A social response to helicopter parents who micro-manage children’s lives by organising a host of structured activities including academic tuitions and after-school music/sports classes, slow parenting encourages children to learn, live and grow at their own pace in non-stressful environments. Aka simplicity parenting, it is increasingly finding favour with educationists, psychologists and parents worldwide – Jayalakshmi Vaidhyanathan, Cynthia John & Mini P. The Slow Movement aka SloMo is the new mantra of 21st century living. This movement, which advocates a lifestyle shift in favour of slowing things down, is gaining popularity worldwide with adults and children worn-out and exhausted by the dominant YOLO (you only live once) culture. Around the world, families are rediscovering slow tourism (which prefers greater immersion into new environments to manic sightseeing), slow food (preference for local produce and traditional cooking) and slow, conscious, mindful living. To this lengthening list add slow parenting, aka simplicity parenting, which is increasingly finding favour with educationists, psychologists and parents worldwide. A social response to helicopter parents who micro-manage children’s lives by organising a host of structured activities including academic tuitions and after-school music/sports classes, slow parenting encourages children to learn, live and grow at their own pace in non-stressful environments. The phrase ‘slow parenting’ was first used by Canadian journalist Carl Honore in his best-selling book In Praise of Slow (2004) and later explained in extenso in his second oeuvre Under Pressure: Rescuing our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting (2008). “Slow parenting is about bringing balance into the home. Children need to strive and struggle and stretch themselves, but that does not mean childhood should be a race. Slow parents give their children plenty of time and space to explore the world on their own terms. They keep the family schedule under control so that everyone has enough downtime to rest, reflect and just hang out together. They accept that bending over backwards to give children the best of everything may not always be the best policy. Slow parenting means allowing our children to work out who they are rather than what we want them to be. Slow parents understand that childrearing should not be a cross between a competitive sport and product-development. It is not a project; it’s a journey,” writes Honore in Under Pressure, described by the global best-selling Time magazine as “the gospel of slow parenting”. With intensifying competition defining every aspect of life from academics to workplace success, well-intentioned parents wanting the best for their progeny, are unwittingly pushing children into a whirlwind of dawn-to-dusk activities — from school, music, dance, sports classes to personality development programmes and supplementary academic tuitions. The result is that a growing number of children worldwide are experiencing incremental difficulties in coping with action-packed daily schedules, burden of parental expectations and peer pressure, which is driving hundreds of youth to depression and often, suicide. According to latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data, a student commits suicide every hour in India. In 2015, 8,934 student suicides were reported countrywide. “Most…
