Parvarish - Where community nurtures the baby

What is the Hindi Translation of Parenting?

I searched a lot but didn’t find find exact with in Hindi for parenting. Actually there is no word for parenting in Hindi. Closest word I found was Parvarish. There is a significance difference between Parvarish in Hindi language and Parenting in English language.

Parvarish means “To nurture” and Parenting means “Act as a mother or father to someone”.
Parenting implies that only mother and father are responsible for raising a child. But parvarish word doesn’t specifically implies just father and mother. It could be anybody and everybody. That’s what brings in the element of Community.

It is an entirely crazy structure of society we are living in that makes one and half human being, at most, responsible 24 hrs a day for taking care of each other. It doesn’t make any sense. It never used to be like this, it used to be communal.

So if mommy is tired, somebody else's’ older daughter comes over and take care of the baby for a while. It just flows around in the community. We don’t have that so parents are facing that impossible situations. It doesn’t mean that it isn’t violence, it is an understandable violence.

For example, twenty five years ago in India, there used to be joint families where raising a child was considered as a sacred word and was done my everybody in the house so that only mother and father didn’t have to worry about changing the diaper. (Diaper is a metaphor. There used to be no diapers in early days.)

Indian Joint Familes in early 18th century
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Not only the people in the house, but all the people in the tribe or community used to take care of the baby. It was considered as gift of God which was taken care by literally everybody.

But the societies are changing. The act of nuclear families have gained the freedom to live the life as they want but lost the wisdom carried by oldies generation after generation. This is the first damage structure of society has caused in raising the child.

The second damage is from the idea that baby shall be taken care by mother only. I consider it as a side effect of Patriarchy. Many people comment that the father must also help mother in raising the child.

Who has more responsibilty of child, father or mother ?
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Yeah, but think about the language of helping her. When you use the language of helping her, the subtext is - Its her job and I am being a nice person helping her. It’s your child too. So instead of helping her think in terms of participating and taking responsibility.

And that’s the revolution I have dedicated to create in the world. A revolution to create sustainable communities. The baby is the property of whole society, let’s come forward to take responsibility of raising each and every child in the community. Because as this African proverb says...

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But creating the communities is not easy. Due to patriarchy, globalisation, and socialization it has became more and more difficult to create communities where needs of everyone is taken care of. A great amount of effort needs to be put into it. Nonviolent Communication can be one of the tools to develop the skills to meet the gap in the members of community. I shall be posting about the problems and their solutions to create sustainable and courageous communities.

-Inspired by the work of Miki Kashtan and the fearless heart.

Click on the links to read my previous blogs-

1. The story of Old Stuffs
2. School: The weapon of mass disconnect
3. Authenticity is my middle name