hence, the fact that obesity is taking endemic proportions amongst the urban children should not really surprise us.

Economically, the urban India has made long strides and the signs are everywhere – the Ferraris, Hondas, Nokia, Victoria Secret, La Royale have made great inroads in Indian households. This is a clear indicator of the increased levels of disposable income of the middle class. But, all this has come at a cost – the cost that unknowingly our children are paying very dearly. The working middle class does not have time to spend with their children in order to attain this heightened level of wealth, and as a trade-off for time they end up buying some latest model of mobile phones, mp3 player, some new TV channel on their CAS systems or a playstation for there deprived kids. For lack of a better term, let’s use electronic blast to represent all the above gadgets. The observation that our children are very easily distracted these days should not astonish us anymore.

It’s the under-current social changes that are the scariest with far reaching consequences. The breaking up of the Indian Joint family system, K-named television soaps, entry of internet into the young lives and inclination to have a single child has completed altered the social fabric of urban India. Lack of company at home and abundance of nuclear families has essentially sucked out the idea of empathy and tolerance amongst today’s children – the qualities that are responsible to bind our diverse country together. So, don’t fret if your younger one cannot accommodate with his sister who is giving a board examination, because he has to watch his favorite cartoon; so what she has an exam tomorrow.

All in all the changes -- economic, social and physical -- in the urban Indian neighborhoods have turned our innocent young ones to stubborn, individualistic, distracted and physically unfit individuals. Welcome to the Urbanization of Indian Childhood.