Urban upper middle-class parents under domestic stress are increasingly flocking to a new genre of advisory professionals: parenting coaches. These new-age gurus with professional qualifications in child and adolescence development, education, psychology and counseling are providing advice to parents to navigate the challenges of raising children in the disruptive pandemic era – Smiti J.N. With schools, colleges, and universities countrywide under comprehensive lockdown for over 82 weeks — the world’s longest education shutdown — for fear of contagion by the novel Coronavirus, aka Covid-19 virus, and children learning best as they can, latter day parents of young and teenage children are obliged to discharge responsibilities that parents of preceding generations never experienced or imagined. In the pre-pandemic era, the responsibility of teaching and nurturing children was substantially discharged by teachers. Suddenly, the entire burden of teaching (or ensuring children learn), feeding, nurturing and counseling children and youth has devolved on parents, themselves obliged to work from home. Confronted with the totally unforeseen and unprecedented challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, a large unquantified number of parents have buckled under the strain. Reports of women and child abuse, forced early marriages, alcoholism and substance abuse are rife. However, it’s safe to assume that these and other criminal acts of commission and omission are spreading in the bottom half of the country’s iniquitous socio-economic pyramid. Urban upper middle-class parents under domestic stress are increasingly flocking to a new genre of advisory professionals: parenting coaches. These new-age gurus with professional qualifications in child and adolescence development, education, psychology and counseling are providing aid and advice to parents to navigate the unique challenges of raising children in the disruptive pandemic era. “Becoming a parent is natural. Parenting is not. It is a highly developed behavioural science. That’s why since ages, young parents have been seeking and getting advice from their own parents, family elders and later on from doctors, pediatricians and psychologists. Now in the 21st century disrupted by the social media and most recently, the unprecedented pandemic, parenting challenges have multiplied. Parents are confused and afraid of damaging their children’s psyche and lives. That’s why they want to go beyond guidebooks and seek meaningful advice from parenting experts and coaches to guide them through new-age parenting challenges,” says Sushant Kalra, parenting coach and founder of the Delhi-based Parwarish Institute of Parenting (estb. 2008). For the past 13 years, Kalra has been coaching parents and teachers to nurture nine capabilities within children — “happiness, self-expression, self-confidence, determination, inquisitiveness, exploration ability, humaneness, self-esteem, self-reliance, and independence”. These qualities in children are imperative for developing “no-limitness adults,” he says. Aarti Shah, a Mumbai-based child and human development specialist who has been coaching parents and teachers for over two decades, believes that latter-day parenting poses unique challenges to parents. She believes that external influences such as the internet, globalisation, rapid urbanisation, and unchecked information explosion have confused and frightened young parents. “With the Covid-19 pandemic mandating isolation and distancing, parents have lost the support of family elders…
