Namaste, and please forgive the long post.
Well, not having children myself, but only by proxy (as an uncle of eleven!), I have to admit some ignorance on what is best in raising kids. But still, I can think of worse things than what you describe, maheshwari. Unhealthy coercion is what I’m questioning here. Actually, it’s more of an observation with some wide-ranging implications.
In the US, parents tell their kids the best thing is to be normal. A lot of families drug their children, and it is a growing trend. Some parents drug their children (with physician recommendation, which has become cheap and suspect here due to the out of control medical industry) with animal hormone injections because they are too “short.” Parents are drugging their children for diagnoses like ADD, autism, and even for being psychopaths (which is being diagnosed in children as young as five years old, with compulsory and often state-funded “counseling” to follow). Concentrated levels of vitamins and minerals (like calcium added to milk, which is contributing, ironically, to osteoporosis), animal hormones, insecticides, egregious amounts of sugary corn by-product, radiation, and other toxins (such as fluoride) are allowed in and actively added to our food and drink.
In addition to the bungling of the Food and Drug Administration, the American Psychiatric Association, which collaboratively publishes and reviews the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, now lists "Internet Gaming Disorder" as a medical condition. If that doesn't suggest to us that medical instrumentality and perspective, specifically, psychiatry, is a warped and relativistic product of our plutocratic, uncritical times, I don't know what will. At the homeless shelter, I saw a number of poor, uneducated people who "chose" to line up at the government drug center ("Community Treatment Center") to get psychotropic injections every month that left them virtually lobotomized and drooling for weeks. I know people (in my family, which is largely poor and poorly educated) who only receive "treatment" or therapy in absentia on a video screen, while these "doctors," whom they've never met, proceed to change their doses and "medications." The last psychiatrist I saw decided to diagnose me with a "non-specified personality disorder" after speaking with me for 45 minutes, insisting he wasn't a drug pusher, but still asking if I would take drugs on more than one occasion. His role in the clinic was nil as a "consultant," but I saw that he works at the local hospital, probably in the psychiatric ward, dosing up kids and adults with reckless, alchemical glee. Hey, it pays for his fancy shoes!
Then there are recreational drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. If the dietary and pharmacological swindling isn’t bad enough, drugs are always abundantly available. In fact, marijuana is legal in many US states now, including my own. I can walk down the street and find a store that sells it. You need a medical reason (excuse) to buy it, but that amounts to paying some quack $75 for a “medical” card for the year. In fact, virtually anything can be construed as a medical condition, including the desire to sit next to your dog in a restaurant or on an airplane.Alcohol and tobacco use is so rampant, I can only say it’s no wonder we have some of the worst health per capita out of the “industrialized nations.”
The reasons for our medicalization of life and human experience are deeply-rooted and longstanding. The West has always been obsessed with stasis and order… and extensions of that idea include strategy, dominion, and instrumentality. The latter is the most relevantly medical concept that has become ingrained into our psyche, and it really has taken root since the industrial revolution, when material advances and scientific (empirical) knowledge burgeoned. That was a time when observation and technical acumen were assured to dominate, repair, manipulate, and cure any ailment of nature with our increasingly sophisticated instruments.
The naive assurance of technical intellect over our own frail, yet universal, nature is fading. In our information age, for example, instruments are needed just to discern what information is relevant about certain instruments. Consider the amount of knowledge required to produce an operating system on a PC. Its production and development used to be a simpler process of designing a system of managing a certain number of modules to meet a certain number of goals. Now, however, even the determination of goals, that is, which are relevant, lucrative, maintainable, popular, and executable, requires enormous management of overextended and uninspired information systems. In the medical field, there are so many diagnoses (which is a Greek word that denotes an arrival [at a prescriptive conclusion] through knowledge) that we now require diagnosis of diagnoses with AI systems like Watson, medical conferences, and continuous training of doctors and medical staff, just to be able to discern what is important in their workday. This meta-medical management, which is the result of the modern inundation of data and information of varying degrees of value, takes daily practice away from the human patient.
We are losing what we had through what we’ve gained, namely, we are losing our sense of value through overindulgence of innovation, speed, ease of contact, and ease of information (which is actually leading to the degradation of knowledge). This monumental and rapid shift in public, private, and global consciousness is affecting law, employment, socialization, diet, and our value systems, which include how we feel we should raise our children. We need to realize, globally, that self-pacing and some good, old-fashioned sense is required for our use of and reliance on information and data, especially as they affect social and personal learning and development. The second thing we need is courage and to fight for and work toward a way of life that we feel is wholesome, good, just, and sustainable.
So, with (albeit circuitous and abstract) regard to parental values and inculcating unhealthy ideas, habits, and outlooks within our families, I can point to our family in sangha and of the Earth. The issues of destructive speculation and criticism (guilty, here!), inauthenticity, self-deception, and taking the easy road abound in our own time and others. But today, it is especially important to work toward what we think is right and beneficial for ourselves, our communities, and the whole. This starts with ourselves and our families.